[Samurai]

Originally Posted by alpha1

But on individual cases, "the excess" definition will can change, so Samurai can have all his health marker very good in spite of having higher body fat than me. So then why should Samurai aim to have a lower body fat than me?
Just to score with some chicas? (Or any other goal under Point number 3 above)

Beautifully said...

My goals are functional, not measurements. My goal is to be able to do silly things like this, despite having 33% fat and BMI of 29. Here I am only doing a hand stand, but I plan to start walking by 50.

[DieselFan]

Originally Posted by Samurai

Beautifully said...

My goals are functional, not measurements. My goal is to be able to do silly things like this, despite having 33% fat and BMI of 29. Here I am only doing a hand stand, but I plan to start walking by 50.

looks great Samurai but just imagine what else you would be capable of doing if you are <24% body fat. possibilities are innumerable. Have you in the past tried reducing body fat? I am not a ectomorph nor a mesomorph as I used to weigh 87 kgs with 37 inches waist just 2 years back. All because of lack of exercise. Once I started investing 6 hrs a week towards exercises and hit the gym regularly my body fat did come down. With 87 kgs I was fit and fine (no issues with health) and was a good player of various sports. Now I am much better in overall health and also look lot younger due to lower weight and waistline.

[rajushank84]

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.

[tsk1979]

Originally Posted by Samurai

Beautifully said...

My goals are functional, not measurements. My goal is to be able to do silly things like this, despite having 33% fat and BMI of 29.

An unrelated question. How do you know 33% fat? When I buy mince mutton, and boil it in water, the fat separates and you can see how much fat it is. Since you clearly are typing, it definitely means you did not put yourself into a grinder and boil yourself(unless you are a bot). So how did you find how much fat you have?

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by tsk1979

An unrelated question. How do you know 33% fat?

Measured using Omron HBF-375 Body Composition Monitor. Don't know how accurate it is, but that's the number it gives.

[amitoj]

Originally Posted by rajushank84

- 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.

I think that right there is the key point. The general amount of activity in our lifestyle has gone down in one direction while the amount of food we consume has gone up in the other direction, thanks in large parts to easy availability of processed and junk foods. Even without that, just a normal average diet of ours is unnecessarily loaded with high amount of carbs we dont really need any more.

And yes, one has to make a lifestyle change for the entire duration of life to bring the balance back. And it is not cheap either, when you compare a healthy meal to a $1 Breakfast menu! In my house, my wife and I eat salad for lunch. We snack on fruit and nuts. We hardly ever buy processed foods. I tell you, our grocery bill sometimes puts me into panic mode

When people notice my weight loss and ask me if i am dieting, I tell them no, I have not gone on a diet. I have changed my diet. And I regularly work out. None of this has come at the cost of "enjoying my life". In fact, now I enjoy my life more than I used to. Doesn't mean I drink as much as I used to or eat junk food as much as I used to. To me, that is not enjoying life. Enjoying life is giving piggy back rides to my daughters up and down 3 flights of stairs. Being able to run around with them, play tag with them. Or just the sheer joy I feel of lightness when I take the stairs. Or when I come home and I still have enough gas in my tank left to go grocery shopping or taking kids to the park. All these things are easier for me now that i am more than 20lbs lighter, have built a stronger core and back, and have increased my overall strength. None of these I would have been able to do without the lifestyle changes I have made over the last couple of years.

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by DieselFan

looks great Samurai but just imagine what else you would be capable of doing if you are <24% body fat. possibilities are innumerable. Have you in the past tried reducing body fat?

I already do at least 6 hours a week of workout. I already eat sensibly, not sure what more I can do.

Originally Posted by DieselFan

I am not a ectomorph nor a mesomorph as I used to weigh 87 kgs with 37 inches waist just 2 years back. All because of lack of exercise. Once I started investing 6 hrs a week towards exercises and hit the gym regularly my body fat did come down.

I am at this weight despite 6+ hours a week workout over 30+ years.

I never remember a situation where I could not be active because of weight. I do like to bring my weight to 80kg simply to increase the pullups and and swimming range. But I am not going to spend more than hour a day on it because I have other responsibilities.

[amitoj]

Originally Posted by Samurai

I already do at least 6 hours a week of workout. I already eat sensibly, not sure what more I can do.

I am at this weight despite 6+ hours a week workout over 30+ years.

I never remember a situation where I could not be active because of weight. I do like to bring my weight to 80kg simply to increase the pullups and and swimming range. But I am not going to spend more than hour a day on it because I have other responsibilities.

I see many people who come to the gym every day, spend 45 minutes to an hour and yet get nothing out of it. Because they have been doing the same things over and over again and now their bodies have fully adapted to it. Which is nothing wrong if maintaining status quo is their only goal for coming to the gym. For people like me, rajushank84, dieselfan, and many others, status quo is not an acceptable goal.

It is not how many hours one spends working out that count anyway.

Having a steady weight may or may not be a good indicator as well. It is quite possible for one to lose muscle mass, gain fat and yet remain at the same weight. But if you are happy with only weight as an indicator for you, then so be it. For most others on this thread, we know there are better ways to measure our progress and we factor in those other indicators as well to determine whether we are heading towards our goals or not.

I think the basic difference here is in the goals. You are happy where you are. We are not. But we are happy that our efforts in getting to the point where we want to be are yielding results.

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by amitoj

Which is nothing wrong if maintaining status quo is their only goal for coming to the gym. For people like me, rajushank84, dieselfan, and many others, status quo is not an acceptable goal.

That's a funny assumption that you think I accept status quo.

