Going to Lose Weight in 2019. Help?

Diet and Nutrition
1

Hi,

My current goal for this year to lose at least 15 pounds this quarter. I am having trouble managing my nutrition and what to eat in order to get lean.

Can anyone help me out?

2

what is your current weight and height, and what does a typical day of food look like for you right now?

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Also, what exercise do you do? How active are you in your day to day life?

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Hi, thanks for reaching out. I am 177cm in height and 150 pounds. I usually eat minimal diet because I am planning to become vegan.

I was not very active before but I have started doing basic exercises along with skipping and running from this month.

P.S. I have also added some planks and crunches to the grind too.

5

So the way to lose weight is mostly by changing how you eat. Tracking macros is very useful in this process, along with overall calories. So you saying ‘I usually eat minimal diet’ really isn’t helpful at all. I’ll ask some more specific questions to get this going in the right direction.

  1. Is your diet consistent from day to day? Meaning, do you believe you usually consume similar calories daily, or is there quite a bit of fluctuation?

  2. Do you snack much, or do you eat mostly at meals?

  3. If you eat essentially the same every day, then sharing an entire day’s worth of food choices and amounts would be helpful in determining what you should change. This would include liquid calories. Every single thing you put in your body. I would prefer that this not be a day of you dieting, but rather an example of what you’ve been eating before trying to lose weight.

  4. Is simply losing weight on the scale your only priority, or would you like better body composition to go along with it? A moderate weight training program would be very beneficial for burning fat, but may ultimately land you at a bodyweight slightly higher than your goal. To me this would be a good thing, as you’ll look better with some muscle tone. As tall are you are, 135 lbs without any muscle tone may not look as good as you think it will. Something to consider.

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This would be extremely helpful.

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Okay. Now we’re getting serious on this. Thanks.

  1. Yes, my diet is consistent. I almost eat similar things daily.(except weekends)

I even tried to calculate my calorie expenditure using a TDEE Calculator. However, I don’t know much about it.

  1. No, I don’t snack much. Only during the meals.

  2. The diet chart surely varies as per our office meals. I can’t type the whole diet that I am consuming but the include enough liquids. I also consume a lot of water and green tea.

  3. Yes, I’d to love to more in shape rather than just losing weight.

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It’s scarily easy to undo a week’s worth of dieting at the weekend. Are your weekends “cheat days” or just days where you eat differently?

You’ll really need to post the specifics of your diet in order to get more in-depth help. It doesn’t have to be the entire week, but a day or two of examples.

Unless you give more detail, really the only advice anyone can give you is increase protein and decrease calories.

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why not? do your fingers get tired?

To get something out of this conversation, you’ll have to put in equitable effort. I, and others here, are prepared to help you with years and years of experience and research, at no financial cost to you. I would think that you could tell us everything you ate over the course of a day, or even a week. If you spend, say, an hour composing a post with this information, you will receive, in return, the results of hundreds to thousands of hours of work that we’ve dedicated to understanding this stuff.

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Okay. I am really sorry. I actually meant that because I have my lunch in my office where they serve different things daily. However, they are mostly healthy and veggies included.

So, here it goes -

I wake up at 7 and drink 2 glasses of water.

After the shower, I eat sandwiches (usually grilled cheese or with onions and tomatoes)

I then head over the office and drink a cup of Green tea.

During lunch, we usually get salads and pasta.

I then comeback home to have some snacks.

At night, I usually order some Chinese or Thai. Sometimes, I make pancakes or toasts if I am not that tired.

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Color me skeptical that a molecular biologist doesn’t know how to calculate calorie expenditure.

On track for Top 10 weirdest trolls. Please explain?

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ok


ok


so I’m with Chris, this thread is weird, and you’re very inconsistent. I’m gonna give this a chance though,because if your diet is actually what you say it is, then it’s a pretty easy problem to solve.

Too many carbs, specifically carbs from pasta and bread, and not enough protein. You’re eating sandwiches for breakfast (again
 ok
), pasta at lunch, snacks that are presumably carb heavy (most are), and then most likely noodles or rice at dinner (or pancakes or toast).

Soooooo the first step will be to change the things that you can. I’m going to assume your lunch situation isn’t really going to change, but you don’t have to have a sandwich for breakfast, and you don’t have to have noodles/rice for dinner. Instead, substitute meals consisting of lots of vegetables, and a major protein source.

The following are some vegan suggestions for where you can get more protein: Tofu, seitan, lentils, chickpeas, and tempeh. You could also make ‘protein pancakes’ instead of regular pancakes.

