Not losing weight despite massively cutting back

[Morgun]

Can anyone analyse what I’m eating and tell me where I’m going wrong? I’ve cut back so much yet the scales are not shifting. I’m 5ft 8 and 16st

breakfast - porridge oats, 2 slices of wholemeal toast with low fat spread, a fat free yogurt and a banana

lunch - pasta salad with a wholemeal roll and a packet of low calorie crisps.

Aftetnoon snack - apple, nuts and sometimes a fat free yogurt but not always

dinner - homemade spaghetti bolognese (wholemeal spaghetti), 2 small slices of garlic baguette, a weight watchers mouse and a piece of fruit

evening snack - a couple of biscuits

this is far less than I used to eat yet the scales are not budging. I’m being told to cut down further but I can’t see what else I can do, I’m struggling as it is.

Interesting - unusual for steel cut or rolled oats to have the same effect as potato. Were you testing for pre-diabetes?

with respect - just stop. your “diet” clearly isn’t working for you. I don’t think have a healthy idea of portion sizes, you’re still getting it wrong and you’re still overweight. If you were eating the right amount to lose weight, you would lose weight.

To be clear - to lose weight, you need to eat LESS than the recommended portion sizes. Yet for breakfast, you not only ate the recommended portion size in porridge, you then additionally consumed 2 slices of toast, serving of yoghurt and a banana. It doesn’t matter that the porridge doesn’t fill the bowl, bowls are not standardised - weight is. You weigh the food, not eyeball the bowl.

Ask yourself, why you feel the need to supplement a full portion size of porridge like this? The porridge is supposed to be a full serving of breakfast, and you’re supposed to eat at a deficit ie eat less than the full portion…not more.

Personally my BMI is 20, and I’d either have the oats with banana as a topping and maybe a bit of yogurt, OR the toast. I don’t need both, especially not for breakfast.

Likewise, why do you need bread with every meal? Could you not drop the roll at lunch and the garlic bread? Do you have to eat crisps daily?

Honestly.. that's a huge amount of food!

It is, but I bet OP feels like she’s starving on it. I certainly would.

I’ve tried every diet out there but low fat, high carb was the most disastrous. At one point I’d built up to eating two whole rolls of giant rice cakes a day on top of my other food and was still craving more so badly I could have cried by bedtime. I also had iron and vit B deficiencies.

I do the fast 800 now, I was sceptical at first, but its been a revelation.

Don't worry, I assume the OPs post was a wind up in the first place!

No it was just an experiment and me being curious

Don't worry, I assume the OPs post was a wind up in the first place!

To be honest, when I read the first post I assumed this was a fake thread. I found it hard to believe that someone was eating that and thought it was a 'diet'.
When I read her other post on what she used to eat, I thought again, this can't be real!

I'm still not sure, especially as the OP has come back and defended her '3 breakfasts' and seems to want to argue that everyone else here is wrong.

If it IS real is sadly shows skewed behaviour with food and a complete lack of understanding of what is normal eating. And an addiction to carbs.

I don't think it is a wind-up because several of the alternative meal plans suggested don't have a single vegetable either. Or very few.
I think veggies are universally acknowledged to be good for everyone.

? Alternative meal plans- whose?
Do you mean posters are suggesting unhealthy options or that the OP has suggested them? She's only posted 3 times.

Posters.
This is perhaps the way people eat now.
Everybody is going on about protein but not so much about veg.

Yes excess protein is bad for the body too. People seem to think the more the better.

The reason protein has been highlighted in recent years is because when we were in the information rut of being told low fat was the answer (not low sugar) people started to veer away from proteins simply because they tend to be higher in fats than in sugars. Hence the market for low fat dairy etc, and foods with fat removed but sugar/sweetener added in its place. Now we know it's sugar that is the real enemy, there has been a pendulum swing - but like most such swings, it has been towards an overkill, with some thinking you can't have too much protein.

But too much of a good thing is also problematic and excess protein stresses your liver and puts you at risk of kidney stones. And, as @holluschickie has noted, has tended to shunt veg out of the picture - often because people view them as carbs (which they are). There can be a lack of nuance, as people want simple rules when its isn't always simple.

I would look at the Fast 800 recipes. You don’t need to stick to 800 but it gives you a good base for meals. As others have said, it’s too much food and not enough nutrition. Breakfast is one of those things you’ve posted. It’s porridge or a slice of toast or yoghurt and fruit or whatever. Not all three unless you’re at an all inclusive on your holidays. You’re just eating too many calories to lose weight and you’re hungry because you’re eating a large proportion of starchy white carbs.

And if it IS real, it's been an eye opening insight into the obesity epidemic.

There's been so much focus from the government and food manufacturers on portion sizes, but they've failed to recognise that some people will take a portion of porridge AND a portion of toast AND a portion of yoghurt with fruit, and call that breakfast, and defend their choices to the hilt because they are "recommended portion sizes"!

This thread is completely bonkers 😂 I know people like to pretend carbs make you starving but pretending you’re starving on 3000 calories a day is quite something. And by roll of rice cakes do you mean 2 entire packs ie 30 odd rice cakes?!? 😭

none of this stuff is real. It’s in your head. crying with craving after 2 packets of rice cakes?!?

oh and I can’t stop thinking about the boiled eggs on a deserted island and whether you would ever do a poo again, since you would be ingesting zero fibre. Can you live without poo’ing??

I hadn't noticed that but it IS a long thread!

Ideally we should all be eating 3 portions of fruit and 5 portions of veg a day.
That's completely do-able.

