200+ to lose and totally utterly confused!

Hi, first let me congratulate you on taking the biggest step forward by seriously drawing a line in the sand about your health. Well done you!

From what I can gather you may not be eating enough calories to fuel your body. That makes sense. A fire won't burn unless you fuel it! If you are finding hard to eat the amount of calories, try using sensible high calorie foods to get to your projected calorie limit. I think its important not to do a drastic diet in your present circumstance.

I can only tell you what works for me. I am doing a Intermittent Fast/5:2 diet combo at the moment. I think this is an important thing for you to locate- What is going to work for you long term? What can you stick to and keep going? That might be trial and error until you find the one that works for you.

You will find help on here. There are a lot of people who have successfully and sensibly lost more weight than you need to! So chin up kid! :-D

Have you spoken to your doctor? Try to get to see a nutritionalist.

You will get different opinions from everyone. You just have to find what works for you. It is my opinion that at your current weight, you can definitely and probably should eat more than 1000 calories a day to lose weight. I think most sites say that the more weight you lose the less calories per day you will consume.

I don't know how to respond, but I can tell you what I do I eat at least 1,300 calories a day (most would be 1,550). What I do is eat my breakfast (before classes, since I'm in University), after my first class and before my second class, I eat lunch. After my last class of the day I go walking for only 30 minutes (Mind you, I gradually got up to 30 minutes). After my walk I fuel my body with a light snack until supper time. I have my supper and before bed I have a little snack. I use to eat at any time during the day, and I found that getting my body into a schedule extremely helped. Also I know that you stated walking can be hard (and it always is at first), but even a 10 minute walk will feel amazing I'm sorry I can't help much

Best of luck!

You need to find what works for you! Talk to your Dr. about how to control your hypoglycaemia and hyperinsulinaemia. Trying to crame that many calories in a short amount of time probabley isn't helping the situation.....fasting may not be a ggod thing for you. Start incorporating short walks every day even if its for 10 min. You will slowly build up....its not a race its a life style!
Learn how to eat properly & fuel your body & most importantly listen to your body at how it responds to the food your eating. Since your just starting off you may just want to stick w/ MFP's suggestion and EAT BACK your workout calories!! Once you lose some then I would start tweeking by fasting etc..... but its not necessary either! Good Luck!

You can do this ! When I started MFP I totally agree it all sounds over whelming when reading every body's comments. Like everyone has said you need to find whats right for you.It will take some time. Im doing what MFP has told me which is 1200 and eating back most of my exercise cal and its working. Im only mostly walking for exercise. Like someone said walk alittle to start and build up each week more time. This is a life change and you can do it. Please dont give up.

Re reading your post i think I see that you are in quite a tizz. I can recommend whatever mfp has set as your calorie goals. There's sound science behind it. There's a lot of other stuff out there with interesting mnemonics that may work but at the moment I think K.I.S. is best for you! (Keep It Simple).
So my advice is- do what Mfp says. Eat healthy. Eat back your exercise calories. Keep at the exercise. Drink the water!
:-)

https://www.facebook.com/groups/LowCarbLadyBug/ I belong to this group on facebook and find it very helpful. The women in the group are all low carb and can help you a lot.

http://www.fatfastrecipes.com/order-fat-fast-cookbook-by-dana-carpender/ Here is a book about fat fasting and the research behind it. It includes lots of good recipes. I recommend you read the book, choose the recipes and choose a 3 day period to do a fat fast. Then go to Atkins Induction Phase right afterward.

If you get into ketosis, you won't need to carb cycle. You may do a fat fast a couple times a month if needed to break a plateau.

Feel free to friend me here or message me. :smooched: You are doing great. Keep up the water aerobics and low carb.

dieting for me is an experiment all the time im usually on 1200 calories a day but if im hungry ill eat 1400 some days i barely eat 1000 im not hungry i wont eat .. people moan at me all the time as im aparently starving myself ... i dont really care thou as some days ill eat alot more and i think that over a week it works its self out. im not here for other peoples opinions im here to loose weight and sometimes get advice. my health has returned to normal now i dont have high blood pressure anymore. i think you just do whats right by you listen to you body x

One point: I absolutely agree with Paul that folks that have a bunch to lose can eat below their BMR successfully. You are carrying around thousands and thousands of calories worth of fat; your body is not going to "go into starvation mode" or have some of the ill effects that skinny folks can have if they did the same. I really get sick of folks saying "don't eat below your BMR" like it's gospel. It all depends on where you're at in your journey.

Ultimately, there is no one-size-fits-all diet. Each of us is unique in the amount of fat we want to lose, our food likes and dislikes, our personal activity levels, our wake/sleep schedules, the family units we are in (who we eat with), the way we respond to macro and micro nutrients, any food allergies we may have, etc... Some are lucky and can pick from any of the methods you listed and be wildly successful. Others pick one, only to find that it does not work for them. Some can be partially successful on one, only to find that eventually they plateau and have to change things up in order to get moving again.

