Help with diet please

[marvelousmarmaladian]

Hi I will list my diest and if anyone can point out where I am going wrong I would appreciate it as I am not losing any weight. Thanks

A cheese sandwich with butter and mayo and yoh feel it is insane to call this a calorific fatty sandwich, that’s mind boggling,

She did have breakfast. She has a coffee with sugar and a diet shake. That could be 200 calories.

Lunch could be 300 if she’s skimpy or with a tablespoon of butter (102cals) plus table spoon mayo (100) and 50g cheddar (200) which plus two slices of bread (200) = 600 calories.

A large plate of lasagne is easily 1000 calories. A lighter portion about 600-700. This already takes her to 1400-1800 calories. That’s most women’s loss to maintenance range.

She is then having snacks, chocolate, cheese and crackers (unknown calories - could be 100 could be 500+) and 2 glasses of wine (160 cals).

It’s not starvation, though I agree it’s not satiating for the calories. It’s also not a crazy amount of food… it’s normal, but it’s not a weight loss diet for most women. And OP wants to lose weight.

Although I do have to say OP you are also drinking over the safe alcohol maximum intake - you are having 28 units a week which is double this. You should also have 3+ alcohol free days per week to reduce your risk of health issues.

What is your height, weight and activity level? For someone in a larger body this day of food could be a calorie deficit. For many others it won’t be (wouldn’t be for me)

Your (total normal but likely higher calorie) sandwich breaks down as something like this as a conservative estimate as I don’t know how much you’re using of each thing, but going off what will probably look like the right amount of each thing to someone not counting:

2 slices wholemeal bread: 200 kcal
Cheddar (est. 40g): 161 kcal
Butter (10g) 72 kcal
Mayonnaise, assume not low fat (15g) 100 kcal
Lettuce (10g) 2 kcal
Tomato (30g) 5 kcal
= 540kcal

Lasagne will be 600-800 kcal a portion
Shepherds Pie - 500 ish
2 glasses of white wine around 350kcal depending on size.
etc etc.

your body will also prioritise breaking down alcohol before fat so drinking daily will be working against you.

I’d recommend this calculator below to help you work out a safe deficit for you. I’d also recommend Nutricheck or Cronometer to track your calories and honestly you need to weigh and track everything because your guesses will be wrong

calculator.chubclubcd.co.uk

Also if helpful for context, I’m 38, 5”2 and 158lbs, do an average of 6000-7000 steps a day over the week, currently losing weight gradually on about 1550 calories a day. Your day of food would be over my maintenance level let alone be a deficit. But if you’re much bigger/taller and more active it could be.

Do you weigh and measure your food? Everything that passes your lips. That’s step number one (or two, once you’ve figured out your calorie allowance). Then input it into an app like My Fitness Pal. Don’t guess, weigh it. And don’t forget salad dressing, the butter in your sandwich, milk in your tea, the oil you use if cooking, that taste of the kids meal…
Stop the wine; that’s 300 or more calories right there. And those are quite calorie dense foods (lasagna, souvlaki, cheese and crackers…). It looks to me you’re just eating too much of the wrong things.

The calories in a cheese sandwich with butter and mayo will be astronomical. Ballpark if not excessive amounts of cheese and mayo then we are talking 600 calories

Also just a week of counting calories religiously can give perspective and then may not even be needed moving forward once you see where the problems in your diet are.

I'm a fellow menopausal woman and despite being quite a strapping one of nearly 6' with muscles from heavy lifting, I'd stack on the weight if I ate that.

Generally, for most women, I would say the key to staying slim in mid-life and beyond is to do one (or more) of the following;

• overhaul your diet to whole, unprocessed food and take care to make sure it's high in lean protein, fibre and good fats. Yes that means cutting the wine.
• use GLP1s, and/or
• get used to being hungry because you can't put away 3 square meals + snacks and drinks away like you used to.

I do the first two.

Exercise is also important, to improve your body composition and metabolism.

I'm a fellow menopausal woman and despite being quite a strapping one of nearly 6' with muscles from heavy lifting, I'd stack on the weight if I ate that.

