starsandowls Member

Because it was easier. Because I had an untreated (now diagnosed and medicated) thyroid disorder that sapped my energy to the point where dragging myself through the day was all I could manage. But mostly because it was easier. It's not just the prevalence of fast food; it's also that my husband wanted different food than…

Greek yogurt and frozen berries, a poached egg, and half an English muffin with a little butter (and coffee!) keeps me going. Sometimes I'll substitute a banana or other fruit for the yogurt and berries, or bacon for the egg and oatmeal for the English muffin. Breakfasts usually comes in around 400. I try to make my…

I suspect there aren't many families where everyone in the family has the same nutritional requirements. My college boyfriend was tall, slim, and athletic. Eating like he did definitely caused me some weight gain! I graduated from college many years ago, so that can't be my excuse anymore, but it definitely happens. When I…

It's probably mostly water. If you ate a lot of salt, were at that very special time in your cycle, and maybe started building some muscle, that could account for a lot of water weight. I did that DVD a few times, years ago. There's the possibility of doing some decent strength training in there. You might want to do it…

The "in five weeks" statements are sometimes funny and mostly just silly, a bit like reading your horoscope. If you just started exercising, that may be part of the weight gain. Are your measurements changing? Without getting into the pitched battle between people with strict diets that are low/high some macro and the…

My toddler has cellulite. She has since she was born. She's not one of those weird Jaba the Hut fast food addict babies that you see in tabloids; she doesn't have much body fat on her, eats healthy food, and is very active. She still has cellulite. It's a genetic fact of life. When I saw that my baby had an orange peel…

Yes, unprocessed is generally better. A lot of processed foods have things in them that wouldn't be there if you made them yourself. I really have no idea how much I buy into the idea of silent inflammation and chronic inflammation as something that all stressed people have. I just know that I have more energy and vitality…

I suspect I've been hypothyroid since I was a teenager, but I wasn't diagnosed until I was 38. My thyroid has been under suspicion since I was 15, and my TSH always tested bang on 4.0, and it was only when it got to 4.43 that a doctor was willing to prescribe synthroid. None of the doctors who tested it would say, "Hmm,…

I try to avoid inflammatory foods. It's not particularly exciting and has no fancy name. I just learned what foods are anti-inflammatory and which are more inflammatory, and I try to stick with the anti-inflammatory foods. nutritiondata.self.com (which is what all the MFP non-starred items seem to be based on) tells you…

I have back problems: scoliosis, spinal fusion, degenerative disc disease (herniated discs and osteoarthritis). I get horrible back spasms if I don't do yoga. Things that are awesome for me are downward dog (oh, so much downward dog), cat/cow, utkatasana, spinal twists, happy baby, and eye of the needle. Savasana is…

I've had at least one day where all my macros were red and I still had calories to eat. Not sure what MFP thought I'd be consuming at that point! I largely ignore the macros on a micro-managing level. I mostly eat foods I prepare myself, that I weigh, that come from fresh produce, fresh meat and dairy, and sacks of whole…

If the information is available, I try to plan my meal exactly. If just a menu is available, I look it over ahead of time. If there's no nutritional info available, I just order salad and white fish, drink a lot of water, and hope for the best. The bloat from so much salt in restaurant food kills me more than the sauces.

South Beach. It's a lot less extreme, and you'd have to be a professional eating contest winner to shove down enough fiber on the Paleo diet without drinking gallons of Metamucil. Honestly, though, there is no magic diet plan that's going to be better than good old fashioned nutrition control and exercise. South Beach will…

I think getting a scale and a heartrate monitor might help, but you might want to see if you can get a test for your metabolic rate, too. I disagree with previous posters regarding the average exercise burn; the classes you're talking about are not a walk in the park. I can believe that the barre class burns 600 calories.…

Neat. I tried all three body fat calculators on that site, and apparently, my lean body mass is somewhere between 89.7 lb (military) and 146.4 lb (the one labelled "body fat")! The third gave me 128 lb lean body mass. For my height, "overweight" begins at 125, and while I am trying, in a subtle way, to build lean muscle…

Check your measurements, or if you've still got them, try putting on a pair of jeans you haven't been able to wear in a little while because you were too big. I had a period of being really, really frustrated. I'd only lost 3 pounds, but I'd lost 2" from my waist and 1 1/2" from my hips, and the measuring made me happy. I…

Are you having a lot of fake sweets, like aspartame and splenda and saccharine? I'm not certain what they're marketed as over there. I find that I lose more consistently when I avoid fake sugars, and it makes it easier to drink the water if I haven't filled up on diet Coke. Are you getting enough sleep? How confident are…

Interesting. My primary care physician didn't want to give me synthroid when I was at 4.43 because he said the number used to be 5.0, with a certain tone. He gave me some synthroid because my mother has hypo, but there was a lot of tone implying, "You don't really need this." When it stopped being so awesome (constipation,…

The studio I go to has two rooms. The larger can fit about 28 people, and my favorite class usually gets 20+ people and sometimes maxes out the room.. Some people have favorite spots, and I get that, but what drives me nuts is when there are about 10 or so people who started putting their mats in a pretty tight 4x7 grid so…