Quote:
Originally Posted by alpha1 If I go by the paragraph above, can I say that you need to be military strict in monitoring and controlling your food and beverage intake in order to reach your goal?
Continuing from above, your "natural self" has tendency to consume 4000 kcal a day.
You need to exercise discipline (1400 kcal/day) to achieve your personal goal.
If you lost the discipline you will regress to the old self.
This implies that one has to make a lifestyle change for the entire duration of life.
How many people venturing into "fat loss" are prepared for this?
How many people want a temporary quick fix solution but results lasting entire life? |
You bring up some very good points. In my opinion.. yes. You do need to be military strict in monitoring and controlling food and beverage intake to reach your goal. Actually, tracking macros is not all THAT hard, thanks to some excellent tools available now. Its not hard, (the hard part is the gym IMO, but thats a different matter) but it has to be done. I mean.. if you are expecting a significant transformation without a significant effort, that's not a reasonable expectation. Don't get me wrong, I will be happy if there an easy way for an extremely obese guy to do a complete "fat to fit" transformation, but if that existed there would be no fat people.
Thats about making a transformation. But then once you lose the fat.. its not really all that tough to maintain at the same level of fat. Very simply put, just eat at maintenance. Personally, I will probably continue tracking - at least approximately - for the rest of my life, but its not necessary. You can also "maintain" over a period of time by eating reasonably, and if you find your weight going up, then simply cut back. That's it. Its all about portion sizes! And yes, making healthy lifestyle choices goes a long way.
We need to keep in mind, its not the nature of the body to lose fat. Its the nature of our body to gain fat. Our bodies are geared to accumulate fat when it can, and we are forcing it in the other direction when we embark on a quest to do the opposite.
I do not agree that there is a natural tendency to eat a certain amount of food, or at least I can say in my case that's not why I was eating a lot. I blame the environment I grew up in and myself for giving in to it.
Let me take a sample day before I decided to cut fat:
- Starting with this whole myth of "breakfast is necessary". I used to easily eat 6 or 8 idlies - with chutney - for breakfast. One idli is 60 calories, a tablespoon of chutney is 120! Before I know it, before I leave the house even, I have consumed close to 1000 calories. My "coffee" (which is more milk and sugar than coffee) adds another 100. I leave the house happy that I had a modest "healthy" breakfast of 6 idlies and coffee.
(Don't even get me started on American breakfast on the other hand. Biscuits and gravy, a hashbrown with a couple of pancakes? We are talking 2000 calories easy!)
- Lunch of course, me being a South Indian has to be rice (a lot of it), sambar and my favorite potato curry. Preferably with ghee. Well, that's how I grew up, that's my traditional food.
- I am a software professional. So I have to drink 4 or 5 coffees a day. "Coffee in, code out", right? Of course I will have it with milk and sugar - lots of sugar - and one or two of those coffees may be Starbucks (you will be shocked if you see the calories and carbs on a Starbucks latte!). My office has free Starbucks, so I won't hesitate.
- Then I return home and help myself to the bajjis and bondas. If there are none, well there is always Lay chips. A beer or two with those chips don't hurt either. (its "cool" to relax with a beer on my couch, right?)
- And then of course there is dinner, the biggest meal of the day. On some days I will eat rice, on others I will eat chappati.
- Of course I left out the cakes, donuts, biscuits, chocolate, sodas and other snacks that pop up in the workplace or in my fridge. (A donut is 300 calories, for reference. Puffs are ridiculously high).
If you do the math, these add up to a shocking amount of energy. I didn't eat these because my body needed them. I ate these because I always thought this is "normal" and I didn't know any different. A lot of this comes from stereotypes in my mind:
- Software professionals should drink a lot of coffee!
- Modern young guys - the "cool" guys - drink beer! Be a man, drink beer!
- South Indians eat rice!
