drbarney1

When they first advertised statins, Lipitor, they showed a famous football coach - who had never had any medical training - as the reason you should admire the advertiser. They advertise to you the patient for the purpose of recruiting you to provide them the free service of advertising to your doctor even though you have not had the medical training to tell your doctor what drugs you should have; "Ask your doctor about Lipitor." This proves they are not worthy of our trust. Statins have some side effects, which for some people, are not worth tolerating even if they could give you a longer life: muscle damage leading to sarcopenia, a loss of IQ from what it does to the brain, and the threat of adding belly fat because of the physiological consequence of diminished muscle mass. It should come as no surprise a corporation who advertises in a manner demonstrating they disrespect the dignity of ther target audience would not care what harm their product might do.
That is why if I visit New York city I will even stay away from Statin Island.

willibrord

The side effects of statins are barbaric. Stay away. Fat is pretective in the event of a heart attack, but to the young OP, diet is everything.
Cut carbs. Eat protein and fat. Ride your bike.

guachi

I wish the diatribe against carbohydrates would just stop. You don't need to, and probably shouldn't, cut carbs and only eat protein and fat. Carbohydrates are a great source of ready energy, foods that contain carbohydrates are tasty and make great meals when combined with foods that contain fat and protein. Also, foods with carbohydrates are often cheap and good for you and cheap.

CycleryNorth81

Statins have saved more lives than not. That is why drugs are develop. While taking these drugs may have adverse side affects, it is better than dying.

drbarney1

Not for everybody. Sure I want to live, but in a skinny-fat body I can't stand to look at with a loss of IQ, that may be surviving, but it is only existing and not living.
Some people move into "assisted living" facilities, in reality, nursing homes, losing their own homes and their freedom to choose what kind of environment and way of life while their homes are confiscated and sold to pay for it. To me that is not a life worth living. Nursing homes are death row, where there is nothing left but to look forward to death. Getting up in the morning to join everybody else watching Good Morning America and get the latest news on sports, celebrity gossip, and the newest pop music stars, waiving your hands to and fro lead in a "chairsersizes" class, and a game of bingo from wheelchairs or walkers is long past time to conclude life with any meaning is long over.
Nobody should have to suffer anyone else deciding for them what kind of life is worth living.

gnappi

+1.

I grow some 20 varieties of exotic (to the U.S) fruits and eat my share of them as well as scads of veg with meals and with cycling my weight is under control, and near where I was in high school.

Things I stay away from are sugary soft drinks, artificially sweetened juices, and beer / alcohol, and chips of all sorts. Being Italian, limiting pasta, breads, cheeses and table wine to once or twice a week have worked well for me.

An ex-gf who was very slim said it best... "eat till you're SATISFIED not till you're full" one of the more sensible things I've heard about weight control.

livedarklions

Where the research seems to be leading is that the proper balance of macronutrients is going to vary widely between individuals, so anyone specifying "x macronutrient is bad" as a blanket statement should just be taken as a quack. There are a few people for whom keto seems to make sense (some diabetics and some people with seizure disorders), and it may work for some other people, but to recommend it to an active fit 16 year old who just wants to lose a small amount of belly fat is one of the stupidest things I've ever seen.

indyfabz

+2. When I am riding a lot, such as when I am bike touring, I feel like crap if I don't get enough carbs to go along with fat, protein and vegetable. That's why I bring an extensive cookset and use it to cook dinner most nights. Pasta is almost always the base for my dinners. To it I will add things like foil packed tuna or salmon or chicken sausage and vegetables.

livedarklions

For me, the major part of why I got fat was that I never actually feel satisfied or full. To do the massive weight loss, I had to train myself to stop eating while still feeling hungry as there just isn't any real correlation between my reasonable calorie needs and my level of hunger. I'm quite sure the mechanism that says "enough" just doesn't function in me like it does in people who say things like that.

My portion sizes at dinner continue to be huge (much bigger than when I was losing weight), but I really enjoy eating high fiber vegetables and I burn many thousands of calories per week on biking, so I can maintain my weight just about where I want it to be.

BTW, one of the most common pieces of advice I got, and everybody states it like it's an absolutely proven universal, is "never make your evening meal the biggest meal of the day". One person got mad at me when I informed her I had lost and kept off 150 pounds doing just that, and accused me of putting my theories ahead of "science". She did not take it well when I asked since I had done it wrong, was I obligated to put the 150 pounds back on?

