MontyMuttland Member

If Calories were not created equal they'd be pretty useless as a measurement of energy... just saying. But it gives some of those people in the Fat-Denial camp a great excuse to say they don't understand how they never lose weight when they "hardly eat anything". It must be all those "unequal" calories they consume...

I work in a supermarket here in the UK, most often on the kiosk where I'm ringing through the contents of people's shopping baskets. The trend in the UK is definitely upwards and outwards if my experience of what people are buying and how they look is anything to go by. Whereas a few years ago folks would be buying one…

The UKs published expenditure in the NHS to treat obesity and the projected figures indicate that the impact of people needing medical attention due to obesity-related illness is less than paying pensions into old age as many will die much younger due to their lifestyle and therefore cost the government less in the long…

I may be guilty of making assumptions, but I expect there is a fair chance I've been where the OP is, going by her profile photo. It reminded me of this (left photo): The left photo is my wife and I back in September 2015 when we were rather over-fat, which we'd been our entire adult lives. The right photo is us in April…

It's difficult to say this without someone getting offended, but the bottom line about being overweight is that you eat too much. How much time you have to spare for this and that is not the key thing, it's what you put in your mouth and how much of it. One simple fact, it takes no time at all to not eat something, Not…

There is no way to target specific areas of your body when reducing body fat, it gets burned from wherever it happens to be throughout your body. You need to burn more calories each day than you consume to ensure your body will burn some fat. The most effective way to achieve that is to reduce how much you eat and keeping…

Activity monitors that you wear on your wrist are well known for making poor calculations of your calorie burn during exercise. As an example, I'm about to send back my latest device (a Garmin Vivosmart HR+) which consistently awards me more than double the calories it should for every exercise recorded, despite displaying…

I've been on maintenance for a little over 6 months having lost around 9 stone before that. It's been the first time in my whole adult life that I've not only got rid of my excess weight but been able to maintain at a healthy weight. In my case certainly, my continued success is down to logging everything that I consume so…

Neither. Normally I'd say your activity monitor should give a more accurate measurement, but your Fitbit is clearly telling you a bunch of gaga. It can happen that you get a bad one when you buy an activity monitor. I've no specific experience with Fitbits, though I've seen complaints elsewhere on forum posts about poor…

Of the handful of devices I've had so far, the ones with a HR monitor could all be turned on and off at will, however the only good reason to switch it off would be to save power if it's going to be awhile before you get to recharge. The reason for keeping the HR on is simple, it allows the device to make a better…

We're all different, so yes is the basic answer to what you're asking. If you put 100 people together all the same sex, age, weight & height then fed them exactly the same food for a week and had them do exactly the same amount of activity, at the end of the week they would not all still weigh the same. However, if you…

Yep, totally... I must have missed all those diets out there that include cheat meals/days/etc in them!

I haven't decided the parameters of anything - commitment is a word with a definition that you can look up if you're not sure of the meaning. I said "IF you've committed..." If you haven't committed to it, then you can't expect much. Do half a job, expect half a result. Suck it up or stay fat.

I often serve at the kiosk in the supermarket where I work and it saddens me how often I see ladies fresh out from their sessions in the gym buying their post-workout snacks consisting mainly of chocolate and full sugar energy drinks. They don't realise they are about to consume more calories just in that snack than they…

If you've committed yourself to a diet plan in order to lose weight and you decide to throw it aside for one meal/one day/whatever, then you have cheated on the diet plan, it's really that simple. Call a spade a spade, why hide from what you're doing? Do you want someone to congratulate you for failing to stick to your…

I have months of test data stored on Garmin Connect. I'm also doing 1800+ steps per mile, accurately recorded at 3mph. However, once my pace exceeds 4mph it drops to around 1000+ steps recorded per mile. When I became aware of the issue at the start of this year whilst using a Forerunner 35, I contacted Garmin about it and…

Please feel free to test it out as I've described it, it's 100% repeatable on the Forerunner 35 and VivoactiveHR. Walk for 1 mile at a sustained walking pace around 3mph, checking total step count before and after so you can calculate how many steps the device records for the activity. Then walk the same mile back again at…

I should have worded my post better. You (and others) are right to point out I've denied the existence of density the way I wrote it, which is pretty dumb. I was trying to make the point that in the context of healthy living and weight-loss it's not good to interchange weight and volume. For example, "weighing" foods by…

I was using Garmin devices but fell out of love with them because of poor step tracking accuracy. Walking is my main activity, but most of it I do at a sustained walking speed of 4-4.5mph. At speeds above 3.5mph the Garmin devices I've used begin dropping steps, getting worse as you go faster. Typically at 4.2mph only 55%…

This is good advice right there. Remember that MFP calorie calculations are based on averages, and the same is true of anything that is working out your calorie burn from exercise, so you may do better or worse than the figures you see. Using an activity monitor with a heart rate monitor will give better calorie burn…

This is starting to wander outside the realms of reality. In trying to simplify the science to explain that it's going to be difficult gaining muscle whilst in a daily calorie deficit, it still needs to be factually correct. A calorie deficit in this context means providing the body with less energy from metabolising food…

Firstly I need to apologise for going off-topic in this thread. The information I wrote was in reply to the various mentions of "1200 calorie diets" in people's responses. It was also posted as information, not intended as bait for someone to chomp on. My wife is a little person, as in she is quite short. But she was also…

Just for information, there's actually a background reason why the 1200 calorie daily limit keeps popping up on topics on MFP and it affects a large number of people. The lowest daily calorie intake MFP will calculate for a female is 1200 calories. Or if you prefer, it's capped at 1200 minimum. My wife is in this…

I'm not too sure what the "pts" are either, though I'm guessing it's some kind of scale of measurement associated with whatever device/method is being used to give estimates of muscle and fat in the OPs body. Regardless of this, a gain in muscle (+5pts) along with a loss in body fat (-5pts) sounds totally reasonable when…

No, no, no no no, nonononononono, nooooooooooo !! There is no such thing as weight by volume. These are two totally different measurements. Weight is a measure of how heavy something is. Volume is a measure of how much space something takes up. They are not the same thing. They are not interchangeable. A kilo of fat weighs…

The pizza topic comes up on this forum pretty regularly and there's always a division of opinion about how good or otherwise pizza is for you, often with complaints about people demonising pizza as some kind of anti-food. The point that nobody can dispute is that if you eat a quantity of pizza that is within your daily…

I haven't eaten pizza in over a year and a half. I spent a whole year losing 9 stone of fat off my body, so eating calorie-dense food like pizza just doesn't fit with the changes in eating habits I've made.

There are lots of very vocal and nonetheless well-intentioned people on MPF who will happily give nutritional advice that is sadly not backed up by scientific fact, Hearsay, myth and pseudoscience prevail in the face of logic and fact. People who quote facts in forum topics are often shouted down by those same…

Possibly the least helpful advice I've read so far on this forum! All the calculations done for you on MFP are based on averages, actual values (and therefore results) will vary to lesser or greater extents from one person to the next. Once you are in maintenance, you should, on average, be ok eating back exercise…

Over the course of the year it took me to lose 9 stone, I never once had a cheat day. Eating too much was what made me fat in the first place and kept me fat for most of my adult life and I really didn't (don't) want to be fat anymore. A cheat day is essentially an excuse to eat too much. Whichever way you cut it and…