I think I have reached a bit of a plateau with my weight loss and I suspect that I simply need to reduce the calories. I find the whole concept of counting calories a bit tedious, but am willing to try it for a few weeks to get a handle on how many calories I am actually consuming. I am already eating a super-healthy diet, low in carbs, but having done intermittent fasting for 2 weeks (skipping dinner), I was unable to lose any weight, so I suspect I am eating too much.
Can anyone recommend a comprehensive and accessible calories calculator I could try online?
Thank you.
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TheMoaningViolet
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Please don't. That way madness lies. You've already proved to yourself that missing out a whole meal (which, presumably, involves a big calorie drop) doesn't have any effect.
My suspicion is that most people who reach a plateau are eating too little, and I'm just trying to put together one of my longwinded essays to explain why.
It might be worth just reviewing what you're eating so people can chip in with suggestions - occasionally, people are including (or omitting) some ingredient that's throwing a spanner in the works. What do your typical meals, drinks and snacks look like?
Also, what's your bodyfat ratio at the moment (you may need to take a guess), your age (feel free to be very approximate!), and your exercise routine?
Thank you for getting back to me so quickly. Not needing to count calories would be welcome news indeed. I am sure my problem is not that I am eating too little, still, I would love to see the essay which I am sure will be intriguing.
I am 54, my BMI is 26 and I do at least 15 min cardio (elliptical) and some physio exercises (including gentle strengthening exercises with a bit of stretching) every day. I am also on a very low dose of steroid Prednisolone (4mg reducing to 3.5mg) for PMR which I have been treated for since December 2019 (when I started on 15mg). It's worth noting that I lost almost 9kg from September 2019 to March 2020 and then put back on 6kg. I avoid gluten and have only recently started eating dairy again (I am experimenting with antiinflammatory diets).
I always eat breakfast as I need to take my medication in the morning. It's a large meal with coconut yoghurt and kefir, an apple, frozen berries, linseed oil, ground linseed, chia seeds, macadamia nuts, 2-3 types of nutritional powders, cinnamon, 1-2 decaf coffees with oat milk (don't take that away from me).
Around 11 am I have a turmeric drink with a teabag, raw cacao powder, cacao nibs, pepper, a few drops of stevia, cinnamon, oat milk.
I try to include something green in my food at each meal, cook with ghee or olive oil, eat a lot of eggs, salmon (once or twice per week), sometimes sardines, venison, rarely chicken, nuts (as snacks - almonds, cashews, pecans, walnuts), vegetarian soups, lots of chickpeas (hummus), raw carrots, salads, legumes, oranges, sweet potatoes, brown/black rice, sometimes kimchi, once a week perhaps mashed avocados. I have been avoiding oatcakes, lentil cakes, gluten-free oat and seed-based bread lately.
If I have a sweet treat, I sometimes make oat-based cakes (sweetened with banana) or extremely rarely, non-gluten (so perhaps almond flour-based) cake sweetened with palmyra tree sugar. More often I will have a piece of fruit after a meal and am finding it difficult to resist bananas at the moment.
When I lost a lot of weight a year ago, I stopped eating gluten, dairy and eggs and was extremely disciplined about not eating anything controversial (so no dates, bananas, potatoes, rice, etc).
I found that after my recent two-week intermittent fasting stint, even though I eat dinner at the moment, I am not very hungry in the evenings and have mostly started eating dinner to socialise with my family.
Thank you and I hope you can put a finger on what I could try next.
I'd say the main problem is that you're not staying consistently low-carb - it sounds more like Mediterranean to me. This might explain why you're finding it hard to resist (eg.) bananas. Your intermittent-fasting routine might have helped somewhat with that, but I would really advise going properly low-carb for at least two weeks, and then see how you go from there.
The thing about low-carb is that your body doesn't know or care about your average carb intake. You need to keep it low, all the time, at every meal, for as long as you intend to lose weight. In other words, eating (say) 100g of carbs on alternate days, while staying 'keto' (<25g) for the other alternate day, is going to have dramatically different effects to a daily intake that's consistently 60g or lower.
If you find that hard to do, it's either because you're not fat adapted, or because you're not consuming enough fat (or enough food in general).
Particular problems are :
- Oat milk (sorry). This is dreadful stuff. It's finely-divided starch that's been partially hydrolysed to make it sweet. The glycemic index is through the roof. That daily (twice-daily?) jolt of sugar/insulin is just going to ruin everything.
- Fruit. You can bring it back later, in moderation, but just steer clear of it for a while and you should find you're less inclined to reach for fruit as a default snack.
- Sweet potatoes, rice, and all "sweet treats". If you feel the need for sweets, it's because you're not fat-adapted yet. You'll know when your body is ready to deal with them again: you won't want them!
- Chickpeas. Fine in small doses (or once you're fat-adapted) but not in large portions or as a regular fixture.
My suggestions would be:
- Have something slightly more, um, normal for breakfast. That's a very odd combination of things you've got on your plate, and I'm really not a big fan of powders and supplements. I assume at least some of those things you're eating because you enjoy them rather than because you think you ought to eat them, so have more of those, and drop the other things. So perhaps more of the coco yoghurt and kefir, and since you eat eggs, maybe an omelette? Coffee is fine, but seriously, the oat milk has to go.
- That 11am sugar (oat milk) hit needs to be changed. If you're hungry at that time, it's because your breakfast wasn't big enough. By all means have a drink, but make sure it's 100% sugar-free (and starch-free).