That change alone will likely lower your calorie intake, as those are foods that are harder to over-eat and are less calorie-dense. It’s really hard for me to get any more specific than this, because I still don’t really know the quantity of food you’re eating. I can only advise on food selection.

If you are eating refined sugar products for snacks, I would suggest eliminating that as well. The tea is fine, the water is fine. You can drink as much water as you want. Mostly avoid fruit juices, they tend to be high in sugar.

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Would normally recommend FAST, FAST and FAST. However, given your vegan tendencies your future prospects are grim. Be prepared for LBM loss, but if gross weight loss is your only concern then this is a small bonus (until your metabolic rate goes down, of course). Sorry, I know I’m not helping but, as a smart person, you can see the point I’m making.

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You’re right, it’s not helpful. And it’s not even accurate.

There are certainly challenges that accompany veganism when it comes to fitness, but you greatly exaggerate them here.

I have a friend who is vegan, and has been her entire lifting career. She has benched 300+ raw.

I have other vegan friends who have competed in bikini/fitness competitions, successfully.

So, as a smart person, I am not seeing the point you’re making. A loss in LBM is NOT necessarily something that she will be facing, particularly since she is not a trained athlete in the first place. Would a professional male bodybuilder, walking around at a lean 250 lbs likely lose LBM if he went vegan? Yea, probably. Will a 150 lbs untrained woman who starts lifting weights? Doubt it.

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Glad you got that bit of your post correct, at least.

Listen, I apologise for using hyperbole. But, honestly, we all know when it comes to weight loss everything works for a time, e.g. Twinkie diet, Biggest Loser, need I go on.

Perennial issues are weight rebound which is often linked to a drop in metabolic rate, exposing such diets as the worthless ventures they are.

As for veganism, perhaps someone living on organic vegan produce will be better placed than someone getting their protein in at McD’s. I accept such arguments. However, fundamentally, there are plenty of arguments, including anthropological ones, why meat trumps veggies when it comes to so many aspects of human wellbeing.

I would like to think the poster, as well as a frequent T contributor as you, would get the original irony of the post.

16

Are these essential for you to eat? Or is it possible you could bring your own food without sacrificing too much?

This is an extremely weird choice of breakfast. I don’t think either of these options are helping you towards your goals. I think a lot more protein and some healthy fat would be far more beneficial

Again, lots of carbs, very little protein. My guess is you aren’t very active during the day so you don’t need very many carbs.

I’d ask for more detail on what these are, but I think it’s safe to assume it’s probably more empty calories, am I right?

I mean, you don’t need us to tell you that none of these are great choices, right?

Bottom line:

  1. start tracking your calories (at least until you get an idea of how much you’re eating) and compare to weight change. Adjust accordingly

  2. reduce your carbs

  3. increase protein

  4. do some kind of resistance training several times a week

  5. Get out of breathe several times a week

  6. if you find you’re too tired to make good food choices consistently, prep food in advance. Make it easy for yourself

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At this point, I don’t think I would be able to make progress on a Vegan diet. The main problem is that most whole plant proteins are allergenic or inflammatory for me. Fat and carbs and total protein wouldn’t be a problem but I don’t see myself being able to easily get adequate quality protein without suffering to some degree from plant sensitivities-and I believe that the large majority of the population is sensitive to polypeptides found in grains, legumes and “nuts”.

At least from my perspective, it is a lot easier with animal proteins, not primarily because of what you eat, but what you don’t have to eat to get enough protein on a vegan diet, also considering that there are high leucine hydrolyzed protein sources made from milk.

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I disagree. I have worked in biochem and molecular biology fields and would not expect any of the molecular biologists I have worked with to have had any formal exposure to human caloric expenditure formulas. I wouldn’t expect an MD to either as they refer nutritional counselling to nutritionists. My wife is an MD and I would bet 10:1 she doesn’t know how to estimate human caloric expenditure off-hand (without referring to basically a TDEE calculator. They were largely developed by people working in exercise physiology so that other scientist and medical professionals didn’t have to know the intricacies of the calculations.

I WOULD expect a scientist to be able to figure it out if it was important to them though.

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Why are you “planning” to become vegan? I ask because it is not a common statement I have heard from friends who are vegan. They either do it for “moral/ethical” reasons in which case, they don’t plan on doing it at some time in the future, or they do it for perceived health reasons which you don’t seem to hold to, or they do it for relationship reasons which also don’t make sense in this case.

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Would you expect someone with a university education to be able to google “calorie expenditure calculator” or similar?

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