New Member

[Cal08]

Newbie here. Desperate. This is my last bash at losing. Everything has been tried in the past. I’m morbidly obese and want so much to do this. I’m housebound. I want to go out again. I’m hoping with help that can be made possible. Thank you for reading x

[Hidden]

Wow what beautiful flowers, a lovely photo. Perhaps you can make today your new beginning. What things have you tried in the past? has anything worked? Have you got family to support you?

There are many different ways to diet, it’s just a case of finding what suits you. If you read the boards you will find plenty of information.

No matter what diet you choose my advice would be to remove all the temptations.(crisps, biscuits, cakes, sweets) you don’t need them in your house, if there not there you can’t eat them! And I would try and switch out fizzy drinks if you drink them, you really do get use to water, I have a nice cold jug in the fridge, although will swap for hot water when the weather gets cold.

Stock up on lots of different vegetables, whether it’s fresh or frozen, what’s best for your circumstances.

Personally I just eat loads of different fish and meat, cod, haddock, salmon, plaice, my favourite is sole a little pricy but nice. Chicken can be cooked in so many ways, i’m Learning all the time.

I’m not really a picker between meals but lots of people are, perhaps if your not doing low carb you could eat plenty of fruit.

The thing is be organised and you will succeed. Good luck I’m sure you can do this, it’s never to late.

[moreless Administrator 7 stone]

Hi and welcome, Cal08

Don't despair, it is possible, I was morbidly obese, housebound and post menopause when I arrived here and it was this post that changed my life healthunlocked.com/nhsweigh... There is a lot of information on the subject of LCHF here and I suggest you do some reading and join this forum too healthunlocked.com/lchf-diet

All of the information you need about the forum can be found in Pinned Posts healthunlocked.com/nhsweigh... and I hope you'll be joining all the Events, Challenges and Clubs that we run, especially a weigh-in and the daily diary.

If you haven't already taken it, here's a tour of the forum healthunlocked.com/?tour=true

We've found active participation to be key to successful weight loss and, of course, it's a good way to get to know people, find inspiration and share support and encouragement.

Wishing you all the best

[TheAwfulToad Visitor]

Don't worry, this is fixable, but you do need to appreciate a couple of things:

1) Becoming morbidly obese requires that you eat a very specific diet. It's quite hard to achieve. Unfortunately, the standard diet advice (calorie-controlled, low- or zero-fat, and large amounts of carbohydrate) is precisely what puts people in that position. If you "eat less and move more", and follow the low-fat advice, you will keep getting fatter. And you will be miserable.

I know that's hard to get your head around - how can all those experts possibly be telling us the exact opposite of the truth? - but if you search back through your own experience, I think the light will go on.

2) You are almost certainly prediabetic. Obesity is not a result of eating too much, but (as mentioned) a result of eating the wrong things. It's a sort of defence mechanism: given too much of the stuff it can't deal with, your body stores it away as bodyfat and recalibrates itself to be more efficient at doing that. In other words, the more fattening food you eat, the better your body gets at making you fat. Why? It's caught between a rock and a hard place: the alternative would be to just drop its attempts at blood sugar control, and you'd die. Eventually this is what happens. That's full-blown diabetes.

3) If you've been "dieting" for ages, you probably don't know how to eat proper meals or what proper food looks like. That's not a personal insult - it's a reflection of the stupendously bad advice that gets handed out by people who should know better. The upshot is that there will be a big learning curve. You'll probably make a lot of mistakes. This does not matter. Don't blame yourself. Just fix whatever you get wrong, and carry on. It'll work out fine in the end.

Because your condition involves some serious metabolic dysfunction, you need to eat in a way that ensures normal service is resumed as quickly as possible. There are not multiple ways to do this. There is one way. I'll get a lot of flak for that from other posters, but it's nevertheless true, and an increasing number of doctors (read up on Dr David Unwin) are promoting the same message. You need to stop eating all of the following:

- Anything containing grains or sugar, eg., bread, breakfast cereals, manufactured drinks (including "healthy" fruit juices), almost all snack products, jam, rice, pasta, packaged sauces and ready meals, etc etc.

- Potatoes, sweet potatoes, and similar starchy vegetables. Fruit also, for the time being.

Empty your cupboards of these things. As Prunes28 said, if they're not there you can't eat them!

