I Need To Lose Weight

White bread is shít. May as well be eating bowls of sugar(and salt. Give up bread for a year and then have a slice, you may find, as I did it's remarkably salty). Most brown bread isn't that much better BTW. Still a large simple carb load, just with extra roughage and nutrients, so better than the white. Irish people have a larger than average number of people allergic to gluten(coeliacs), so if you're one of them... Though coeliacs are usually underweight as the condition screws up absorption.

Portion control is the biggie. Basically people tend to eat too much and more than their bodies actually require to thrive. Buy smaller plates. Yep sounds daft, but it does work. A good mate of mine did that and him and his missus had the weight fall off(though in fairness neither were exactly overly portly to start with).

Exercise is brilliant, but walking and the like isn't that great when you look at the figures. It takes one helluva long walk to burn off the actual calories* from a big mac. Exercise that builds muscle is the way to go. Muscle is very calorie greedy. Just sitting there doing nothing it's chewing up calories. Ask any dedicated bodybuilder how much food he(or she) needs to consume to keep the muscles at their best.

Hunger pangs can often be confused with other stuff. It may be boredom, anxiety, habit often enough simple thirst. Try having a cup of tea/coffee when you feel "hungry", wait ten minutes and see if you're still hungry. The tyranny of modern life and set regular meals, kids told to "eat all on the plate" adds to all this. IMH too many folks eat when they expect to eat, not when they're actually hungry. Indeed very few people in the west have experience of true hunger, more often than not it's a blood sugar drop. A healthy man or woman should be able to not eat for a day with no real stress. IMH if someone can't go a day without food there's something amiss with their systems.

Avoid processed food. That stuff is laden with bad fats, sugar and other ingredients purposely designed to trigger very deep needs within our animal brain**. It makes for more profit. Avoid most "low fat" foods too. Fat, good fats, are not the enemy, the sugars are and check out the labels on "low fat" foods and count up the sugars involved.

Go for high nutrient foods. The better bang for your buck. EG eggs. Full of nutrients, but low in calories for the nutrients received. Bread/pasta/rice/etc on the other hand has the ratio go completely the other way. Berries, nuts, some fruit and veg, some meats... you get the picture. A steak has a shedload more nutrients per mouthful than a shedload of other foods.

If you're not a problem drinker, then a glass(even two:eek:)of red vino with your evening meal will help.

Increase variety in your foods. An easy way to do this is with colour. If your food is mostly beige you're fooked. Turn up the colour dial. The more colours the better.

Forget the bathroom scales. The bathroom mirror will give a much better appraisal, as will your clothes.




Completely personal opinion and all that, but at 47 I am the exact same clothes size I was at 19 and pretty much never varied in the interim so in one sense I am walking the walk as well as talking the talk.






*calories are a vague term. A neat vodka is very high in calories(cos it burns like petrol), but unless you're Irishman 2.0, no way can your body metabolise those "calories" into fat.

** these ingredients selected by the food industry to make us come back for more are rare in nature, hence we sought them out. White sugar? The natural equivalent would be something like honey and that was hard to find and seasonal. Today that idea of rare is gone, we have a smorgasbord of such delights in every supermarket, but our monkey brain has yet to catch up in recognising the inherent dangers. Put it this way diabetes is pretty much unknown among hunter gatherer folks(type 2 and 1), coronary disease is rare too.

woodoo wrote: »

Its almost impossible to feel full without bread, well apart from dinner time when you can load up the plate with spuds, rice or pasta.

Ehhhhhhhhhhh. No. Just no. Bread, rice, pasta(bread by any other name) is pretty much "empty" calories. Grand if you're a marathon runner or the like, who is gonna need that for basic fuel, but if you're a sedentary cubicle dweller, then no, you don't need to be eating that stuff.

carraig2 wrote: »

Wise
Insightful
Brainy
Brilliant
Sensible

Wibbs, you are the man

You forgot sexeh. I'll let it slip C2... This time. Just this time. You just can't get the staff these days, even with paypal.