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Exercise and Fitness: bro science debunked


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On 4/5/2019 at 3:00 AM, Martell Spy said:

I'm basically trying to lose weight, while still having the ability to drink some beer. It looks like I can still lose weight and drink 3 beers a day, if I maintain at 1050 calorie food diet. Not sure if I can drink 4 beers a day yet and still lose. I'm pretty happy though with my results from setting my food cals this low. I'm 42 years old and 194 pounds. Just lost about 25 pounds in the last few months.

This is with a sedentary lifestyle.

I'm still trying to wrap my head around having 1050 calories a day and I don't think there's a scenario (other than a massive health problem) I could stick with that. Adding beers on top of those calories would somehow make it even worse.

Last time I checked my BMR (4-5 years ago), it was 1800-1900 calories a day. Since then I've gained at least 5-6kgs of muscle so I'd imagine it's even higher now. Eating barely over half of that would just not do the trick.

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6 hours ago, baxus said:

I'm still trying to wrap my head around having 1050 calories a day and I don't think there's a scenario (other than a massive health problem) I could stick with that. Adding beers on top of those calories would somehow make it even worse.

Last time I checked my BMR (4-5 years ago), it was 1800-1900 calories a day. Since then I've gained at least 5-6kgs of muscle so I'd imagine it's even higher now. Eating barely over half of that would just not do the trick.

Yeah, it may indeed have turned out to be too low. I think I started the diet in late January. I seemed mostly fine, with minor hunger the mornings before lunch, but in just the last few days I got major hunger pains and sometimes even headache just before lunch. I'm adding a cheese slice to my breakfast, so I'm now at around 1100 food cals plus beers. The cheese seems to have helped so far and it's the pre-lunch period where I have the most problems. We'll see how this goes, I may have to reduce the beers down to 2 a day.

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On 4/8/2019 at 10:12 PM, Erik of Hazelfield said:

I am just sooo tired of my diet and fail miserably to stay at 2400 kcal/day. This had made me hit a plateau some 3 kg short of my goal. I've lost just 4 kg since Christmas, due to my 0.5 kg/week loss plan being offset all the time by days or even weeks of not following my diet.  When I do keep to my calorie goal carefully I've found it works very reliably: down 0.5 kg per week.

Does anyone have any tips on how to regain the inspiration to reach my goal? What worked for you?

Its really hard to stay on track if you don't have any special reason to lose the weight, or you could potentially put it off for a while. I do best if there is an event I need to plan for, wedding, beach holiday etc. 

What works really well for me is to keep a diary and blog your progress in some way, so that if you fail you have lots of people around you to support / have a go at you. You need some added pressure and reason to force yourself outside of your own motivations. 

Outside of that, measuring your progress all the time is useful. Weigh in every day and take an average over the week, measure yourself once a week too. It keeps your head in the space where you rememeber that you are trying to do something. 

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15 hours ago, Martell Spy said:

Yeah, it may indeed have turned out to be too low. 

It is too low. I worry it may cause health issues. At such low calories (meaningful ones, the beer calories are not very useful) I don't see how you can meet basic nutrition demands. Unless those 1000-1100 cals are supremely well thought out and combined with supplements but if you are eating biscuits for breakfast I suspect that is not the case. 

I don't mean to come across as preachy but what you are doing now doesn't sound real good. Maybe you can see a nutritionist? They can help you come up with a better compromise diet considering your weight loss goals and sedentary lifestyle. If you get a good one they'll be sensitive to your lifestyle constraints and propose something that will work for you.  

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I shaved a minute off my 2.5 mile run already so I’m chuffed about that. And this is on a day when I really DIDNT want to go and I FORCED myself too and I still ran a lot better. I had a laughing fit in the car on the drive back (I drive to some woods to do my run) and I ate a subway today and it felt awful. And I bought a cake yesterday and I couldn’t eat it - just didn’t want it. Eating healthy and feeling much better for it. Now I’ve lost 10 pounds in total (in 1.5 weeks)

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23 hours ago, Martell Spy said:

Yeah, it may indeed have turned out to be too low. I think I started the diet in late January. I seemed mostly fine, with minor hunger the mornings before lunch, but in just the last few days I got major hunger pains and sometimes even headache just before lunch. I'm adding a cheese slice to my breakfast, so I'm now at around 1100 food cals plus beers. The cheese seems to have helped so far and it's the pre-lunch period where I have the most problems. We'll see how this goes, I may have to reduce the beers down to 2 a day.

You disgust me!

12 hours ago, baxus said:

That still sounds very low to me.

You seem to really like your beer if you're willing to go through that.* :D 

*Nothing wrong with that.

There is no like, only varying levels of love. 

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10 hours ago, Scott_N said:

It is too low. I worry it may cause health issues. At such low calories (meaningful ones, the beer calories are not very useful) I don't see how you can meet basic nutrition demands. Unless those 1000-1100 cals are supremely well thought out and combined with supplements but if you are eating biscuits for breakfast I suspect that is not the case. 

I don't mean to come across as preachy but what you are doing now doesn't sound real good. Maybe you can see a nutritionist? They can help you come up with a better compromise diet considering your weight loss goals and sedentary lifestyle. If you get a good one they'll be sensitive to your lifestyle constraints and propose something that will work for you.  

