[OT] Atkin's Diet

[Pbartender]

A good book to read is Eat, Drink and Be Merry, by Dr. Dean Edell. His advice echoes that of alsih2o... Eat a wide variety of foods and drink, eat in moderation, excercise regularly.

His basic guideline is this...

Reduce your Calorie intake (or increasing the number of Calorie you burn) by 200 Calories a day, and you will lose about a pound a week. To put this in perspective, that's about equivalent to drinking one less can of soda a day, or eating one less candy bar a day, or walking for an hour (4 miles), or 15 minutes of aerobics.

That's it.

Also remember that losing more than 2 or 3 pounds a week is unhealthy. Faster than that, and you start to lose weight in water and muscle mass, not fat.

 

[Gothmog]

I have a friend that tried the high protein/fat, low carb diet- and to be honest, those diets don't work. You will lose water weight pretty quickly that way, but in order to actually lose fat tissue, you pretty much have to use something like powerful stimulants (NOT recommended) or exercise. The gimmick diets leave you feeling unsatisfied with your eating habits, and its really easy to backslide, losing any progress you have made.

My recommendation is the same as alsih2o's: get at least 30 min of good cardiovascular exercise per day working up to an hour (getting your heart rate above 130 bpm), restrict fat to less than 30 grams per day, continue to eat lean meats (chicken, fish, very lean beef), cut out all chips, soda, and sweets. For snacks, eat fruit, vegetables, pretzels, popcorn (w/o all the butter- you can use the butter salt though), etc. Stick to it for 3 weeks, and you WILL see results- probably something on the order of 10-15 lbs lost. You won't see weight loss results in the first week and a half- instead when you exercise, you will be building muscle while you lose fat. You will notice that your clothes will be a little looser though. The bad news is that the first few weeks are the hardest- but you have to be resolute and not let yourself backslide. Once you have made it 3 weeks, allow yourself 2 indulgences per week- maybe a slice or two of pizza, one bowl of ice cream, etc. Trying to quit those things cold turkey will drive you nuts, and when your body craves soemthing, give it a little of what it wants.

I lost a lot of weight this way, and I have kept it off for three years now. I'm 6'2", and I used to weigh 330lbs. I ate well and exercised for 1 hr a day for about a year, and went down to 190 lbs. Another thing that will help you is weight training- and it doesn't have to be anything really strenuous. The more muscle mass you build, the more calories per day you burn- which means once you lose the weight and keep active, you can start to re-introduce some of those naughty foods you love in moderation. Lifting weights 2-3 times per week for about an hour is enough. I'm weighing in at about 245 lbs right now of lean, mean, gaming machine- and to be honest, once the weight comes off, its really easy to keep it off since you do see results. Not to mention that the chicks REALLY dig guys who do take care of themselves. They don't even care if you are a gamer at that point!

Hope this helps you bud!

 

[mirzabah]

I keep forgetting to take those 'one a day' pills though.

"Why hasn't this cold gone away!!?? oh yeah, vitamens."

And if the need to take supplements isn't enough to tell you that your diet is inherently unbalanced, then there's no hope...

 

[MaxKaladin]

The only diet I ever lost weight on was restricting myself to 1200 calories per day. I figure I lost about 70 pounds over three months. I just couldn't keep it up though. I was hungry all the time and I gradually started eating more. It probably would have been worse if I wasn't a person who only drank water anyway. If I'd been giving up favorite drinks along with favorite foods, it would probably have been worse.

Exercise would have helped, but all I really did was walking some. I pretty much hate sports so that's not going to work for me. Most other forms of exercise, like weight lifiting and biking/running, I'd quit from sheer boredom if nothing else. I'm pretty convinced that if I tried running I'd have a heart attack and die. Besides, exercise just makes me hungrier anyway.

I suppose its all academic now. My doctor is recommending Gastrointestinal surgery to correct my (severe) obesity.

 

[Moleculo]

Thanks for the advice mystic, i've been looking at switching up what i have been doing so far. I still find the irony of fitness coming up as a topic quite delish hehe. Good luck everyone!

jaek

 

[pogre]

I was on Atkins a few years back and lost some weight. I just could not maintain the low carbs. I also had lingering doubts about the healthiness of it. Now I'm back to fat and sassy.

As a sidenote - I have one player who occasionally skips our gaming sessions because of all the junk food there. He cannot keep from eating it.

 

[chatdemon]

Has worked well for a few people I know. But I can't give up my Carbs.

Exactly! They can have my potatoes and rice when they pry them from my cold, dead (probably of congestive heart failure for being overweight...) fingers!!! Carbs rule, they rule!