I'd say the latter is you. So I guess my advice is: if what your doing is not working, change it! Don't get too hung up on what the experts say, the goal here ultimately should not be "how can I drop weight the fastest", it should be "how can I lose fat while eating in a way that's sustainable for me for the long run." Once you figure that out, this becomes habit and is just part of your regular activity.

Hey Sweetie, Hang in there. I have over 100# to lose. If you have already lost 18# since January you are doing something right! i have lost 16 #s.( I started Jan 2nd) I was discouraged last time I weighed, until I figured out that was 2+ pounds a week. :noway: Look around the groups & other people on here. Groups have several with "over 100" to lose. People? Some over 400#, need to lose 200+ . One of my friends has lost almost 200#s & still has another 100#s to go.Like others have said to you, you have to figure out what works for you. We are all different. Just don't give up!! Remember you are trying to change your lifestyle to something you can do for the rest of your life. Friend me if you like. I try to encourage my friends, but also am honest if I see something not so good. :flowerforyou:

I suggest eaiting a low glycemic diet. Limit sugary foods and junky carbs like candy, cookies, cakes, white bread, chips, etc. Ramp up your protein intake and if that is difficult for you add in a protein shake. Eggs for breakfast, cottage cheese for snack, chicken for lunch, greek yogurt for snack, another meat for dinner. Of course keep fresh veggies on hand to snack on all day and incorporate them into your meals. Even your eggs. Eat fruist as well. Berries, apples, oranges. Oh and nuts. Snack on unsalted almonds. Keep your water intake up. Constantly drinking when you think you are hungry. I eat about 1600 per day. work out 4-5 days per week and will eat back some of the calories I burn when working out. I started working out slowly. You will be amazed and how quickly our bodies adjust and bounce back once you start moving. You will go further and further each time and will feel great. Our mind will always give up before our body does!!! Good luck

You're getting caught up in the details. The starting point is logging everything you consume everyday. Do this for at least 8 weeks and then start making adjustments. The food log reveals a great deal of useful information.

How many calories are consumed during evening snacking?
What are some of the foods that I consistently eat that are dense with calories?
Are there substitutions that I can make that will lower the calories of a specific meal?

Hey, I am so inspired by your willingness to do your best here. I don't know how you're eating so few calories and aren't hungry! Try spacing out your calories. Eggs in the morning is a good start, bananas are great for you and have some calories to keep the number up higher. It's good to eat good foods, but don't force yourself at the end of the day. If your body needs more, it will let you know. Everyone is different, which is part of what makes this so hard!! I hope you find your balance and can lose what you need to lose.
I'm going to be a hypocrite and tell you to do as much exercise as you can, even if it is a short walk. You'll start being able to do more with every step! What I do is go to the local mall with my hubby. We walk the whole mall once, with minimal stopping or browsing. It gets me in a better mood for walking personally. You'll find your own way, and will get down to what you want to be. I believe we all have it in us to become the thinner healthier us! It's the motivation and vision that are the hard parts.

Work on your diet. Don't worry about exercise. Body composition is 80% diet (what you put in your mouth, not how much). The rest is a combo of exercise and genetics (walk. Do lots of walking. It doesn't have to be fast. As long as you are moving you are doing something). Just move. Be active.

He talks about calories here.

http://thatpaleoguy.com/2012/12/19/calorie-rants-and-ketosis-part-1/

http://thatpaleoguy.com/2012/12/24/calorie-rants-and-ketosis-part-2/

Although this might just confuse you even more.

So let us say that (because we can measure someone’s resting metabolic rate) they need 1200kcals to keep the lights and central heating going in their body, without adding any movement on top of this. And let us say that they are eating a minimum of 1200kcals to keep everything running. We would say they are in energy balance… calories in = calories out. But what happens if, say, the hormonal environment in our soft and squishy biological system causes 600 of those kcals to be pushed straight through to fat storage, locking that energy away nice and tight? On paper, calories in still balance calories out, by our mathematical equation. But something within our biological entity is causing half of those calories to be made unavailable.

And this is again the problem with the whole calories deal. We can’t accurately count them outside of our body, our bodies don’t count them at all, and a whole raft of hormonal and neurological factors determines where the “calories” go and whether they are actually available for biological functions. As I mentioned in part 1, the currencies our bodies do actually deal with are the likes of the saccharides, amino acids, and fatty acids, and these can be fed into various parts of your metabolic machinery to generate your main energy currency – ATP.

Conventional wisdom tends to hold and promote an overly simplistic view of things. This wisdom suggests, by way of analogy, that you need a certain amount of money (calories) to keep the power, heating, and water running in your body, to keep everything maintained, the grass growing, and to fuel occasional trips to the mall. You can make regular payments via the ATM deposit box in the middle of your face. If you run a fairly lean house, you are going to need to make deposits that come close to matching the cost of keeping everything running every day, having only a small savings account to draw on. If, however, you insist on stuffing wads of cash in your face hole, some of it will be used to keep the utilities paid off and running, and the surplus will automatically spill over into your savings account. If your savings account is getting too fat and you need to run it down or suffer some serious withholding tax penalties, then conventional wisdom holds that you make fewer deposits via the face and do more circuits of the mall via the legs. And because you are now spending more than you are depositing, the difference can be funded from savings.

