rankinsect Member

Some of my favorite custom beat saber maps: Du Hast - Rammstein (a great song and a great map) Boulevard of Broken Dreams - Green Day Gagnam Style - Psy (does an excellent job of incorporating the iconic dance moves) The Final Countdown - Europe Honorable Mentions: Macarena - Los Del Rio (also does a good job incorporating…

Yeah, I pretty much need to, as I tend to drift upward in weight over time (by about a pound a month) if I don't.

As mentioned, it's water weight. Your body can store energy in two ways - glycogen (a type of carbohydrate somewhat functionally akin to plant starch) and fat. It prefers to store carbohydrates as glycogen, because it's more energetically favorable versus synthesizing and later breaking down fat. Your body stores glycogen…

Well, some tips from someone who was in the same boat. Some of these were covered already: 1. There are tons of great meals (soups, stews, sauces, sandwiches, etc.) that include veggies along with other things that may make it more palatable. I admit I rarely eat just plain veggies, as I think they're often a little…

I often just use stereotypical calorie measurements for foods that have a low calorie density, like many veggies. If I cook with three stalks of celery, it's getting logged as 18 calories, I'm not going to bother weighing as it's just not worth it - all food has some degree of imprecision in calorie counts, I won't sweat…

Using a food scale isn't different from using measuring cups. My main uses: 1. I'll prelog a food and then weigh out that amount. If it's a bit off, I don't sweat it, but it gives me an accurate portion to aim for. Particularly with high calorie foods like ice cream, it's a lot more accurate to weigh it out versus try to…

I want to not just count calories, I also want to make calories count. I actually eat a whole lot less prepackaged food or fast food in favor of more homecooked meals, not just to eat healthier, but because I find I can often make a tastier and more filling alternative for the same calorie count.

Just had the leftovers from yesterday's lasanga dinner - entirely homemade, including homemade noodles. I've been getting a lot of use out of my new pasta maker from Christmas.

Eh, I certainly have a fair amount of loose skin (the guy in that post looks better than I do), and I certainly don't regret any part of losing the weight. I still look so much better than when I was over 300, and I feel so much better as well just in everyday life. Would it be nice if I had no loose skin? Sure, but that's…

I always liked eating pieces of any kind of salty sausage (like summer sausage) using yogurt as a dip. Adds some sweetness and tanginess to a savory treat.

Why bother? I can't imagine it would be anything less than god awful, and if you want to eat cayenne for some reason, there are plenty of great dishes. Heck, even if you wanted JUST cayenne, then buy the whole peppers and sautee or roast them or something, they'll be a lot tastier than pepper water.

Under FDA regulations, "good source" or "contains" are used for foods that contain between 10-19% of the daily value for that nutrient, and "excellent source" for those that are 20% or higher. For protein, that's only 5g for "good source" and 10g for "excellent source" since the "daily value" is 50g for a 2000 calorie…

The real thing is not to accept anybody's statements as fact, but apply critical thinking (which it sounds like you are, as you're questioning what you've been told). One good thought exercise is to imagine that the statement is true, and then see what else would happen as a result of that statement being true. For…

If you roll all the way to 1/8" thick and cut in fairly small cookies, you could easily get 3-4 dozen crispy cookies, although it depends a lot on the shapes of the cookie cutters and how thin you roll. I often make thicker cookies (1/4" or even 3/8" for very chewy cookies) so I get fewer but chewier cookies.

Mostly, you need to consider your personal health situation. Sugar can be problematic for diabetics. For others, sugary foods are often less filling for their calories than more savory foods, so you might (or might not) find it harder to stick to your goals. Sodium can be bad in a certain set of people with hypertension.…

Here's my favorite. I make a lot of these and give them, along with sugar cookies, out for the holidays. As is traditional, I just pipe the frosting to make the outlines & features on whatever shape, rather than cover the entire top of the cookie. The frosting recipe makes a lot of frosting - more than is needed for one…

True, but accuracy over time is more important than accuracy on any given day. One slice may vary a lot, but over time when you've eaten 50 slices or 100 slices, the total calories you've eaten of bread are very, very close to 50 or 100 times the "per slice" calories. That's true even if you're sharing the bread, as long…

Necessary? No. It's a powerful tool, however, and one that can increase the odds of success, and the degree of success that you reach. Calorie counting is to weight management what household budgeting is to financial management. Some people can be very financially stable without a planned budget, while others need a lot of…

Well, significant dietary changes often cause some short-term gastrointestinal problems. That's not too unusual. Overall, though, I would recommend greatly increasing the breadth of foods you eat. It's really not very healthy to eat exactly the same thing every day, even if the individual pieces of that meal are typically…

How healthy it is depends pretty greatly on what one wants to eat. I'm a pretty firm believer that as long as you eat a good variety of different foods and you don't have any specific health issues causing you to need to pay particular attention to some aspect of your diet, nutrition tends to largely work itself out.

I don't use the app, but I actually have been tracking this myself, inspired by the Eowyn Challenge that started this all several years ago. I track all my intentional walking via MapMyFitness and check my "lifetime stats" at the end of each month. I took the bulletin board in my office, bought a "cloth" map of Middle…

Also, if you do a lot of bread baking, I love my breadbox and slicing guide (Amazon) - it's a convenient place to keep a loaf of bread, and I can cut uniform slices every time, which means I skip weighing and just log based on the # of slices per loaf, which is always the same as long as I use the same size loaf pan, as…

There are lots of tricks to making it easier to log: 1. Know where you need to be precise and where you don't. A medium-sized onion is typically just under 50 calories. Just log it as 50 if you use a whole one. Even if you're off by 20%, that's only 10 calories, which is basically rounding error. On the other hand, butter…

When I did Kilimanjaro in February, most of the mountain was pretty energizing for me (I'd trained a lot and thankfully I tolerated the altitude quite well) but summit night was rough like that. By that altitude, the lack of oxygen just saps your energy like crazy, and you wake up at midnight for about eight hours of…

I would argue the opposite, though. By restricting DDT use in agriculture, DDT remains effective against mosquitoes for longer periods of time, because it slows the acquisition of DDT resistance in mosquito populations. Overuse of pesticides greatly shortens the time to acquire for the pest population to acquire immunity,…

Yes, I notice this as well when I am in too much of a deficit in winter. There's a very noticeable difference between days I eat at maintenance and days I eat in a deficit, particularly noticeable in terms of how many blankets I use when in bed. Last winter I basically took a maintenance break all winter long because it…

While in theory probiotics could be useful - the gut microbiome is very important - there's really no evidence yet that the actual products being marketed are even the right species of organism, or that they can successfully colonize the intestinal tract. Most organisms that can thrive in food (the fermenters, etc) are not…

Well, it's easy for me since I think McDonald's is pretty bad, but when I go to a Five Guys, I order the hamburger. And the milk shake. And plan all my other meals around having so many calories at once, so I can still meet my goals.

I don't think it's so easy to point blame at any one factor. I was an obese child starting from around age 8 or 9, and pretty much everything that people blame wasn't true in my case: * Neither of my parents was obese. My dad had been overweight as a child but was a tall and thin adult, my mom was on the higher end of a…