Boosting Metabolism - Advice and Help Please

foxsmum

Hello Everyone

I am struggling pure and simple - I lose 3lbs and the next week its back, and I have yo-yo'd like that for months

I need to find out how to boost my metabolism and would like any ideas you may have

I am a few days away from being 50 and I weigh 245lbs !!!!! I work full time. So heres a sample of my day so you can get an idea of my activity level.

I wake at 4am, take the dog out for a 20min walk then to work starting at 6am, I leave at 3pm, I spend 90% of my day on my feet walking round a retail store. Back home talking my dog out for another walk, between 1 to 1.5 hours, then I make dinner, sit down for an hour maybe then out again with my dog for 20 mins, sit down again and bed at 10.30pm.

Typical days food
5am Cup of Tea
8am Cup of Tea and a Crumpet
12noon Salad Lunch, cup of Tea
6pm Spag Bol and fresh Juice
9pm Tea

I am suffering with Plantar Fasciitis, which is a very VERY painful foot problem, so after all my dog walking and being on my feet for 9 hours at work, I don't exercise, sometimes the pain is so bad I can hardly walk.

I also have PCOS, and this hinders my weight loss.

So please I would welcome any help and support, and am at the stage where I cannot see the light at the end of my tunnel, Thanks in advance from a very disheartened lady :sad:

mcarter99

Can you translate that food list into calories?

foxsmum

I eat between 1200 and 1400 each day

stephanj

My friend I am seeing almost zero protein in that list. Is there a giant chicken Breast on that salad? Could you slap some almond butter on that crumpet? Have a look at your diary and see whether you are hitting the protein-fat-carb levels Mfp sets you?

deadbeatsummer

you need to eat more food for breakfast to boost metabolism. try and eat something like:
eggs
fruit and yoghurt
oats

exercise boosts metabolism.

Sarauk2sf

Nothing will really 'boost your metabolism' per se to any degree. To increase your daily calorie expendiure you need to increase your activity - although it sounds like you are already pretty active so I would hesitate to suggest more, especially as you are not eating that much and with your restrictions.

A couple of questions:

- are you sure that you log absolutely everything? Condiments, oils, dressings etc. And do you weigh your food?
- how tall are you?
- how long have you been eating at the 1200 - 1400 level and not seeing any progress?

mermx

IMO I really don`t think you can boost metabolism. You could drink loads of caffiene spiked drinks to make you a bit jittery and maybe boost things that way. Or you could lay in an ice cold bath and your body will use extra cals to heat up.

It`s all about cals in and using up fat stores.

Eating more protein fills you up more and helps repair and build muscle. It helps if you are doing a little exercise, which you are with the walking.

A lot of heavy carb type food are full of sugar. Fruits especially.

The body will use protein better than sugary carbs. This is a very simplified version BTW.

You are welcome to friend me in the hopes that I can help you a bit more?

eclare87

Are you completely sure you know how many calories that crumpet is? What about salad dressings and oils? Do you put sugar in your tea?

If you are sure, you might want to see a doctor. I've heard there are some disorders that can prevent people from losing weight.

Also you should be eating more fruit, healthy carbs, protein. Instead of a crumpet, how about some Greek yogurt? Add some banana and peanut butter for a snack later on. Instead of a salad how about a whole-wheat wrap with grilled chicken breast and protein for lunch?

starkid120

Not sure what you profile is set to, but I would say you might need to up your activity level, if you work a retail job (i.e. lightly active instead of sedentary, if this is what you have it set at).

Also, I'm not sure if you're eating back the calories your burning from your dog walks. IMO you definitely should. And definitely get more protein in your diet!!

If you feet hurt from being on your feet all day, is there a pool that you can go to and swim? It's a very low impact exercise and would probably help alleviate some of your foot issues.. Also, possible better orthopedic shoes for the rest of the day.

I hope some of this is helpful to you.

Good luck on your journey!

jadesign19

Hi. I'm not qualified medically, but I do have hypothyroidism and my situation seems similar to you. I have been following the same pattern as you for many many years. I started following the book The Metabolism Miracle. I'm still in stage one and I've lost close to 8-10 lbs in 35 days. This is amazing to me. My energy has increased so much and I'm currently doing the couch to 5K program.
What I've learned so far is that this website works- especially for support.
There will be a time each month when I'll be 3-6lbs heavier .
Celebrate the ounces as well as the pounds.
Weigh yourself once a week.
Protein with veggies every meal. Snack. You need fuel.
Water. I try to drink water all the time. Two full cups when I wake and every time I go in kitchen.
When I feel sad about a bad day or gain, I turn to the community forum and get motivated.

Good luck! I'm cheering for you!

michellematteson

Not sure what you profile is set to, but I would say you might need to up your activity level, if you work a retail job (i.e. lightly active instead of sedentary, if this is what you have it set at).