Seriously though, this diet does appear to work, and I've yet to see any credible proof that it's bad for you, but I personally can't see anything really healthy about cutting all the vegetables and legumes out of your diet and eating only protien and fat. If you really need to drop a few pounds and can handle life without carbohydrolic goodness, go for it, and good luck, I for one know what a living hell trying to lose weight can be.

 

[mirzabah]

Exercise would have helped, but all I really did was walking some.

Nothing wrong with walking. Some people say that for the best results, you should do more than 20 minutes at a time - say 30-40 minutes. The theory is that during the first 20 minutes of exercise, the body is burning carbs stored as glycogen in muscle tissue. After this it starts to burn fat.

Others argue that while it is true that the longer you exercise, the more "fat calories" you burn, the key factor is total calories expended. So if you find that you have trouble walking for 40 minutes at a time, try breaking it up into two 20 minute walks at different times of the day. Or four 10s, or whatever works for you.

My opinion is somewhat divided. While I think the total calories view is generally right, I don't believe that you get much benefit from a lot of short bouts of exercise compared to fewer, longer bouts. On the other hand, some exercise is better than none.

... I'm pretty convinced that if I tried running I'd have a heart attack and die ...

I've been there. In fact I used to get panic attacks just from walking up more than a few flights of stairs. Seriously.

I suppose its all academic now. My doctor is recommending Gastrointestinal surgery to correct my (severe) obesity.

I'm very sorry to hear that. It sounds very extreme Good luck with whatever you end up doing...

As a sidenote - I have one player who occasionally skips our gaming sessions because of all the junk food there. He cannot keep from eating it.

It'll be interesting to see how things go at my next session. Since our last game I've been diagnosed with diabetes so I pretty much have to stay away from junk food from now on. Unfortunately, our group's self-appointed supplier of viands practically lives on the three Cs: coke, chocolate and chips. He always brings a ton of it to sessions. I don't expect him to change his habits, so I guess I'm just going to have to hope I get a good roll for my WILL save

 

[Videssian]

Diet / Life Extension

There's also evidence to support that caloric intake about 30% below a person's set point, but with optimal nutritive content in the foods consumed, will delay aging and extend maximum lifespan. This has been shown to hold for many organisms (up to and including dogs and cats), and the same biomarkers which have been observed in those organisms which show that aging is delayed have been/are being observed in primates including humans. A good resource for this is Walford's book "Beyond the 120 year diet", and you could also check out www.walford.com or do a search for "caloric restriction" or the like in your favorite search engine, there's also been articles in various places like scientific american as well. Interesting reading in any event.

There's been some key points mentioned already that I really agree with. The key to weight loss is to take in less calories that you use. The tricky part is to do that in a way that you're inclined to maintain until you get to the weight you want. Eating a diet high in complex carbs (especially green leafy veggies), largely cutting out the pop/chocolate/candy/mcdonalds/etc., low fat (and when you do, from good healthy sources), and in most cases, low protein, you can get what you need by-and-large from plant sources. Fish and shellfish are a good source too, but with contamination (Mercury/PCB/Dioxin) being an issue there, that's a much poorer choice than it would have been 50 years ago. Not to mention the environmental cost (massive worldwide overfishing). Insects would be an excellent source of B12 and protein in general, and all our primate relatives eat them, but most north americans (myself included) find the idea of eating them (because of cultural reasons) rather revolting. I'm not necessarily saying that one should go to a vegan diet, but definitely something much closer to that than the "standard american diet" would be a good thing in my opinion. Oh, and I agree that exercise is very important too. Not to extremes, but an hour a day is probably about right..

Can you tell I've been thinking about making changes in my own diet?

 

[Gothmog]

There's also evidence to support that caloric intake about 30% below a person's set point, but with optimal nutritive content in the foods consumed, will delay aging and extend maximum lifespan.

Yep, that is true- although some recent lab experiments I have done also suggest that a 25% decrease in caloric intake also decreases the rate of neurogenesis in the hippocampus and brain by about the same figure- 25%. The hippocampus is involved in memory consolidation and formation, and the other area of the brain that is specifically affected are the lateral ventricles- specifically the new neurons that migrate to the olfactory bulbs and allow us to maintain the sense of smell. My experimental animals were mice, but it seems to generalize to most mammals from what I have read. If we made the mice exercise for about 30 min per day, the neuron loss was only about 8%- but the sample size in this part was only 6 mice. I'm still working on some follow-up data and preparing a larger sample of mice to make the data more valid.

Having said that, the only good way to lose weight is to decrease caloric intake by 25-30% per day, in addition to exercise. Also, as a plus, increasing exercise ususally decreases appetite so you won't feel as hungry the rest of the day- it inhibits pathways in the hypothalamus that control appetite.