Weight is still off three years after that conversation, and I still eat a big dinner, right after a workout of about 75 minutes.

OBoile

I have nothing but anecdotal stories from various people to back this up, but I suspect there is a strong genetic/epigenetic component to hunger and satiety.

livedarklions

I always try to be cautious about evolutionary explanations for things, but I could see how the ability to eat huge amounts when food was abundant could have been quite adaptive in certain climates as a hedge against periodic scarcity.

Epigenetics is a relatively new field, and it's already showing some interesting findings. I've mentioned this on BF before, but the recent study of type 2 diabetes in India indicates that the nutritional status of your grandmother when your mother was in the womb(!) has a big impact on the your body fat percentage. If grandma was undernourished while she was gestating mom, you're likely to maintain a very high percentage of body fat compared to other people with your BMI.

InOmaha

I was fat and lost a bunch of weight by cycling and watching what I was eating. Then I started adding weight lifting and put on a ton of muscle weight almost to the same weight as when I was fat. I feel much better with the strength exercises added in and less cycling. I have much more energy and ability to function in general because lifting things is easy now. When I watched the Tour de France, the cyclists look sickly to me. I never want to look like that. I got down to 225 and I'm a rather powerful 250 now. It carries well enough on a 6'-3" frame.

My diet consisted of drinking less alcohol and more water, watching the sweets, and eating smaller portions as slowly as I could. Eating slowly and chewing triggers the full feeling. I also found my personal daily calorie requirement based on my metabolism. It's easy, you track every single calorie without cheating by eating the same easily cataloged foods for several weeks while slowly dropping portion (therefore calories) until you just start to lose weight. Then add back food until weight loss stops. That calorie intake is your daily requirement. Reduce it by a couple hundred and workout or reduce it more and exercise more to lose weight faster. Generally track an exercises burn rate and compare it to food. You'll mentally look at food, estimate the calories of it, and compare it to the amount of time it would take to burn it off. Suddenly a donut becomes 2 or 3 hours of cycling instead of a donut.

You're an individual so the estimators and weight loss plans that work for others may or may not work for you. It's okay to dabble, mix and match them, and develop something completely tailored to yourself. I found no one diet or exercise plan to work the best. Protein laden breakfast with lighter carbs like eggs and Canadian bacon on thin bagels, no lunch, and a reasonable dinner go well with my mix of strength training, cardio, sedentary job, and Bourbon consumption. I developed my own eating and exercise plan while my wife uses video trainers and software. I can't stand the perky people on the videos or those yelling in my ear so they are demotivators for me. I don't race for exercise so I stopped logging in Strava, etc. and do my own interval training based entirely on body feedback by focusing and listening to myself.

I'm not a vegan type and I'll never be considered small or thin, but I'm in the best shape of my life. Weight has nothing to do with it, so I eventually ditched the scale.

OBoile

Yeah definitely good to be cautious about evolutionary explanations for things. But, the feeling of increased hunger compared to other people could have been countered somewhat by the fact that food was often limited in the past, so being more hungry wouldn't necessarily lead to fat gains, or a battle of willpower.

I mention epigenetics because I know a few people, who like you, have lost a significant amount of weight. They also say that they pretty much can't eat until they are full or even really satisfied if they want to stay the same weight. I suspect that all of that weight gain (and the foods that contributed to it) have skewed their sense of satiety somewhat compared to what it was before and/or compared to a "normal" person.

OBoile

Good god man! How big is that donut?!?

livedarklions

Yeah, that's some real "which came first" stuff there. I'd have no way of telling whether I have a limitless appetite because I ate too much, or I ate too much because I had a limitless appetite.

InOmaha

Wrong time frame, right concept.

Many people jump on those calorie estimators and assume that is the starting point. Given my parameters I've had them spit out a generic 2500 calories per day requirement. Pre weight lifting I found it was 1800 for me personally and 2200 after gaining muscle. I sit a lot for work.

Most people are sedentary anymore and likely need 500 calories a day less then the online guidelines. On top of it 100-200 calories per day extra will add around 10-20 lbs a year. That extra beer, a cookie, bowl of ice cream, 2000 calorie value meal, etc. add up.

Exercise to exhaustion one day then figure out what you could eat to get to zero. Make a direct connection between food sources and exercise effort to zero it out and it will make you pick and choose better.