Generally, for most women, I would say the key to staying slim in mid-life and beyond is to do one (or more) of the following;

• overhaul your diet to whole, unprocessed food and take care to make sure it's high in lean protein, fibre and good fats. Yes that means cutting the wine.
• use GLP1s, and/or
• get used to being hungry because you can't put away 3 square meals + snacks and drinks away like you used to.

I do the first two.

Exercise is also important, to improve your body composition and metabolism.

Starving? Are we reading the same plan?

It just goes to show, I genuinly thought people were more educated on nutrition now, but it is clearly not the case,

but here we have someone who has a diet shake for breakfast, likely yoghurt mid morning, a cheese butter and mayo sandwich for lunch, some fruit mid afternoon , a heavy carb laden fatty dinner like lasagna, followed by a couple of glass of wine, some cheese and crackers, a few chocolates,,

and someone responds with all seriousness, you must be starving, and someone else responds that it’s insane to call a cheese mayo and butter sandwich fatty and calorific, as apparently it’s normal, which means if canr be calorific and fatty,

and the op doesn’t understand why she’s not losing weight, as she drinks wine, eats chocolate and enjoys her cheese and crackers.

Have you weighed your food and tracked your calories, including drinks/spreads/sugar and milk added to drinks etc.
There is a lot of scope for ‘hidden’ calories in that list that you might not think of as food but which add up.

Remove the snacks. Have a proper breakfast. Those shakes are absolute processed rubbish.

I have never found removing alcohol makes a jot of difference to my weight loss but may as well try and see if it helps. It would improve your health either way

It’s fine to ask but I would assume most people would know the answer, even if they find it difficult to make changes. Focus on nutrition buy getting enough protein, veg and calcium. A really easy win would be stop the alcohol.

I agree but just to add some nuance, because of MN in particular and even on this thread, people can get very emotional and extreme about food and diets - keeping a very careful and accurate food diary/calorie tracking of every single thing you eat can be really helpful, but most people only need to do it for a short time only. If you're of the data-obsessed, perfectionist turn of mind (I know I can be) there is a bit of a risk in going too far and getting so into macro tracking and diet optimisation that it tips into disordered eating. As an example there was an AIBU thread on here a while back about an OP and her mother, they'd been out for a meal and the OP had quizzed the waiter on the nutritional content of the meal, hadn't got satisfactory answers, the mother then criticised the OP for giving the waiter a hard time and said that it had ruined the meal, Op wanted to know was she UR. On the face of it you'd think she was completely normal for wanting to know what's in her food, allergens etc, but as the thread went on it transpired she was an absolutely obsessive calorie counter, at home she weighed and measured every single thing she ate every day, and when she went out she expected not only a precise calorie counted meal but also to know the protein, carb content etc as well, and hence was not willing to eat out anywhere other than the kind of large chains that can provide this level of data- and the worst was she was genuinely under the impression this was a healthy way to be and indeed was standard weight loss advice... You can see how it can spiral!

So yes definitely as a reality check and to help you understand where you really are in your 'normal diet', where you can cut calories, how you stack up to recommendations in terms of protein, fibre intake etc, sure, the apps are really useful. And of course you do need to be strict with yourself about not just eyeballing portions of higher calorie things like cheese or not logging little cheeky snacks etc if you want proper accurate info. But be careful if after doing this you find yourself reliant on being this controlled or controlling long-term, and if it's stopping you doing normal things like enjoying a nice meal out from time to time (the irony being for that OP she could probably have had both a more enjoyable and a more healthy meal in a small cafe or pub with home cooked food than heavily processed but accurately recorded chain meals!)

It's not that there's inherently anything wrong with the sandwich, but OP has come onto the thread looking for advice on her diet because she isn't losing weight. Clearly at the moment she is eating more than the amount she'd need to eat to lose weight. That's potentially a high calorie sandwich with unspecified amounts of butter, mayo and cheese. It could easily be made a lower calorie sandwich by only having butter or mayo, and measuring the portion of that plus the cheese; also ensuring you don't go large on the bread - there's a big difference between a doorstep sandwich and two medium slices of wholemeal bread.

If you want to lose weight, you either have to restrict certain food types altogether, or you need to weigh, measure and count your portions. Yes, it's a chore, but it needn't go hand in hand with being miserable. Once you are in the habit of it, you will know what size a piece of cheese you can have, how many teaspoons of mayo etc.