You are right about the vitamin deficiency. I have B12 deficiency, but I already had that. And I now have vitamin D defiency, possibly because I used to drink a glass of milk at bedtime and quit it for this diet. I'm under the care of a very good and thorough GI doctor though and my blood is tested regularly. He's having me take supplements. Oh yeah, the GI doctor knows about the diet and seems to approve. He wanted me to lose weight eventually. I must admit he does not approve of the beer though.

Also, this is not a permanent way of life. I'm hoping to lose 15 more pounds by the heat of summer in about 3 months, and be at 180. At that point I will take a long break and will only have to worry about maintaining. I'm planning to lose 30 or 40 more after that, but it can wait, and I may even do those parts broken up as well. Looking forward to purposely raising my cals.

I can't really claim my old diet was that healthy. In some ways this one is far more healthier. I banned pizza for example and only eat burgers infrequently. I can't eat very many vegetables and zero whole grains, as things with fiber can easily put me in the hospital, it gets caught in my intestine, and those are the very things I'd suggest anyone to eat a lot if they want to lose weight. 

My new diet is just a variation on things I ate before, except the dinners changed pretty radically. A lot of it is pasta and some sort of meat for dinner, often chicken. I have long eaten ham and cheese sandwiches for lunch. What I did to adapt them was drop the mayo, drop 2 slices of bread, and add one cheese slice. So I get a decent amount of protein in there. It seems to do the job, as the post lunch period is the period I have the least hunger issues with. I did a complete ban on some really bad stuff like ice cream and pizza.

The biscuits were just an adaption of what I used to eat for a few years, which was croissants. One of the things I discovered is that for at least a year I was eating 600 calories worth of croissants every day. Pretty sure that played a role in my weight gain, and I did not even know I was eating that many cals. 

And yeah, my diet often the same for breakfast and lunch. This helps with the diet, actually. I will sometimes vary lunch on weekends, maybe eat some pasta or the like instead of the usual.

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19 hours ago, Heartofice said:

Its really hard to stay on track if you don't have any special reason to lose the weight, or you could potentially put it off for a while. I do best if there is an event I need to plan for, wedding, beach holiday etc. 

What works really well for me is to keep a diary and blog your progress in some way, so that if you fail you have lots of people around you to support / have a go at you. You need some added pressure and reason to force yourself outside of your own motivations. 

Outside of that, measuring your progress all the time is useful. Weigh in every day and take an average over the week, measure yourself once a week too. It keeps your head in the space where you rememeber that you are trying to do something. 

This is probably it. I want to get fit, but I don't care all that much about it. And that's the same thing that always makes me fail. (Once I did try the blog way, posting pictures on Facebook and whatnot. Eventually I quietly stopped doing it due to lack of progress and it was getting embarrassing.)

I guess my main motivation now is not to fail again. Hardly a very compelling cause, but there it is. I feel like if I don't succeed this time, I won't ever again be as fit as I'd like. 

Thanks for the advice though. I'll try to think of some ways of increasing my motivation. 

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8 hours ago, Triskele said:

Still hoping some of y'all will weigh in with your thoughts on the whole issue of knees passing beyond toes on squats that I linked upthread.  

I certainly don't worry about the knee going past the toe any more, much of what I've read suggests its basically irrelevant. If you watch a lot of Olympic Weightlifters, they are all doing it.

I think as long as you are getting your legs to basically parallel and your body isn't going totally horizontal on the push up you should be fine. I think squats are different for the individual as the hinge on everyone is different. Personally I prefer a wider leg stance and going more ass to grass, but I know many others don't like that. Depends on your build. 

Keep it up though, your squat is decent. I think that for a lot of people its an exercise that takes a while to plateau and you can keep making gains as your technique gets better and you become less scared of being crushed to death!

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13 hours ago, Martell Spy said:

I'm under the care of a very good and thorough GI doctor though and my blood is tested regularly. He's having me take supplements. Oh yeah, the GI doctor knows about the diet and seems to approve. He wanted me to lose weight eventually. I must admit he does not approve of the beer though.

Fair do, mate. All the best in the pursuit of your weight goal. 

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10 hours ago, Triskele said:

Still hoping some of y'all will weigh in with your thoughts on the whole issue of knees passing beyond toes on squats that I linked upthread.  

I agree with Heartofice, no problem with knees going past the toes. I don't think I know anyone where this isn't the case. As long as the bar is centred over the middle of the foot throughout the motion, you are good. 

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10 hours ago, Triskele said:

Still hoping some of y'all will weigh in with your thoughts on the whole issue of knees passing beyond toes on squats that I linked upthread.

To be perfectly honest, I have never lifted so much weight that knees passing beyond toes on squats would be relevant. :lol:

That being said, I don't think I've ever paid special attention to it. I focused more on opening my hips and moving my knees properly.

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Yeah my impression is that the whole "knees past toes" thing is not considered good advice anymore. From what I've looked into (as I'm concerned about knees problems, they run in my family and with my height seems like more potential to go bad), the biggest ways to protect your knees are to make sure you are going deep enough into the squat and also to make sure that your knees are tracking over your toes.

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For lunges it does make sense. I mean, both your knees should be bent at 90º angle in the bottom position so there's no way to have your knee in front of your toes while maintaining that.

 

My left thumb tendons are a bit messed up. Had to wear a cast around my wrist for two weeks (most of which I spent on vacation) and am starting with my first of ten physical therapy sessions today after work. Hopefully, that does the trick and I'm back to training in two weeks or so.

I guess I will have to run a bit until then or something like that. My company might sign up for some 5k business run coming up soon and I said I'd take part in that so that might help me find motivation for running.

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