OBoile

Yeah. I knew what you meant (and I agree). I was just having a bit of fun with that comment.

guachi

What surprised me most about weight loss studies and the follow-up keeping weight off studies is how beneficial resistance training is to effective weight management. I read an article yesterday by a professor of exercise science that was a review of a study on calorie-restricted weight loss (800 kcal/day) of overweight women who were divided into three groups - aerobic exercise, resistance training, no exercise. The author included this statement about the study:

The reason for this was that the "no exercise" group had a larger decrease in calorie expenditure caused by the weight loss than the other two groups and the resistance only had the lowest change.

livedarklions

Based on my own experience, more time exercising means less time to sit around mindlessly eating. I'm only half-joking.

sirjag

What in the world are you talking about? Ive never heard of these side effects before. A quick view of WebMD and Mayo Clinic turned this up:

https://www.mayoclinic.org/diseases-...s/art-20046013

Me personally? Ive taken Crestor for 15+ years. My total chol was 496 when I got out of the navy at 23yrs old. After three years it dropped to 200. This year its 168. My fitness and diet have fluctuated somewhat, but my doctor tells me with all my genetic risk factors and family history, my diet should only contribute about 15% of my total numbers. (I'm late 30s now)

I have never had any side effects, or heard of anyone who did...i guess i'm just curious where you are coming from.... Statins are also the #2 most prescribed med in the USA (behind pain killers of course). Just finding it hard to believe it could be as bad as you say....we would hear more about the issues you talked about....

Your kinda coming off as tinfoil hat person....

JAG

drbarney1

I looked up possible side effects on webmd and two other reasonably official sites. The risks of these side effects may be small as you say, but I so much do not want them that to me they are akin to mad cow disease. Yes, MOST people can take the without these side effects, but I do not want even the small risk for my body. Most people would not rather be dead then sarcopenic or fat but I don't feel that way.
I am glad your medical care worked for you I assure you. We all have different priorities.
There have been several massive bodybuilders who took steroids knowing they would be dead in middle age but wanted to live in a massively muscular 250 pound almost zero fat body. This is not natural, but even if their choice is hard for me to imaging, I grant them the right to make it even if I disagree with it.

sirjag

I believe i understand better now where you are coming from. I appreciate the reply Sir.

JAG

hubcyclist

Kinda late to this party, but I've developed the opinion that cycling can be really effective for weight loss, problem is most people do fitness wrong and don't progress to reap the benefits of the calorie burning potential of cycling. As an example, I recently did a ride with my spouse, who is not an active cyclist like I am. We had about 90mins of active riding time, and according to my data it was about 300kj of work. For me it was nothing, but if you were to get a lot of folks doing the same ride and were to do a poll of what they estimated their caloric expenditure to be, I'm guessing you'd get a lot of overestimates. So I think educating people, especially those who want to use cycling as a supplement to other dietary modifications, on the true caloric expenditure of cycling, is important.

To build on that, people need to work at it (i.e. train). I know a lot on this forum dismiss the idea of training, and I've seen my share of derisive comments about racer boys, lance wannabes, etc. But bottom line is, you don't have to race to get faster, and getting faster means more than just improving your speed, it's getting more bang for your buck in exercise and improving other aspects of your health and wellness. And it means doing more than HIIT, which if that's one's only method of exercising is a terrible way to go, even well trained cyclists can't do more than several consecutive weeks of hard interval training without risking burning out.

Cycling can be used to lose weight, folks just need to work harder at it. Just due to time and effectiveness, I do a lot of my cycling work indoors, generally a maximum of 2hrs at a time and 10hrs a week. And for those who feel that's soul sucking, I can understand, but I can work hard sometimes and then go out and ride 80 miles with some folks like I did yesterday at a good pace and feel like I could go back out for more today.

FaithMartin

bike and cardio workouts are great!

John Foster

There has been a lot of good advice posted already, and maybe what I am going to say has already been said. If so pardon me.
Develop a love for an activity and let it become a lifestyle. Don't pick an activity because it is great for a specific fitness or weight loss goal and then force yourself to do it. Try things,whatever they may be cycling,hiking, jogging, swimming, team sports, etc. etc. until you find your love; then you will eagerly make time for that activity,. This will yield fitness, weight and psychological benefits. Nothing is worse than doing an exercise that you dislike because it burns more calories an hour than one that you do like.