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Skinny/underweight

6 (18.2%)

Completely fit

3 (9.1%)

A little bit of chub

14 (42.4%)

Bulky but strong

3 (9.1%)

Fat is a good word to use

7 (21.2%)

MAN THE HARPOONS

0 (0%)

Total Members Voted: 33

[Ted Belmont]

I have plantar fasciitis too! Luckily mine only bothers me very rarely.

[Influenza Enema]

calories

I second this. My husband has had weight problems for years, and done various bullshit diets, but in the end what got him to drop sixty pounds (to a now-healthy weight) was just monitoring caloric intake and subtracting a certain amount. Google's food-tracking widget is really handy for this.

[Brentai]

I have not tested this, but it seems to me the thing to shoot for if you're trying to lose weight is to find your basal metabolic rate, and try to eat at least that much but as little more as possible.  The idea behind the BMR is that it is roughly the caloric intake required to maintain healthy body function and consciousness - everything beyond that extra.  From here you'll burn a certain amount by simply moving around and talking, but if you want to lose any non-negligible amount of weight you basically have to exercise to create a calorie deficit.  In other words, you're "dieting" only so far as to ensure that you're not actively gaining anything, and then using exercise to actually burn off what's already there.  It's a lot less painful and dangerous than relying on starvation to do it for you, even if it is somewhat slower and requires an actual commitment (both to exercising and to actually tracking your intake and daily requirements.)

Yes I am aware of the irony of taking dieting tips from a frosted cookie.

[Niku]

Yes I am aware of the irony of taking dieting tips from a frosted cookie.

I'm not.

[Brentai]

  That... is why you're fat.

[R^2]

I need to start lifting weights again but with my blood pressure and cholesterol and so on all I'm okay being a big fat dude. And when I work out I always put ON pounds no matter how long I do it so whatev.

[Brentai]

Yes you do!  'swhy I keep telling people not to worry about weight so much.

Try measuring your body fat percentage instead.  A lot of large guys are basically giant masses of virile meat, and should probably say so to anybody who calls them "fat".

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BpFzkuYBvJw

[Miss Cat Ears]

Yea, and working out will raise your metabolism so you should expect to eat more.  Gaining weight isn't always a bad thing.  Besides, muscle weighs more than fat and all that.

[SCD]

Something of a success story building up here, I find is circuit training, which deals with strength training and cardio endurance at the same time, and has become my favorite way of dealing with recruits in the morning. 

This is because everyone seems happier due to the mass of endorphins, and the bad music you can be pumping off at 70-80BPM, not to mention the feel of satisfaction of accomplishment. 

While it usually is a group activity, you can tailor it for yourself, and circuit training is perfectly customizable.  The idea behind it is that you have stations along a track, in certain parts of a gymnasium, or anywhere else you can run for a short while.  At each station, you try to do a physical activity, which you can set by yourself or by a trained plan (just make sure that each station that uses similar muscle groups are staggared).  At the end of each circuit, do a lap, take some water back, and repeat the process one or two more times based on your intensity you've chosen, or whatever criteria you, or your professional trainer has chosen. 

Best parts is that this series of exercises is customizable to the extents of your imangination.  Don't have medicine balls, use books!  Don't have barbells, use xbox controllers and move up from there!  None of you should not be too far from a children's playground, so if you're willing to do 6AM, there's a chin up bar, sit up assists, walls for assistance of squats, potential area for hopscotch and a radius to run around in a nutshell. 

I highly recommend this, although I am not a trained fitness professional, based soley on how energetic it makes me feel throughout the day, despite being consistently sleep-deprived.  And I keep getting better.

[Miss Cat Ears]

I have a friend who went from this to this (on the right).  He says it was 80% just monitoring his diet.  He ate a lot of non-fried chicken, salads, fruits and vegetables and drank water.  The other 20% was that he started jogging when he lost enough weight to feel up to it.  I wish I had better pictures, but he went from about 325 pounds to about 175 or so and he looks GREAT.