I second this post. A lot of people discredit standing as not burning any calories, but in truth it does involve using your muscles. I don't think you are eating enough calories per day.

Also, try looking for exercises that you can do while sitting. As a person with two retail jogs and a dog as well, I know how little energy you can have at the end of the day, but something you can be doing while watching TV can really help.

TLPad

I used to suffer with Plantar Fasciitis and know that it is not very nice and does hinder certain exercises. I would suggest swimming as another form of exercise if you have a nearby pool, this may help your weightloss (also are you doing any exercises to get rid of this condition, I suffered for ages and caused damage to my ankle because of the way I was walking until I saw a specialist who showed me some exercises that I could do and in time it went). Also a good breakfast can kick start your metabolism I understand anyway, good luck

Mainey13

sounds like u are not eating enough food, especially PROTEIN (lean meat, nuts, greek yogurt, eggs) and vegetables! Ease back on the tea and drink 8 cups of water/day. just my thoughts.....

TArnold2012

You didn't say what you set your life style at moderate or active. Also we can't see your dairy but it looks like you may not be eating enough or often enough.

I have found that eating 3 meals and usually 2 or 3 snacks helps. Also you listed salad for lunch but without any details to what kind. Salad while we often consider healthy are often loaded with calories when we dump cheese, bacon, croutons, nuts, and loads of salad dressing on them.

It's really hard to say with such limited information


As I was reading other Topics I stumbled across this and thought parts may answer some of your questions. I DO NOT AGREE with the part on suppressants !!!!!!!!!!!!! I do not believe they help us learn a new lifestyle of eating and maintaining.

(link: http://www.bodyrecomposition.com/fat-loss/9-ways-to-deal-with-hunger-on-a-diet.html)


1. Eat More Lean Protein

While dietitians continue to squabble over whether carbohydrates or fats are more filling in the short-term, the data is actually abundantly clear: protein beats them both out. Increasing amounts of research has shown that both acutely and in the long-term, higher protein intakes help blunt hunger. It also helps that, as long as you’re dealing with sources of lean protein (low-fat fish, skinless chicken, even low-fat red meat), it can be tough to get a lot of calories from protein in the first place.
I’d also note that there are many other reasons to consume sufficient amounts of lean protein on a weight loss diet including blood glucose stability and sparing of muscle mass loss. It’s also worth mentioning that a lot of the benefits that are often attributed to ‘low-carbohydrate’ diets have more to do with the increased protein intake; the benefits occur because they are ‘high-protein’.

2. Eat Fruit

For odd reasons fruit has gotten a bad rap for dieting, at least in the athletic and bodybuilding subculture but little could be further from the truth. One aspect of hunger has to do with the status of liver glycogen, when liver glycogen is emptied, a signal is sent to the brain that can stimulate hunger; the corollary is that replenishing liver glycogen tends to make people feel fuller.
The fructose component of fruit works to refill liver glycogen and folks who include a moderate amount of fruit in their weight loss diets often report feeling much less hungry. That’s in addition to the other benefits of fruit (fiber, nutrients). Oh yeah, eat whole fruit, stay away from fruit juice.

3. Eat More Fiber

No list of this sort would be complete without the mention of fiber. Fiber can help with hunger in at least two ways. The first is that the physical ‘stretching’ of the stomach is one of many signals about how much food has been eaten; when the stomach is physically stretched the brain thinks you’re full. High-fiber/high-volume foods (e.g. foods that have a lot of volume for few calories) accomplish that most effectively.

Additionally, fiber slows gastric emptying, the rate at which food leave the stomach. By keeping foods in the stomach longer, a high-fiber intake keeps folks full longer. Basically, mom was right, eat your vegetables.

4. Eat (At-Least) Moderate Amounts of Dietary Fat

Ignoring the debate I mentioned above about carbs versus fat and hunger, the simple fact is that exceedingly low-fat diets tend to leave a lot of people hungry in both the short- and long-term. Tying in with my comments about fiber in Number 3, dietary fat also slows gastric emptying (hence the aphorism that high-fat meals really stick to the ribs). While dietary fat does little to blunt hunger in the short-term, moderate intakes tend to keep people fuller longer between meals since the meal sits in the stomach longer.

As well, exceedingly low-fat diets often taste like cardboard, tying into some of the comments I made initially about psychological effects of dieting; people won’t follow a diet that doesn’t taste good for very long. Dietary fat gives food a certain mouth-feel and very low-fat diets remove that, leaving people dissatisfied. The diet usually ends shortly after that.

Research has shown that moderate fat diets improve adherence to dieting and, with rare exceptions, I don’t suggest taking dietary fat much lower than 20-25% of total calories on a fat loss diet. In some cases (such as very low-carbohydrate diets), it may be higher than this.

