maillemaker Member

For me, "eating whatever the heck I want" and "moderation" are at direct odds with one another. Because what I want to eat never fits within my allotted calorie limits. Thus it always boils down to what I get to eat, now what I want to eat. Eating whatever the heck I want is how I got fat to begin with.

I don't see how exercise helps though. If you have to eat X calories to lose Y amount of weight each week, and you exercise and eat it back, you're back to the same X calories. So why go through the discomfort of exercise on top of it just to end up where you started?

MFP has me at 1570 for a 2-pound-per-week loss. I am averaging .8 pounds per week over 12 weeks.

I don't see how a pancake could *be* a pancake without flour and water, but to suggest that ingredients have no impact on calories is silly.

MFP is notoriously over-generous for calories allotted for any given exercise.

http://themilitarydiet.com/military-diet-plan/ Looks like a very low calorie diet.

SCREEEEECH! That's not a doctor. Full stop.

Man that's a depressing read.

There's going to be a lot of people here telling you that you shouldn't be hungry when losing weight. I'm not one of them. Sadly, it's part of weight loss. I think it's true for most people, and it's why most people fail at weight loss - they simply cannot sustain the discomfort of the hunger long-term. I can always tell…

The size of my moobs.

This has never been the case for me. If I'm losing weight, I'm hungry. I think this is an artifact of lowered fat levels, not what you are eating, though eating fats and proteins can help with hunger to a limited extent. Can't match drugs though.

Well, there is currently no drug available that you can take forever, so no. But it remains to be seen who is right. One camp says that when you get to maintenance you won't be hungry anymore since you have learned all your great eating habits over the months and years it took you to get there. Another camp says that your…

I agree 100%. We live in a calorie-surplus environment. If you just eat to satiety the commonly-available foods that you find tasty and convenient, you are almost guaranteed to eat a surplus. We should be counting calories from a young age before we get overweight.

If I were to make a fool of myself by running around the grocery store hitting myself with a loaf of bread or wearing underpants as a hat, this would be hugely embarrassing to me, so I don't do it. Basically, there are immediate negative repercussions for that behavior. If I eat a donut I'm not supposed to, no one gives a…

Yup, and that's the bottom line. Regardless of whether your metabolism is slowing down or not, if you aren't losing, you are going to have to cut down on the calories even more. Or exercise more. If you're fat, you really don't have to worry about any kind of "starvation mode".

This was already answered, but I suspect that there is a limit to how much conservation the body can do regardless of how much you weigh. And as was answered, the Starvation Experiment seems to corroborate that idea. I suspect most people probably chalk up the discrepancy to inaccurate logging. I've never hit the…

According to the study, that is what they demonstrated in the laboratory, with people who evidently did not exercise to offset the effect.

Agree 100%. Disagree partially. The metabolic rate drop does seem to be related to lowered levels of Leptin. But the lowered levels of Leptin are a result of lowered levels of body fat. Body fat produces Leptin. Your body detects the lowered Leptin levels and responds in a defensive manner in an attempt to restore the fat…

Great study find. That seems to indicate that resistance training might counter the metabolic slowdown caused by weight loss. This makes sense. If your body is not having to work and you cut calories, it's just going to slow down to try and preserve its fat stores. But if it has to work, it can't do that to the muscles.

Well, the study did not study the metabolic effects of weight loss on people who were exercising. They just saw (as I read it) that increased power output seemed to mitigate the increase in GME. "Maintenance of a body weight 10% below Wtinitial was associated with significant increases in skeletal muscle GME to generate 10…

The study indicates that heavy exercise may mitigate the metabolism slow-down.

It doesn't sound significant, until you don't pay attention to it and eat those 250-300 calories that you think you ought to be able to eat based on your weight and discover that you're consuming a 10% surplus. Just a 3% surplus over a few years can result in several pounds of weight gain. On my 1570 calorie-a-day…

I am not "telling people why they will fail." This is a discussion about the metabolic consequences of weight loss and exercise. I am providing scientific citations about the metabolic consequences of weight loss. Weight loss of 10% results in about a 10%-15% reduction in metabolism beyond what is accounted for by the…

I am down 28 pounds from my maximum of 291 pounds on 8/24/2014. However, I am now about where I was this time last year (MFP charts on PC only goes back one year). Last year I lost 30 pounds and gained it all back. Since August I have lost it again.

I re-started dieting on 2/18. I started weighing on 2/28 with my new scale. I was 272.1 pounds on 2/28. I am currently 261.4, for a loss of 10.7 pounds over 13 weeks, or approximately .82 pounds per week. The best I have ever achieved was 1.2 pounds per week. I have MFP set at a 2-pound-per-week loss, and it has me at 1570…

The entire paper is here: http://ajpregu.physiology.org/content/285/1/R183

All I know is that scientists in more than one study say that a 10% reduction in weight results in about a 20% increase in skeletal muscle efficiency and about a 10%-15% reduction in overall metabolism. So if you previously needed 2100 calories to maintain, if you lost 10% of your weight you would need 10%-15% less…

Are we looking at the same graph? I have lost weight.

Another relevant study: http://ajpregu.physiology.org/content/285/1/R183 "Effects of Weight Change on Skeletal Muscle Work Efficiency Maintenance of a body weight 10% below Wtinitial was associated with significant increases in skeletal muscle GME to generate 10 and 25 W, but not 50 W, of power. The percent increase in GME…

See the 38:38 point of this video: http://videocast.nih.gov/summary.asp?live=2993&bhcp=20 By the way, this is a co-author of the study cited above.