vingogly Member

I highly recommend a trending app for the many people who see fluctuation in their weight and get discouraged by it. I'm also a happy user of Happy Scale.

A cognitive therapist can teach you a variety of relaxation technique to manage the anxiety. Anxiety is very treatable - which is preferable to taking addictive medications. By the way, drinking alcohol, caffeine, and nicotine are all bad for the anxiety. With alcohol, you can get a rebound after the sedative effect wears…

It's the time of year for pears and apples. I tried Opal apples last year, and loved them - they're a Golden Delicious hybrid with a more complex flavor and none of the "sponginess" you get with the Golden Delicious. Pacific Rose are also high on my list. Fresh figs come into season in late fall. Grapes, of course - I…

If I'm trying to lose weight, as a general rule of thumb I minimize the number of meals eaten out where I don't have the nutritional info from the company or from MFP. If I'm in maintenance, it isn't much of a concern. Best you can do without nutritional information is approximate based on other items with known…

I find using a weight trending app on my iPhone useful for monitoring my weight. It smooths out the daily up and down noise in my weight. What you're aiming at is a flat trend curve over time, and you can add calories until you see the curve flattening out - then stay there. The app I use is Happy Scale which is available…

There are zero posts in the thread accusing the OP of being stupid for asking beginner questions. There are a lot of posts accusing the people who gave the OP bad advice of being stupid. Some of them try to use a bit of humor to make the point.

I have a 16 oz. coffee every day, usually hot but sometimes iced. I have it with half and half (called half cream in the UK), and sweetened with stevia. 3 Tb of half and half is about 60 calories. It's worth the 60 calories to me. Iced coffee is served unsweetened at my local Starbucks unless you ask for syrup. I bring my…

Put some on a plate, add a couple slices of avocado, sprinkle with capers, add some chopped onion (I like pickled onions), chop some hard-boiled egg on it, and sprinkle with a good quality vinegar. Eat with a few cornichons (or your favorite pickle) on the side.

You have to eat fruit between 8:47am and 1:23pm, else you'll gain all the weight you've lost back again, and then some. Seriously, find more intelligent people to hang out with or stop listening to the advice of friends (and MFPers) who are idiots. When you eat a particular food has nothing at all to do with weight loss

You don't have to go to a keto diet to lose weight. Why make things difficult for yourself? Make it difficult enough, you'll start resenting the limitations and planning and next thing you know, you'll be putting the pounds back on again.

I'll also mention the Beck Diet Solution, which is a cognitive-behavioral approach to dealing with the behavioral aspects of weight loss and maintenance. There's also Mindful Eating, which is similar to Intuitive Eating. Some links to each of these approaches for the OP: http://diet.beckinstitute.org/…

Something else to consider - a weight trending app will smooth out the day-to-day "noise" in your weight data. It's highly unlikely you actually gained 6 lbs over the course of a week - that would mean a daily excess of 3000 calories PER DAY over maintenance (3500 calories per pound). A trending app smooths out the daily…

Chain restaurants usually offer nutritional information for their meals, which is probably somewhat inaccurate but better than nothing. Independent restaurants are worse, because you don't know what you're getting. This article mentions a research project that found a serving of tandoori chicken at Indian restaurants…

I use what we call half & half in my coffee here in the states (10-12% butterfat). Every Starbucks has half and half, as well as every non-chain coffee outfit I've gone to. Dunkin Donuts doesn't have half and half, but I believe McDonalds still does. Most of the breakfast places around here offer half and half, or 2% milk.…

There are other sources of protein that he can add other than meat and eggs. The other thing he might tweak is fat - if he's going very low fat, increasing the grams of fat might help. I find that if I am heavy on the carb side and low on the protein/fat side, I tend to experience more hunger during the day. He might also…

You might want to ask yourself if this is a circle of friends who will help you reach your healthy goals, or hinder you. They sound like a bunch of immature people with serious alcohol problems.

A problem with over the counter meds like St Johns Wort is, the dosage isn't consistent. When you get a medication from a doctor, the amount of drug in a dose is controlled and monitored. You have no such guarantee with something like St Johns Wort. Absolutely let your doctor know about your taking it, because it is a…

I've had problems on and off with gout over the past 30 years. I read about tart cherry juice for reducing the symptoms of gout. I've been taking two caps of tart cherry extract every morning (about 800mg) - since I started doing so, I haven't had any major attacks and whatever pain I've had has been minor. My doctor was…

Tilapia is low in mercury, I personally don't worry about eating fish that are on the low end. Farmed fish tend to be higher in fat because of the diets they're fed but they're not "bad" for you unless you listen to looney tunes like Mercola. Wild fish in my opinion do tend to taste better. Here's a list of the best and…

Be sure to get a scale with a tare button; it zeros out the scale when you put a container on it. I use it like this: put a bowl or plate on the scale, press tare to zero it out, put in the food. If I have something else to add, tare again and add the additional item. I use gram measurements for the best accuracy. Once you…

Never heard of Mark Patrick, and as far as I can see from his site he's a "hypnotist to the stars" with no formal certification. He seems to be most interested in selling his materials online. Hypnosis works to a greater or lesser degree for about 90% of people, but the other 10% can't experience hypnotic induction. In a…

Cutting a food you love out of your life works great as a strategy until you can't stand feeling deprived any more and go out and eat a ton of it. Here's how I've handled maintenance: I love ice cream. Not ice milk, or that Halo stuff - real, full fat, high calorie ice cream. I don't keep it in the house (I know myself),…

I was diagnosed with atrial fibrillation in September 2000. I'm going on 18 years living with it. I've been on coumadin most of this time - the cardiologist had me on aspirin for a while but switched to coumadin based on newer research. Main problems I experience is occasional shortness of breath and chest pain; it comes…

What I've found the last few years in maintenance is that I need to keep track of what I eat, even if I'm not monitoring calorie intake - and I need to weigh myself periodically. If I don't, the weight can slowly creep up over time if I let myself return to my old eating habits. What I've done is made an oath to myself…

Look up the data for the individual ingredients in the database and add them to the meal. As a rule of thumb, four ounces of meat or fish is about the size of a deck of cards; a serving of vegetables, grains, beans, or fruit is usually about a half cup; a serving of pasta is about a cup (ball up your fist, that's close…

It all adds up; a protein source is a protein source, and at the end of the day it doesn't matter whether you're getting X grams of protein from one source or from ten different sources spread throughout the day. I don't believe there is an official level of percent protein caloric content required to state that something…

Pickapeppa sauce (Jamaican), Peri Peri sauce (Portuguese/African) are two spicy hot sauces that are among my favorites. Chimichurri sauce (Argentina) is mild, and great with grilled foods. Aji sauce (Peru) ranges from mild to hot, comes in various colors, and is great with chicken and on sandwiches.

Quinoa, buckwheat, amaranth also have a decent amount of protein in them. Plus, other seeds beside hemp, nuts, and other legumes not listed above.

Beck Diet Solution was designed by Dr. Judith Beck, daughter of Dr. Aaron Beck who invented cognitive behavioral therapy. There's a book available, a workbook, and a lot of free resources and information on the site. http://diet.beckinstitute.org/ Another site with good articles and resources (this by Dr. Judith Beck's…

You might focus on maintenance and your college studies. If you're not doing so, you could start doing some strength training. I've gone in and out of maintenance twice over past several years, now I'm back focusing on losing the rest of what I want to lose. What this has done for me is provide practice on maintaining my…