5. Exercise

I’m hesitant to mention exercise in this article simply because the response to it can vary drastically in terms of hunger control on a diet. Doing the topic justice would take a complete article in and of itself but here I’m going to give a quick overview.
Basically, through myriad overlapping mechanisms, exercise has the potential to increase hunger, decrease hunger or have no effect. Some of the effects are purely physiological. On the one hand, exercise increases leptin transport into the brain which should help some of the other hunger signals work better.

On the other hand, some people can get a blood glucose crash with exercise (this is especially true in the early stages of a program) and this can stimulate hunger. Most research suggests that exercise has, if anything, a net benefit in terms of hunger control but it’s even more complicated than that.

Whether or not exercise helps with hunger control ends up interacting with psychological factors that I’m not going to detail here. Some research suggests that people ‘couple’ exercise with their diet. The underlying psychlogy seems to be along the lines of “I exercised today, why would I ruin that by blowing my diet.” That’s good.

However, another category of people often use exercise as an excuse to eat more. The underlying psychology seems to be “I must have burned at least 1000 calories in exercise, I earned that cheeseburger and milkshake.” Of course, since people basically always over-estimate how many calories they burned with exercise, they end up doing more harm than good.

The short-version of this point is this: for some people, regular exercise (and it may not be anything more than a brisk walk) has a profound benefit on keeping them on their diet. And for others it tends to backfire.

6. Consider Intermittent Fasting (IF’ing)

IF’ing is a current dietary trend that, while exact definitions vary, basically refers to a pattern where someone fasts for some portion of the day (perhaps 16-20 hours) and eats most of their food during a short ‘eating period’. Various interpretations are out there but there is emerging research showing a variety of health benefits from this style of eating.
In the context of this article, IF’ing can be particularly valuable for smaller dieters who simply don’t get to eat a lot of food each day. A small female trying to subsist on 1000-1200 calories per day and trying to eat 3-4 times per day is only getting a few small, relatively unsatisfying meals per day.

However, if that same dieter fasts most of the day (many find that hunger goes away after an initial spike in the morning), she can eat 1-2 significantly larger (and more satisfying) meals later in the day.

If you’re interested in IF’ing, I’d direct you to Martin Berkhan’s Leangains.com for the absolute best source of IF information on the net. Martin is currently working on a book on IF’ing and I, for one, can’t wait to see it.

7. Use Appetite Suppressants

The history of diet drugs is a mixed bag but, for the most part, diet drugs have fallen into one of two major categories: metabolic enhancers and appetite suppressants. Sometimes the drugs do both. Now, used without changes in diet and activity, these drugs tend to only have small and transient effects.

But the simple fact is that they can help a diet. The old Dexatrim (containing pseudoephedrine HCL) was actually very nice in that it blunted hunger without over-stimulating the person but it’s not available any more. I’m personally a big fan of the ephedrine/caffeine stack.

Despite scare-mongering to the contrary, EC used properly (e.g. don’t take 3X the recommended dose) is actually quite safe and has both potent appetite suppressant effects along with boosting metabolic rate slightly. Hell, I thought EC was important enough that I gave it an entire chapter in The Rapid Fat Loss Handbook.

Which isn’t to say that I think every dieter should be using/abusing appetite suppressants from day 1. At least try the non-drug strategies first; but when the hunger is clawing at you making you want to quit your diet, consider using one.

8. Be more Flexible Towards Your Dieting

This is another topic that really deserves a book to fully discuss. I’d say that I need to write that book but the fact is that I already did, the topics I’m going to briefly look at here are discussed in detail in A Guide to Flexible Dieting.

Let me address this topic with a question “What would you do if I told you you could never have something again?” Assume it’s something you like or want, how would you react? Odds are you’d want it that much more, right. It’s human nature, we want what we’re told we can’t have.

Guess what, that’s dieting. Or at least how many dieters approach dieting. Many diets are predicated on some food being bad, off-limits or what have you; dieters go into the diet thinking “I can’t ever eat XXX again in my life” which just makes them want XXX that much more. This is one of the psychological aspects of hunger I mentioned in the introduction.

And, of course, the followup to this is that when dieters do eventually eat XXX (and they will), then they just feel guilty and miserable, figure the diet is blown and eat the entire bag or box of XXX and abandon the diet altogether.

It’s truly a damaging approach to dieting and research has clearly shown that the type of rigid dieter I’m describing above (who expects absolute perfection from their diet or it’s a failure) do worse than more flexible dieters.

The reality is that, within the context of a long-term diet, even small deviations don’t really do much harm (unless the person goes berserk and makes it harmful). That is, say you’re on a diet and you eat a couple hundred calories of cookies because you really wanted them. If you’ve dieted the past 6 days, that’s no big deal. However, if you decide that you are a worthless piece of crap with no willpower and eat another 1000 calories of cookies; well you made it into a problem. Understand?