- Your use of fat seems OK, but since you seem to include various snacks and non-meals in your routine, I suspect you're not eating enough at mealtimes. Eat until you're really full. This might take a bit of a leap of faith, but just give it a try and see what happens.
Oh ... the steroids are likely to make things worse. That doesn't mean low-carb won't work, but for as long as you're taking them, they will tend to mess things up a bit.
You'd think so, wouldn't you? It's an odd fact of life that cream tastes sweet but actually isn't - it contains almost no lactose.
Conversely, of course, the stuff that cream is removed from - ie., skimmed milk - still has the same amount of lactose in it as whole milk.
Also ... most people will use quite a lot of milk in coffee, but only a relatively small amount of cream.
Pig farmers used to be able to obtain skimmed milk for next-to-nothing, and it was an excellent source of protein, but they knew you couldn't give excessive amounts of it because you'd end up with a fat pig.
Absolutely. Choose the natural product where possible. And remember that skimmed milk was (not so long ago) considered a waste product - or, at least, something that was best turned into cheese before it was suitable for human consumption!
TBH it sounds like you still have a residual sugar addiction. I would make a conscious effort to knock that on the head - once it's gone, you'll be free and clear and it won't bother you again.
Don't be afraid to use artificial sweeteners for a short while if you need to - as long as you make an effort to quickly wean yourself off them, you'll find yourself completely sugar-free with very little pain.
It sounds as if you're still consuming quite a few carbs. Maybe try counting and restricting carbs for a few weeks and see what happens, maybe below 50g per day. One medium ripe banana has about 27g of carbs (at least, that's what google just told me), which is quite a lot, especially when some of us aim for less than 20g per day.
BMI is not a great measurement for everyone. A healthy person will have a waist that is less than 50% their height. Measure around the widest point (just below the naval) without sucking your stomach in and see how you compare.
Don't fret about it. It appears to move much quicker than your weight so it doesn't take a lot to get it down. It could also be that the prednisone is affecting this measurement. Not that you should stop taking it but be aware of what it does.
I realise I have an additional obstacle here. On the plus side, I have been extremely well and able to reduce my medication slowly and steadily. It seems like the right moment to tackle my stubborn weight problem.
No. That is not correct. Women have naturally much slimmer waists than men and typically put on more fat on hip, thighs or breasts than the waist. A woman with the same waist as a man the same size will most likely be much fatter than him. And for n=1, my waist when in my 40s was 68cm (and I wasn't slim at that point). If I was to add 16cm to that, I would have visceral obesity.
But if you want data, I will put these thousands against the dozens in the study.
They are also naturally shorter. I note you have pulled me up on this issue before. I could also post multiple sources that support the measure being universal across genders but it gets us nowhere. I will agree to differ with you on this point.
Edit: I note the difference could be in the measurements being taken. The page you link to says to measure just above the hip bone. The 50% method suggests a measurement at the largest part of your abdomen, which is typically just below the naval.
I’m a bit crap at all the measuring & tools. I get my height wrong converting feet to cm or something & I find I am morbidly obese. I find my current measure of waistline is working well for me - all the clothes I buy that go over my athletic (but not body builder) shoulders are far too big, several sizes, around the waist.
I am sorry to be a bit naive here, but don’t we just need to look in the mirror to see whether we’ve got abdominal fat to shift?
Look in the mirror? No, people don't know what fat looks like. Because almost everyone is overweight and obesity is common, we have reset our idea of a healthy weight.
I've got a friend who must be hovering around 30BMI,with plenty of belly fat. She actually told me she doesn't see the need to lose weight, as she is normal. Which she is, but that's because it's normal to be fat. As an aside, she also told me not to worry about my blood sugar, because it's normal for it to rise with age. Again, that's true and it's also normal now to have diabetes.
And it's not just members of the public. I hopped on the scale at my doctor' s and and told him my weight. He plugged it into a formula incorrectly and got 26 BMI not 30 something it should have been and said "that's fine". I was standing in front of him, wearing clothes that did not conceal my shape, with clear visceral obesity, and he said "that's fine"
I really agree with you that dinner is important to family life, but if you must have breakfast and dinner that makes intermittent fasting difficult. Some ideas:
1 Limit yourself to 3 meals a day. Take TAT's advice on eating enough at each meal, then nothing calorific until the next meal, just water, black tea and coffee.
2 Talk to your pharmacist about timing your meds. I think a lot of the time they just assume we are all eating 3 meals a day. Your pharmacist may be able to suggest a different schedule if you aren't having breakfast. Ask what they would suggest if you were keeping Ramadan.
3 If you must eat breakfast, make it high fat and close to zero carbs. Eg bacon, eggs, olives and avocados. That will keep insulin low.
Thank you. I can skip dinners instead. The timing of meds is to do with the optimum time to coincide with natural cortisol high (9am) and as steroids can interfere with sleep it's not advisable to take them in the evening.
I agree with Toad. Don’t count calories. If you have reached a plateau, I don’t agree that you definitely are not eating enough - you might not be, but that’s not the only reason people plateau. When I have defeated a plateau, I have increased the amount of meat I have eaten and cut back on full fat dairy, berries, seeds and nuts, and my weaknesses, pork scratchings and very dark chocolate. There’s nothing very magic amount about that, except I personally find meat more satiating than any other food for the energy it conveys. I know that others have got through plateaus through fasting.
Then I think the meat you like is the meat you should eat. Also eggs and a lot of them would work as well. There’s a dietician in California who eats nothing but eggs and is skeletal.
Thank you for your advice and I am happy to hear of your success with weight loss, it sounds very sensible. I think the consensus here is that I am still eating too many carbs.
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