[yyler]

Chiming in with MCE here. I've never lost weight on purpose, but all the overweight guys I know lost the weight they lost just via diet.

This is from a good friend of mine, taken from another forum:

dude i know who is an international-level sprint cyclist + is currently writing his master's thesis in biology says:

80% of weight loss is diet

limit yourself to lean meat, vegetables and long-lasting carbohydrates

eat six to eight small meals at three-hour intervals throughout the day

this keeps your metabolism active all the time, and you will burn far more calories per day (the many small meals thing will work regardless of the content of your diet, but it will work a lot faster if you stick to healthy stuff)


also my mother's work does clinical trials and every time they do a study that requires people to stick to the small meals thing, all the patients lose a bunch of weight without doing any exercise at all

I like this guy enough that he lived with us for a little bit while he was traveling through America (by which I mean several weeks, not a few nights). He's smart and I'd trust that.

[Royal☭]

It's not too hard to figure out that altering your diet is the biggest change.  It can take hours on a treadmill to burn off a fried-chicken dinner, but simply never eating it in the first place works faster.   I was 195 last August, and by cutting back on fried-chicken, soda, and cookies (plus regular exercise) I've gotten down to about 180 or so.

And while cutting down on food can help you lose weight, exercise goes a long way towards making you feel great.  Even if you're skinny, not being in shape will make you feel like shit while doing basic activities.  I also learned in my fitness class that people with high-cholesterol but who are physically fit generally live longer than people with low-cholesterol who aren't fit.  Soo.. they both just kind of work in tandem.

[Miss Cat Ears]

You say it isn't hard to figure out, and I'm inclined to agree, but I have known more than a few people who think that going to the gym twice a week is going to do all the work they need, while refusing to stop eating pizza, chick-fil-a, and even switching to a diet soda (much less cutting out soda altogether).  So I do think it is good to share experiences that may help people make their own decisions.

You're completely right, though; exercise and diet together can do a world of good in helping you feel good in general.

[R^2]

Oh, I ran my BMI a couple years ago when I still had health insurance to cover physicals and so on. I'm fat, no two ways about it. But I work my ass off every day and don't collapse into bed every night, and my doctor couldn't find any compelling reason to lose weight except "You should weigh less". It'd be nice to be 200 pounds but I have more important things to worry about right now than sticking to a weight-loss regimen. Daily life seems to do just fine.

[Brentai]

Oh, I ran my BMI a couple years ago when I still had health insurance to cover physicals and so on. I'm fat, no two ways about it.

So is every quarterback in the NFL, according to BMI calculations.  Fuck the BMI.  Unless you meant BFP and are just getting mixed up in the sea of acronyms that are regularly thrown around in the biz.

[Detonator]

I have more important things to worry about right now than sticking to a weight-loss regimen.

If you DID need to get healthier, that isn't the way to go about it anyway.  Pretty sure it's been said here over and over.

[Royal☭]

You say it isn't hard to figure out, and I'm inclined to agree, but I have known more than a few people who think that going to the gym twice a week is going to do all the work they need, while refusing to stop eating pizza, chick-fil-a, and even switching to a diet soda (much less cutting out soda altogether).  So I do think it is good to share experiences that may help people make their own decisions.

I meant more in convincing people with bad diets to change.  If you can explain that it takes about 5 hours on a treadmill (running being the fastest way to burn calories) just to work it off, they might begin to comprehend.

That's actually one of the biggest problems with getting in shape.  Too many people think that exercise means they can continue to eat terrible stuff all the time, so they have a hard time getting the results they want.

[yyler]

I really need to learn how to do the reverse of losing weight so that I don't look like a really hip cancer patient anymore.

[Royal☭]

You expend about 1700 calories from just sitting around and doing literally nothing all day.  That's what your body needs to function.  The surgeon general recommends about 2000-2200 to cover the basic activities of walking, moving, lifting, and sitting that we do in our daily lives.  Just adding an extra 100 calories to your diet each day will give you about 1 lb a month.

So my recommendation is to do less and eat more.

[R^2]

I did. Still fat.