- Ghee makes you live longer (I am not even kidding, my father literally told me this every day. "Yogurt is strength, ghee is long life" and he used to encourage me to eat lots of both).
.. and so forth.
This is not my "normal". This is what I thought was normal, out of ignorance. If you also notice, there is absolutely NO nutrition of any value in my whole day. The little bit of vitamins I do get, come from the tiny amount of vegetables I eat with my sambar rice, and most likely it is overcooked. Carrots have to be overcooked to the point where they are almost mash. Same with beets, green beans and most others. I won't have much of these anyway, I prefer the potato.
In between we sometimes like to compare our lifestyle with people of the older generation. But we need to keep in mind that:
- Our elders (for the most part) didn't snack like us every day! There were no biscuits, chocolates, cake, donuts, burgers, pizza, soda, all of the high-calorie food
- They ate three times a day.
- Tea and coffee are a relatively new concept and weren't accompanied by a lot of biscuits in those days!
- Snacks were a rare thing - once for Diwali and once for Pongal
- Festivals in between used to be more of poojas than festivals. A small amount of fancy food would be offered to deities and then had as "prasadam" - not dozens of vadais, glasses and glasses full of payasam on the smaller festivals in between.
- The sheer amount of activity was way higher. Just because transport, and nature of most work.
So my guess is, our ancestors had a pretty good balance between intake and expenditure.
So no, what I've been doing is NOT normal, our current lifestyle is not normal, this is the ridiculous abuse I put my body through out of sheer ignorance. Whether I track my intake or not, I will never go back to being this person. Yes I will eat more than I am eating now (because deficit forever doesn't make sense), but I will:
- Skip breakfast (overrated myth sold us by the food industry!)
- Make sure my lunch has some greens, preferably raw. Don't get me wrong, it wont all be healthy greens alone. But I will try and include some greens and preferably some meat.
- Have one coffee in the day.
- Eat a protein bar (these are so delicious I would eat them for taste alone, forget the protein!)
- I will make dinner a nice and fairly big meal. Again "big" doesn't mean as big as before, it means say one cup of rice (not four!). And my meal will either have rice or potatoes. Not both at the same time.
- The accompanying side of vegetable curry won't be overcooked. Semi-cooked is perfect.
- I will continue to eat a multivitamin, a fish oil and maybe even a protein shake.
Now, this is just an example day. Every day won't be the same. But as long as I am cognizant of how much food is going into my body, I will be fine. I won't gain weight back. If I do, I can spend a month or two in the year and burn it off. This is highly feasible even when I am not tracking my intake. Sure, I love treats - I love donuts, I love In-n-Out burger now and then. But the thing is, on those days when I have these treats I have to eat my other meals according to that (for instance, don't eat rice on the same day - eat low-calorie bread or use cooking spray instead of oil to make upma. Something like that). Overall keep the amount of intake sane. That's all.
Now that I have spent 30 years of my life irresponsibly stuffing my body with the "see food" diet (I eat whatever I see) and alcohol on top of that for a good number of years, that is nothing but abuse.
At the end of the day, it does (mostly) come down to income vs expenditure. Managing your intake is like managing your money. If you say "spending feels natural for me, restricting myself doesn't feel natural" - well, we all know where that will lead. You could choose to ignore it, but your body won't.
As for whether we need to lose weight to be healthy - that's a different topic. I assume since we are all on the "weight loss thread" here, I reasonably assume we all want to lose weight. If we want to say that weight loss is not necessary at all and health is a completely different thing, I guess that belongs on a different "health" thread and I will bow out of THAT discussion
.
I am curious if you have a different way of going through a complete "fat to fit" transformation without putting in so much effort. From my understanding.. no. It does take an incredible amount of effort, there are no shortcuts. Well there are shortcuts (just starve, don't workout and eat nothing but juices and salads), I am concerned to see more and more people following this path (especially women) but this is the path that leads to more obesity than you started out with.
So.. no There is no temporary fix. There is no half-way.