You need to replace them with wholesome ingredients: non-starchy vegetables, eggs, meat, and dairy. Especially vegetables. Buy the best quality you can afford. I don't think I'm exaggerating when I say your life may depend upon it, so don't scrimp on this. For recipes, have a look a carbdodging.com and dietdoctor.com. You don't have to force yourself to eat meals that don't seem appetizing; pick what you like (or can cope with) and ignore the rest. Your tastes will rapidly adjust. After a few weeks, you'll be able to (cautiously) reintroduce some starchy things, when your tastes aren't demanding them all the time.

You will be getting the majority of your calories from fat. Try butter, cheese, cream, Greek yoghurt, eggs, meat fat, olive oil, coconut oil, and avocados. You eat when you're hungry and stop when you're full. Under no circumstances attempt to do a low-fat diet, and do not count or limit your calories.

The reason I'm advising you to drop starches and sugar is that your body can no longer do anything useful with them. It just stores them away for a rainy day that never comes, and then demands more food. Your only viable energy pathway is the one that burns fat. It takes a few days to kick in, and you'll feel a bit under-the-weather until it does. Don't worry. You're not going to die. You'll wake up one morning feeling just great. For me it was more than just feeling energized again: you get a deep, visceral feeling that everything is going to be fine. Eating healthy food has an incredible impact on your body and your mind.

[SofaJockey in reply to TheAwfulToad]

Toad outlines an excellent approach here. My 8 stone loss was pretty much down to doing what is outlined here (over a 12 month period). 😊

[Hidden in reply to TheAwfulToad]

Cal08 The Toad’d advice changed my life. He really knows what he is talking about. I did not have as much weight to lose as you I admit, but I was pretty unhappy about what I dud have to lose and my massive hunger signals ruled my life.

I should add that your brain and body will rebel at the idea of giving up sugar and carbs. Just as people giving up smoking find the prospect very daunting. What may help you is to think that you are not giving up carbs /favourite foods FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE. But you aren’t eating them today. And then not tomorrow. And after a short while, you find you don’t want them anymore anyway.

[Cavill]

Honestly, there's a lot of unhealthy advice in these comments, and I can't address all of it - I have neither the eloquence nor the energy to look up the sources I would need to cite to refute so many well-meaning but misguided points. What I do want to be very clear on, though, is this:

It is not your fault that you're obese. I want you to repeat that to yourself: it is not your fault that you're obese. It may feel like you've been trying and "failing" to lose weight for years, but the failure, in the end, doesn't matter. Only the trying.

GPs are notoriously fatphobic so please be careful with this if you're not already fairly sure that your GP is understanding and kind, but I highly, highly recommend speaking to them about this. A lot of the advice you're going to find here is going to be based around dieting, and the unfortunate reality is that diets /do not work/. They don't. They are not helpful in sustaining longterm weight loss without also forcing you to compromise your enjoyment of food and the healthiness of your relationship with eating.

I highly recommend the following blog for anyone and everyone struggling with their weight, especially those who have been struggling with diets on and off for years, and those who believe that obesity always equates to unhealthiness:

bigfatscience.tumblr.com/ta...

It IS good advice to cut down on carbs and sugary foods, but the idea that you have to eliminate them from your diet entirely is absurd. The most that's going to do is give you binge cravings within a few days or weeks. Eating more vegetables, wholegrains, and overall healthier meals is of course a good idea too.

Also: drink more water. I cannot stress enough how much drinking water throughout the day will help with weight loss.

Overall I wish you and everyone else here the best, but I hope that the blog I linked can help people to develop a healthier relationship with their weight and dispel some of the myths around dieting and weight culture on this site.

[SofaJockey in reply to Cavill]

Cal08 , Cavill is quite correct that there is no need to eliminate carbs and sugar. In fact I'd suggest that's pretty much impossible as carbs and sugar are everywhere.

I'd say exercising a choice to remove specific carbs that are irrelevant to your diet can really help, but only those you want to.

I largely eliminated potato, pasta, rice and bread (I found I quickly lost their 'addictive' hold on me), making weight-loss so much more attainable. I'm still probably eating around 50g of carbs per day (grains and crackers), but I'm no longer a walking fat-storing machine.

The right diets do work, but of course they need to be based on science not fads. I think there is plenty of evidence from yo-yo diets that don't work, that a miserable diet of starvation followed by binging goes no-where. A lifestyle change (meaning a permanent adjustment to eating patterns) seems to me to be the only long-term solution to the pandemic of obesity.

Eating more vegetables and healthy fats has really helped me to lose weight.