I always recommend that dieters use strategies like free meals (non-diet meals, preferably eaten out of the house), refeeds (extended periods of deliberate high-carbohydrate over-consumption) and full diet breaks (periods of 10-14 days where the diet is abandoned for maintenance) when they diet. It keeps people from falling into the rigid dieting trap that, invariably, backfires. Again, all of the details can be found in A Guide to Flexible Dieting.

9. Suck it Up or Stay Fat

I want to make it clear that I’m not being facetious with the title of this one; and I’m only being slightly obnoxious. Even if you do everything I talked about above, apply every strategy perfectly, the reality is that you will probably still have some hunger on a diet.

Well…too bad. The simple fact is that losing weight requires eating less than you’re burning and this will, at some point, generate hunger. Now, there are exceptions, extremely overweight individuals often find that they have no appetite in the initial stages of dieting but the reality is that eventually hunger will rear it’s ugly head.

At which point every dieter is faced with a fundamental choice which, put simply is this “What’s more important to me, losing weight, or eating this food?” I’d note that this is also a reason I’m so adamant about the flexible dieting strategies, at least one way of dealing with food cravings is to include them in the diet in a controlled fashion. That way the dieter is controlling the diet, instead of the other way around.

But even with that, hunger is a reality of dieting no matter what else you do. Now, you can try to reframe it (Tom Venuto in his new book suggested telling yourself that “Hunger is fatness leaving the body.”) or you can simply accept it (yes, I know, very Zen) and move on.

But none of that makes the hunger away, it’s just you trying to trick yourself out of feeling bad about it. When that point is reached, there are only two options that I’m going to put very bluntly.

You can suck it up or stay fat.

After you’ve gotten your protein and fruit and fiber and fat and appetite supressants and exercise and flexible dieting strategies down pat, when hunger rears its ugly head, those are the only two options left.

gsager

You can boost your metabolism by eating more often. Egg whites, yogurt, chicken, fish, steak....cottage cheese. I don't recognize any of the food you eat. Good Luck.

QueenSamira

Your diet looks very carb-heavy. As someone with PCOS, I understand that PCOS women have to low-carb (less than 90g net a day) to see any real results. I do and it's really helped my weight loss. Eat more protein and fat, and complex, rather than simple, carbs.

john233

Really nice post, highly informative and professionally written..Good Job

brneydgrlie

If you have PCOS, you are eating too many starchy carbs. Try switching the crumpets and spaghetti out for other things that have more nutritional benefit (like vegetables, beans, and lower sugar fruits like berries). I also agree with the poster who said to increase your protein. You can do this with meat, chicken, and fish, and by adding snacks like Greek yogurt to your diet. Also, I do not see you mention drinking any water. Water is EXTREMELY important. Just having a couple of cups of tea is not enough hydration.

debkmoore

I was just reading in "The South Beach Diet Super Charged" book that if you use this interval walking plan you boosts you metabolism.

It says walk 15 seconds at moderate pace then 60 seconds at easy pace and repeat several time. With a 2 minute cooldown when your done walking

Maybe that will help. I haven't tried it yet as I have just started walking yesterday. Hope this might help some.

youngmomtaz

You have gotten some good suggestions in regards to protien and possibly upping your cals. Here is my addition. I am a massage therapist. In school one of my instructors was the "foot guy" he was amazing at figuring out foot ailments. His suggestion, which I pass on to many of my clients with plantar fasciitis, is cammomile tea. It is supposed to help bring down inflamition. Add to that a frozen water bottle rolled on the floor under the affected foot. May help somewhat with the pain. I also suffer from PCOS, getting less grain based carbs will for sure help you. Keep your carb intake to tons of fresh veggies and some fruit and I'll bet you will see results. Good Luck!

jerzypeach

As a fellow PCOS sufferer, I'd say right off the bat, ditch the crumpets, sugar in your tea, and the pasta. Carbs (especially processed ones like what I saw on your list) are very unwise choices for those of us with insulin resistance and PCOS.

Eat more lean protein (chicken, turkey, eggs, lean pork, etc) and fibrous veggies (GREENS!!). Keep your higher-carb intake to coincide right around your workouts when you actually need that extra energy.

Increase your calories.....you're not eating enough. Your 1200-1400 per day is what I eat and I weigh 135.

Drink lots of water.

Get enough sleep.

Most importantly.....go to the doctor because the PCOS has lots of other nasty side effects and you really need to get some blood work done for a baseline and then you can get rechecked to see improvement as you start dropping fat pounds. The docs may even suggest going onto an insulin sensitizing medication like Metformin. I've been taking it for 5 years now.

When you are ready......incorporate some strength training into your workout routine. You'll see some very good results in your body shape as it emerges from from your fat loss.

Please feel free to friend me. There are also a couple of PCOS groups here on MFP if you'd like to join them.

Best wishes!