This model assumes that you have a way of depositing only one currency – calories (calories are all that counts), spending only one currency (calories fuelling metabolic processes) and have only two accounts to balance – your day-to-day cheque account (for metabolism to immediately draw on), and your savings account (fat storage). But what if the model actually worked more like this…

You need to make daily deposits to keep everything running. But instead of paying for everything with one currency, the different processes actually require different currencies. Some processes require the currency of glucose, whilst others require the currency of fatty acids. Some processes prefer one currency over the other, but will ultimately accept both, though perhaps with a few fees and transaction penalties for you paying with one instead of the other. Some processes, such as growth, maintenance, and repair require more of the amino acid currency than anything else, and indeed, if you don’t put enough of this currency in, things start to get a bit run down and you end up robbing Peter to pay Paul.

It is possible to deposit too much of any of the currencies, but with some of the currencies being worth more than others, and with economic conditions at the time dictating that one might be of more value than other, this is a highly variable thing. If you, for example, continually flood the market with glucose, it soon isn’t worth that much. So best to save some of it to smaller accounts in your liver and muscles, and then convert much of the excess to a different currency altogether and to lock that into a term deposit – you can get it back when economic conditions improve.

Other currencies, even if they appear to have the same face value, such as glucose and fructose, actually hold completely different values in different markets (a bit like $10AUD vs. $10NZD). They look similar, but in reality, it is actually best to get a whole wad of the fructose and convert to a more valuable currency – like fatty acids (for a fee and penalty for flooding the market with a weak currency). Of course, if you are flooding the market with a currency that is better just to be converted and spent, then there isn’t much point in pulling more of the same currency out of savings.

You could play around with this analogy forever. But the bottom line is that your body runs multiple accounts, deals in multiple currencies, has term deposits, and won’t release savings unless the economic environment is right to do so. You can easily have a situation where some accounts and currencies are spent and running on overdraft, but the body just won’t release savings/term deposits because it isn’t right to do so.

When someone suggests that “calories count”, before reaching for your calorie tables and calculator, ask yourself where calories come… ask yourself how you get calories into your body. Obviously, you get them from eating food (and if you don’t believe me, try to go to the supermarket and buy a packet, tin, box, or bag of “calories” – you can’t do it). Calories don’t count, but the food currencies you eat, and the “economic environment” that they, your sleep and activity patterns, stress levels, etc. create, do count. People like Robb and others are quite right in suggesting that it isn’t all about the carbohydrates on the plate… that you can’t just eat low carb and get a free pass on everything else… that you can’t eat sources of fat and protein with impunity. But we do the subject an injustice, we confuse people, and we are perhaps being a little intellectually dishonest, when we short-hand the proteins, fats, and alcohol to “calories count”. It might be me being pedantic and arguing semantics, but I have seen how people interpret “calories” and the numbers they start tracking.

Because so many non-food factors influence your “economic environment” (e.g. hormones), counting calories and simply trying to balance energy in and energy out equations, sees people missing the larger (and perhaps more important) qualitative picture. You could have the calorie numbers squared away, but not be sleeping, walking, getting out in the sun, maintaining healthy relationships, being engaged in something that mentally stimulates you, not getting out in natural environments, be an angsty ball of stress, and so on, and you will not be getting the results you want to see in terms of how you look, feel and perform, and the answer is most certainly not to screw the calorie equation down even tighter.

I can really sympathize! I have about 100 to lose and it is utterly daunting. Like you I see SO many options out there and I feel overwhelmed with making the right choices.

Thinking about it as I read your thread, I realize that this is some of the same "stinking thinking" that got me where I am today. I had to do it "right". I had to figure out the very best, most optimal diet plan bar none. For years this has kept me from doing anything. After all we all know the saying, "If you can't do something right, don't do it at all."

This is only my second day, so I have limited experience (this time around), but who cares how it's done? Who cares if I lose 35lbs. in the time when I "should" lose 40? At this point either number would delight me!

My "plan" is to start out by learning. I am going to use the MFP built-in calorie plan and combine it with the use of "Striv", a fun and free app I found here yesterday that tracks my walking and rewards me with coins and energy to play a fun, but silly, little game. Best of all, it keeps up with my total steps all day, so the extra effort of parking further away from the store is rewarded.

I plan to diet just one day at a time and to stick with it no matter what! I will do this for as long as it's working for me and adjust as I need to because the simple truth is that there is no perfect way to get there. I will value each single pound lost because it's a victory against weight gain and I will greedily sop up all of the support I can get!

Stay tuned!