... to tell you that diets don't work for everyone

[Wroxie]

Today is my 9 month anniversary of tracking every bite of food that's gone into my mouth, with the exception noted below:

My birthday (one day in which I had, as I remember, pancakes with maple syrup for breakfast, no lunch, and fish and chips + a couple of donuts for dinner).

And that's it. I don't drink alcohol. No takeaways. No restaurants. Nothing that I didn't weigh, portion, and track faithfully. Even when I bake or make something from a recipe, every ingredient is weighed and the calories per serving calculated. I skip breakfast during the week and have normal, healthy food and smallish portions for lunch and dinner.

I eat, on average, 1,100 calories per day. I have a desk job but I walk for 30 minutes to an hour nearly every day.

Before this, my diet was pretty bad - takeaways 3-4 times per week, pastries for breakfast, sandwich with crisps and chocolate at lunch, biscuits whenever I felt like it- probably more than 2,500 calories most days (I'm 5'3" so that is A LOT).

And now, nine months later, I have gone from 13 stone to 12.3 stone. That's a grand total of ten pounds lost on an extremely restricted diet- and it was all within the first two months.

Please don't give me diet advice - no, I'm not in 'starvation mode' (because that's a complete myth). No, I don't need to 'cut carbs'. Seriously, I do not want your advice. What I want is to point out that, the next time you're tempted to say something asinine like 'it's just about calories in vs calories out' or to dismiss or vilify or judge someone based on their weight, to realise that the human body is not a two-stroke lawnmower engine and weight, food, activity, hormones, age, genes, and a million other factors are at play. Losing weight isn't simple and even with all the willpower in the world - which I have demonstrated - it isn't always possible.

I'm not giving up. I have gotten used to eating this way and I actually feel like my blood sugar is more regulated (no 'sinking feeling' a few hours after eating a big lunch, for example) and I know that as I get older, it will be better to, at the very least, not get any fatter. That, at least, I can probably do. But nothing short of eating less than 1000 calories per day or surgery or medication are going to get me to a 'normal' BMI.

@namochangoro thank you. I do sometimes have golden milk made with almond milk, turmeric, black pepper, grate of ginger. In fact you’ve prompted me , I’m off to make one now ...

How do you explain that weight loss is a main symptom of coeliac disease then, when it’s the very definition of an inflammatory reaction?

Because it gets to the point where you can't digest food? So you need to metabolise muscle and body fat in order to live. Inflammation is a process whereby the body tries to defend itself. It will lean towards preserving energy rather than expending it but it can only do so much.

Umm... I'm autistic so not the best judge, but isn't that comment massively inappropriate...?

I don’t know the answer to your question about Coeliac and inflammation. I have always thought that because it prevents neutrients from being absorbed it is the equivalent of not eating and any body will use it’s own reserves in an extreme enough situation.

What I have read and personally experienced is that systemic inflammation leads to insulin resistance which in turn makes it hard for the body to lose weight.

Celiac

@BeyondsConstantBangingHeadache you’re not wrong.

@bluebluezoo How do you explain that weight loss is a main symptom of coeliac disease then, when it’s the very definition of an inflammatory reaction?

I was diagnosed with celiac disease after my second significant stomach bleed. I was a patient who did not suffer weight loss. My main symptoms included a fiery like abdominal pain and very significant bloating to the point I looked 7 months pregnant.

Just enjoying my golden milk @namochangoro ... @Wroxie sorry not meaning to ambush what is turning out to be a very interesting thread.

I haven’t RTFT sorry, so this has probably been covered but....

Your metabolism will get used to the amount of calories you take in after a while, hence why you tend to lose weight at the start of a diet.

There is a technique called reserve dieting which is generally used by the “fit fam” (for want of a better word) after a set time of eating in a calorie deficit you then add a small amount of calories back in - like 100 more a day for the first week and so on and so on, until they reach a calorie maintenance level.

You do this to effectively kick start your metabolism and ensure your body doesn’t get used to living on restricted calories and therefore stall the fat loss. You would then drop your calories again after a period of maintenance.

Do diets work for everyone - yes if you eat in a calorie deficit they do. If YOU are eating in a calorie deficit can only be answered by looking at your BMR - if you are adamant that you do not eat over 1200 cals a day then my first guess would be that your body is just used to this calorie intake and has adjusted to live on it.

Have two weeks off at Xmas, add some decent calories in, relax and start again in the new year.

That's not to say that everybody who is overweight has religeously followed the guidelines and done everything perfectly, Shrodinger

The human body is designed for scarcity, and, as such, the body fat storage mechanism is enormously clever. It's not so clever in our society though, when we are biologically programmed to gain as much weight as we can, and surrounded constantly by foods with an addictive carb:fat ratio found only in breast milk naturally.

My point was that even those like OP who assiduously over-ride these urges and follow the guidelines to the letter are still suffering with unwanted body fat because the guidelines are skewed. We have a societal problem that we can't even fix when we do exactly as we're told.

The "nooo its science" gang could take a look at Tim Spektor's work ("spoon fed" and "the diet myth"). He's a geneticist, leads a major nhs Reaearch project (and currently the COVID symptom tracker app). So definitely a scientist, and definitely not a believer in calories in/calories out.
(And yes, that was a spectacularly inappropriate comment above...)