And yes, drinking as much water as you would like to drink is key, though another myth to dispense with is the myth that you need to bloat yourself drinking 6-8 glasses a water each day, a myth that is dealt with here: 😄

healthunlocked.com/nhsweigh...

[TheAwfulToad Visitor in reply to Cavill]

I'm not entirely sure what you're objecting to in the advice so far, Cavill. Nobody has advised "dieting". Every post above, including my own, talks about making healthy changes for a lifetime. Nor is anybody talking about eliminating carbohydrates. As you said, it's physically impossible. The protocol I'm referring to involves a very short period of "eliminating carbs" (ie., keeping them as low as technically possible) and then reintroducing them over the following weeks and months. The target is somewhere in the 50-100g/day range, but most people go above that on occasion with no issues. In other words, they end up eating pretty much what anyone else eats, but with a lot less emphasis on stodge.

The initial elimination of carbs does not give you "binge cravings". With that assertion, you're basically calling millions of successful LCHF adherents liars (and the clinicians who treated them). Try it and see. You'll certainly get carb cravings if you fail to replace the carbs with fat, or if you don't cut them sufficiently to begin with. Both of those are common mistakes, because people think "all that fat can't be good", or "I'm sure cutting down slowly will work better". Clinical experience says otherwise.

I'll have to disagree with you on the "whole grains" thing. Who on earth eats whole grains? OK, Tollund Man apparently did, but so what? I've tried them, and they're not nice. What do we need to eat whole grains for? We're not rodents. I'd rather have an extra helping of veg. Likewise on the "drink lots of water" thing. It's one of those bizarre bits of dietary truthiness that doesn't make any sense. Your body is perfectly capable of regulating its own water intake. Even brainless animals can do this. There's no apparent reason why humans should not be able to do it too.

I'm also not convinced a visit to the GP is going to be helpful. The vast majority of GPs know nothing about healthy eating or weight loss. Many of them are overweight themselves. The usual outcome, given the 3-minute-consultation window, is "eat less and move more" and a prescription for some useless drugs.

The blog you linked to is pretty interesting and I'd agree with a lot of it - particularly her stance on "low fat" and calorie control - although I don't think the author is as qualified as she thinks she is. She clearly doesn't know what insulin resistance/sensitivity is, for example. Knowing about statistics isn't enough. My background in statistics is pretty damn good, but I also know about dynamic systems/control systems, physics, chemistry, and physiology, and those are far more important IMO.

[Diane1962]

Read delay don’t deny by gin Stephens it’s totally changed my life so much science behind this ( intermittent fasting)

Been a yo yo dieter all my life I’m finally free from diet mentality and now I’m resting and healing my body and loosing & maintaining my body weight

Join the Facebook groups and see for yourself from people like yourself it’s mind blowing !!

Good luck !

[IndigoBlue61 in reply to Diane1962]

Thank you for the recommendation 👍

Here’s a link to a review goodreads.com/en/book/show/...

[Gizmocat Moderator 13kg Maintainer]

Hi. You have been given lots of good advice here by people who know from experience. Take our time to read the through the links and ask any questions. We are here to help and support you. You can do this!

Would you like to join a weigh in? Today's is open. Here's the linkhealthunlocked.com/nhsweigh.... We are a friendly and supportive group. Just follow the link and post your start weight. I hope to see you there.

[PedallingMinstrel Restart April 2024]

You will be given lots of help and advice here 85% of your weight can be reduced through changing your diet. I am taking the low-carb healthy fat approach.

I virtually cut out all carbs and it’s really working for me. If you’re eating protein and fat you don’t crave carbs so you don’t get the hunger pains you normally get when you eat carbs.

This is a very different way of changing your diet than calorie control and counting calories.

I think you should try different things to see what works for you.

Remember there is nothing wrong with feeling hungry sometimes. That means your body will have to use up some of its fat reserves. I do wish you well. I have realised it’s a life time commitment now rather than going on a diet losing weight and then returning to a way of eating which has led to the gains in the first place. Good luck Cal

[Cal08]

Thank you all for your kindness it means a lot and I look forward to reading about you all and getting to know you x

[Gottadosummit]

Well done for making the step of joining!

Takes a lot to admit to ourselves n let alone others that we have issues.

So much info n really sound peeps on this site.

Its a great safe place to plan n think n see others a little further down the road than you , n others further to travel than you.

The old mantra " The rest of my life..will be the best of my life"

is a way of looking forward.