Fruit at every meal
2 veg for lunch (could be soup or salad)
3 veg with dinner

The old 5 portions a day came out of nowhere- it was never scientific, it was just thought up as a number that most people could achieve without much thinking.

I don't know where it's coming from to be honest.

Is it starting with kids where parents let them 'graze' or snack all day long?

I agree with other posters who said that bowl size is irrelevant.

You don't have to FILL the bowl!
This is where people go wrong with pasta or rice.

A portion is supposed to be the size of your fist- so about 2 to 3 tablespoons. (and that's a tablespoon not the huge serving spoon you serve food with!)

Not a huge pasta bowl filled to the top. Or a mound of rice filling the bowl.

Restaurants never used to serve garlic bread or dough balls etc WITH pasta or pizza.

People didn't eat a WHOLE pizza for themselves- a portion is 1/4 of a pizza.

And so on.....

Yes but if it isn't genuine, I rather think that was the point intended - and I'm not sure it's totally fair. There has been a few extremely dismissive comments on these forums recently where people are basically trying to say all people who are overweight simply because they effectively "nom nom huge volumes of cake and party food."

It is so much more complicated that that. Much of the issue was the food industry's bum-steer of saying fat was the problem, when in fact a quick bit of research shows that obesity has risen in the wake of "fat-free" products. It's also been the movement away from cooking from scratch, and a big demographic who have fallen prey to that are women who are now juggling both careers and running the home.

So implying that people are obese because they sit home all day eating donuts or big white rolls with bacon is overly simplistic and unfair.

And in fact what I take from this thread is something rather different: look at the people who have come on and said how hard they are working to manage their weight - particularly peri-menopausal women who just can't eat large volumes.

It may be that the op was eating what she claims, and if so, I agree it shows a lack of understanding of food - and I wish her well because with a little learning, I think she can really get her weight under control; she has lots of room for useful changes. But many overweight people simply don't have that scope to address what their intake is, yet are still struggling, and to put that all down to mindless over-eating is overly simplistic.

I agree @Calliopespa

The problem is multifactorial.
Too many products in shops labelled 'healthy' when they are usually ultra processed crap and basically, lies.

When they start putting 'healthy' on a head of broccoli I'll believe the food industry and the government is serious about tackling obesity.

And they make changes with tax or whatever to the likes of Weight Watches etc selling 'diet' meals that are ultra processed rubbish.

I think a big issue is there are multifaceted issues around food health that alone, may or may not cause obesity and there are presented with equal importance (or fighting for importance) which is overwhelming to anyone on a weight loss journey. What do you take from:

• no processed food
• 100g protein
• 8 fruit and veg
• carbs are making you starving and 2 boiled eggs will satiate you
• low fat food is the devil because it’s sugary

ETC ETC especially from MN where there are high levels or orthorexia. Especially when you try these things and they don’t work.

no one needs to eat this strictly for good health. For weight loss…..maybe. Maybe they need to find what works for them, maybe nothing will. There are WLI which are a fantastic substitute for all this emotional energy and frankly, hard work.

none of it is particularly helpful to someone who is trying to lose weight and this “oh what an insight into people who aren’t as good as me” is just disingenuous and feeds the posters own needs.

Weight loss can be a really hard thing to get your head around op. You’ve definitely improved your diet quality. Where you’re going wrong is by not calorie counting. You don’t have to do it forever but if you do it for a couple of weeks you will learn lots about which foods you can eat lots of and what to avoid. Often with dieting you can actually eat more food not less, it’s just about making different food choices.

Focus too on finding out which foods keep you fuller for longer. This is where protein is very useful! Dont worry about being hungry between meals, you should expect some hunger when dieting but your shouldn’t be starving.

Good luck

If you are maintaining your weight, but not losing (or gaining), you're eating the calories you need to keep as you are.
So even if you think you are within your calories to lose weight, you aren't, so need to cut down.
You evidently like your bread, but that would be the easy thing to cut out. And despite your arguing, that IS a big breakfast unless you are very active

It is a massive improvement in quality from what she says she was eating before. To me that's actually a far more important shift than the weight loss.

No body can last without nutrients. Yes a bit of extra fat puts strain on the body, but living without nutrients is simply unsustainable.

I know someone who lives on tiny amounts of crap and smokes like a train. She waxes lyrical about how "healthy" she is because she has a very low BMI and there's nothing you can tell her to wake her up from that. I feel BMI has been given too high a status in society at present as the one and only barometer of health.

So when I was trying to lose weight I would have:
175g full fat yoghurt with 20g lemon curd and a small banana for breakfast.
For lunch, 1 chicken breast chopped and air fried with half a sachet of some sort of flavour (like the Maggi shawarma powder) and cooked with an onion and and a pepper or a 3 egg omelette with salad.
for dinner, I’d have a plate of assorted cooked vegetables and another portion of protein.

that would add up to around 1700 calories.

you are eating way too much and far too many carbs.

"And despite your arguing, that IS a big breakfast unless you are very active".

I think this is a misnomer. My husband is 6ft1 and has a stocky build. He works in a trade in which he's currently working 12 hour days, averaging 17,000 steps a day and carrying 40kg of equipment up the equivalent of 100 flights of steps a day (all recorded on his Garmin!). He would never eat a breakfast this large.

I do crossfit (among other exercise types) and my breakfast on those crossfit days is just 40g of porridge made with milk, with sliced banana on top.

The OPs breakfast is enormous and no amount of activity could justify it.

If she smokes like a train, she will be warned about it and offered smoking cessation support every single time she sees a doctor. It may be that BMI is weighted too heavily in the overall scheme of things, but there's no way society views a high BMI as more harmful than smoking. If your friend is deluded about it, that's on her, not society or the NHS.