My point was that even those like OP who assiduously over-ride these urges and follow the guidelines to the letter are still suffering with unwanted body fat because the guidelines are skewed. We have a societal problem that we can't even fix when we do exactly as we're told.

The guidlines should be amended. You are right. To a current lifestyle. We are just so much more sedentary than before.
My mum was talking about it not so long ago. In an office job she still had to move a lot. Take x there, bring y forms, go and ask about z etc. 15 years later, email about x, get y emailed and call about z.
Now, the "average woman/man" from the guidelines did the former. The real average person at this time does the latter. More drive than ever, everything is at our fingertips so no need to get up and find that encyclopedia, or for older ones, change a tv channel. Lets face it, 30 min of walking just isn't enough movement.
But! Our food got more convenient too. You can have full meal in 6 minutes with a ping.
Another thing is self care. I started doing what my mum did. Every evening I sit down and massage my legs and arms with body lotion. I tend to hold quite a lots of water so this helps. I know some of my friends who have issues losing never do anything for their bodies like this. It's a little thing but it sooths body and pleasures the mind. Both very important.

Then there is the famous denial on top. Until I actually said to myself that it's me (because I don't have disability or serious illness) it was everything else and no success.

It's hard, very hard. But throwing in some common sense usually helps a lot.

tdeecalculator.net

This is an eye opener for me. I have always taken the ‘calories in, calories out’ as fact and believed overweight people on diets that weren’t losing weight were secretly eating or not understanding portions or otherwise doing it ‘wrong’.

I can’t help thinking of that tv show ‘secret eaters’ where they filmed people in their homes, the people swore blind they were on diets and kept food diaries but once the secret cameras were on them for a few weeks it showed every one of them eating a lot more than they realised/ recorded. I remember one lady in particular who was cooking and tasting all her dishes which totted up to 700 calories. Others were not counting drinks as calories etc. I guess the point was not one of them was eating a restricted diet and not losing weight. But if you are OP then you are and I will certainly remember this

Calories in v calories out doesn't work for a few reasons. It does work at a very base level, but doesn't take into consideration that we use more calories from carbs than we do from the same calorific intake of fat (because a higher proportion of the fat calories are used in processing the fat), and that different hormones are triggered by different foods, leading to it being near impossible on some diets (even very low calorie ones) to resist the biological urge to overeat, or to use (and therefore lose) stored body fat.

These considerations lead to enormous variations that CIvCO ignores altogether. There's no wonder people are confused.

I won't be back to this thread but I will repeat the point I was trying to make- you can literally do everything right and diet your ass off (lol) for a year and still be fat. Or maybe you succeed, but you have less than a 20% chance (some studies say less than a 5% chance) of keeping the weight off for more than five years. You'll have done all that work and then end up fatter than you ever were to start with. Fat isn't about being lazy, greedy, or stupid and the (SPECIFICALLY UNASKED FOR) diet advice you all gleefully, desperately rushed in to share is worthless at best, actively dangerous at worse. 600 to 800 calories per day is called an eating disorder and people die from those. But I guess that's better than being a bit fat, eh?

@RonObvious

1100 calories is maintenance level when you’re sedentary.

Where do people get these numbers from? Yes, everyone is different, but 1100 is certainly not "maintenance" for the average person!

But yes, I agree with you OP. I think that we really don't understand enough about individual human metabolism. I hate the "calories in, calories out" mantra.

Oh god, 'metabolism'. Differences in metabolism between human beings are negligible, to the point that they're not even worth talking about. Calories in v calories out IS the main thing to focus on - while preferably trying to make up the vast majority of those calories from nutritious foods!

diet advice you all gleefully, desperately rushed in to share is worthless at best

Jeez you're rude. You started a thread about diets. People have been discussing diets. It might be worthless to you, but don't forget; you're not the only person who matters.

@eckhart something I think we can all agree on...

diet advice you all gleefully, desperately rushed in to share

You all?

Alrighty...

A lot of people didn’t give you diet advice @Wroxie they gave you exercise advice. You specifically criticise the idea of “eat less, move more” whole conveniently ignoring the move more bit. But 🤷🏻‍♀️ It’s your life.

Wroxie has left the thread, refusing to learn any more than she knew when she started the thread, and bitter because nothing is changing for her. It's almost poetic

OP, an hours walking a day is nothing exercise wise, unless you are doing it up a 1 in 4 gradient. At 8 I did that just going to school and back ( half an hour of normal paced walking will cover about a mile ), thats not exercise, that is moving as part of your normal day. But it is hard to think of ways to add in exercise when you are doing a sedentary job, especially in the Winter when days are shorter.
Think about stuff you could do at home that is easy to achieve, if you live in a house you will have a flight of stairs, how many times can you go up and down them in 5 minutes ? Set a timer and do that a couple of times an hour for a couple of hours when you get back from work, that is 20 minutes of exercise that is going to have far more impact than a wander around for half an hour or an hour. Ad break on the TV, get up and go up and down the stairs until it is over, you don't need to leave home or spend a fortune or get changed to increase your exercise level.

Im quite happy to agree that walking might not be the best exercise

But i walk much faster than 2 miles an hour...thats really slow isn’t it?

But it is hard to think of ways to add in exercise when you are doing a sedentary job, especially in the Winter when days are shorter.

The tables which go up and down should be a standard in offices. It makes you get up, you can do bit of a walk on spot or smth. It also helps with concentration apparently! In my case moving really does.

Maybe not for an 8 year old