When I turned 45, I couldn't do single pullup. I could do 5 when I turned 46. But I couldn't swim. When I turned 47, I could do swim in breast stroke and free stroke. But I can't walk on hands...

My fitness goal was/is never reducing weight, fat or BMI. Mine is about constantly learning new physical skills and keeping fit enough to do it. If it is not progress in your eyes, then so be it.

[rajushank84]

@amitoj I'd be careful with those fruit and nuts, bro! Those can get ridiculously high calorie (fruits high sugar and nuts high fat) in pretty small quantities. Again, they are "healthy" foods but I'm talking purely from the perspective of weight loss. Fortunately or unfortunately, it's more about quantity than quality when it comes to weight gain/loss.

For the record, weight loss is not my only goal either . I just focus on that aspect in this thread because it's about that. For me, I don't just want to be skinny, I want to
a) be strong and
b) look good

I'm making some small progress with the strength part, but unfortunately as you lose weight you become significantly smaller overall, so I find my strength gains not significant yet. I'm sure once I reach my target level of leanness, I will do the opposite i.e weight gain on a lean bulk. The will give me strength gain. But that's years down the line.

Don't get me wrong, I do see some progress. My deadlift went from 95 pounds to 165, squat went from zero (bodyweight) to 135 pounds. My bench press is the worst, at 115 pounds (started at 65). I couldn't do a pull-up, now I can do 2 or 3 in a set. Those are very low numbers (pathetic numbers actually, for a grown man) and I'm anxious to increase them.

However I have come to grips with the fact that strength gain is not going to happen significantly on a cut, and while I will continue working on the lifts as much as I can, my focus for now remains fat loss. I need to be laser focused on that to achieve it first, and then laser focus with equal amount of accuracy and detail on adding lean mass. I'm looking at several years of effort ahead of me, but Rome wasn't built in a day.

As for the second goal (looking good) I don't have to do anything for that, except maybe have a haircut once in a while . All I have to do is ensure I lean down and add some lean mass, looking good will happen automatically. This is not for "scoring chicks" (I'm too old for that), this is for myself. I feel better about myself when I look better in the mirror, is all.

[amitoj]

Originally Posted by Samurai

That's a funny assumption that you think I accept status quo.

When I turned 45, I couldn't do single pullup. I could do 5 when I turned 46. But I couldn't swim. When I turned 47, I could do swim in breast stroke and free stroke. But I can't walk on hands...

My fitness goal was/is never reducing weight, fat or BMI. Mine is about constantly learning new physical skills and keeping fit enough to do it. If it is not progress in your eyes, then so be it.

That's awesome! But you are happy with the status quo as far as your weight, BMI and fat %ages are concerned. You can learn new skills without losing weight, or sweat What are you looking for from this thread?

Originally Posted by rajushank84

@amitoj I'd be careful with those fruit and nuts, bro!

<snip>

Don't get me wrong, I do see some progress. My deadlift went from 95 pounds to 165, squat went from zero (bodyweight) to 135 pounds. My bench press is the worst, at 115 pounds (started at 65). I couldn't do a pull-up, now I can do 2 or 3 in a set. Those are very low numbers (pathetic numbers actually, for a grown man) and I'm anxious to increase them.

Fruit is mostly one banana pre-workout and nuts are less than a handful. I am 6' 3" weighing 190 lbs, 17.5% bf. I need somewhere around 3000 Calories to maintain that. I am consuming somewhere close to that but burning 3500 calories on average as well.

Those are significant strength gains any day. Your pull up count will go up as you lose weight anyway.

[Samurai]

Originally Posted by amitoj

What are you looking for from this thread?

In this thread, lots of weight/fat shaming happens because of stupid formulas like BMI. If you are fit enough to have an active life, then absolute weight doesn't matter. Does my uncle at 73 who does field work 8 hours a day, need to lose weight?

So I am spreading the word that weight-loss itself should not be the end game. It is just a number if you are fit enough to lead an active life.

India's greatest wrestler Gama had a BMI of 31.3 and he was superbly fit, and had a 50 year long wrestling career.

[amitoj]

Originally Posted by Samurai

In this thread, lots of weight/fat shaming happens because of stupid formulas like BMI. If you are fit enough to have an active life, then absolute weight doesn't matter. Does my uncle at 73 who does field work 8 hours a day, need to lose weight?

So I am spreading the word that weight-loss itself should not be the end game. It is just a number if you are fit enough to lead an active life.

India's greatest wrestler Gama had a BMI of 31.3 and he was superbly fit, and had a 50 year long wrestling career.

"Fit" and "active" have different meanings for everyone. Do you think people who are not able to do headstands are unfit? I dont think so.

You can not compare your uncle, and Gama pehelvan nonetheless, to today's generation who has a much more sedentary lifestyle. We have weight as a target or goal because we are seeing benefits of these goals in our day to day life.

[rajushank84]

Ok slight change of topic. I found my colleague using almond milk to mix in his protein shake, I've never tried this before. Is it good for making Indian style tea/coffee? Anyone tried? Seems to be only 30 calories per cup (as against regular milk which is 180). Any downsides? (Like they say soy milk will affect testosterone)

[amitoj]

Originally Posted by rajushank84

Ok slight change of topic. I found my colleague using almond milk to mix in his protein shake, I've never tried this before. Is it good for making Indian style tea/coffee? Anyone tried? Seems to be only 30 calories per cup (as against regular milk which is 180). Any downsides? (Like they say soy milk will affect testosterone)

I have had something similar but I used to drink it plain. I think it will taste horrible with tea or coffee!!