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05-06-16, 12:44 PM

#713

Heathpack

Has a magic bike

Join Date: Aug 2013

Location: Los Angeles

Posts: 12,590

Bikes: 2018 Scott Spark, 2015 Fuji Norcom Straight, 2014 BMC GF01, 2013 Trek Madone

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Quote:

Originally Posted by Bah Humbug

I don't do beer, but yeah, I miss delicious cereal. Or even any boxed cold cereal. Switching from an Oatmega or Nature's Bakery bar to a Kind bar before morning workouts helped. Cutting the starch out of dinner (except after a late afternoon workout) helped. Switching my scrambled eggs from using rice for texture to shredded Brussels sprouts helped. All these lots of little things matter, and once I did enough of them (and committed to sticking with it for longer than a week), weight started coming down and hasn't stopped. But if I'm hungry, dammit I eat. Had a midnight snack the other night because I woke up with a growling stomach at 2am and wasn't going back to sleep like that.

This is exactly the right approach IMO: make lots of little painless changes, eat when you're hungry (of course the right things and in reasonable portions) but don't panic over it, watch the surprising calorie bombs (big portions of starch with dinner), drop or minimize empty calories like beer, exercise in enough volume to make a difference.

I hate articles like that NYT articles because they summarize all these studies that look at 1 isolated thing- like adding brussel sprouts to your eggs- and they see that people who ONLY do that thing don't lose weight. Therefore things like that don't help. Duh. It's the cumulative effect of multiple different things and the ideal combo of things is different for different people.

I think it's also hard for us to realize here because we all have the common interest of an athletic endeavor (cycling)- but the vast majority of Americans are lazy and unrealistic about food choices/nutrition/calories. I've mentioned that I participate in another forum which has nothing to do with cycling. There's been discussion of this NYT article over there. One woman argues that anything more than 30 min of exercise daily is "unbalanced" and she's talking about easy stuff like yoga & riding her exercycle & walking. She won't exercise on weekends. She won't give up her Saturday pasta dinner & bottle of wine (she's Italian-American). She has previously lost weight but is currently 65 pounds overweight. Her son is over 300 pounds. Her conclusion is that it's not realistic to lose weight and she believes you can be just as healthy at 65 pounds overweight as she would be at a normal weight. Why does she believe these things? Because it means she doesn't have to make any difficult changes in her life. Ironically her job is to run the weight management clinic at a hospital! Another woman is actually writing a book that explains why humans are biologically destined to be overweight, how kids are not really overweight they are just bigger with more muscle making BMI charts erroneous for kids, how dieting will ruin your health and most importantly how IT'S NOT YOUR FAULT if your overweight. The perspective is just stunning to me. Your typical American has zero idea what it is to really exercise & they just want someone to make them feel better about their overweight or obese status. Public health agencies would never even look at the question of whether people should maybe get 2 hours of exercise per day because they know even 30 minutes is going to be a nearly-impossible sell.

Crazy stuff and it's outside a lot of our experience, but this kind of thinking is prevalent in our society.