Gosh, I've been joining all of you without realizing it. Just started a bit over a week ago.

My goal is to get down to my original weight of 5 lbs, 10 oz.

OK, just kidding... But I would like to be a total of 30 or more pounds from my high by the time the 25th high school reunion rolls around in late June. Started at 249 (gasp!) the most I've ever weighed, and working towards my initial goal of 224, then I'll set a new one. Ultimate goal is 180-185, which is what I weighed when I took my balls off. Presently I've lost 7 pounds and am at 242, but I know the first week it just flies off you, and then it gets slower.

I'm on a 1500 calorie a day diet. For reference, a quarter-pounder "meal" at McDonald's is about 1300 calories. It's been tough, but I'm starting to get used to it.

We should all compete with one another. If nothing else, it will give us a sort of accountability and motivation to keep going.

--LT

Sounds good to me LT, my goal this year is to be 235 at the end of the year, that represents a 10% loss, I have already dropped about 8 lbs, 22 more to go.

River

I just weighed in at the clinic yesterday at 203.9 pounds. Goal is to drop 30, which will still leave me about 10 above where I really want to be, but I'll be OK with 170-175. Unfortunately, the doc tells me I need to cut out the Belgian wheat ale, and the Canadian Communion Whisky - too many calories / carbs. And I need to work at getting my A1C back below 6 again.

I have I debated posting to this thread. By BMI I am normal weight and have never been overweight. But I have considerable experience in losing weight. On several occasions I have chosen to become anorexic for various periods, twice intending to starve myself to death. After the end of my marriage I lost almost 50 pounds down to 118 (at 5’11”), until I let my therapist convince me that I should not push on to the end. At the time, I was cooking for the local Drug and Alcohol program for CCS, and everyone assumed I had a serious meth problem.

Diets simply don’t work with the way I eat. What was necessary was changes in behavior regarding food. The following are some of what I worked out that worked for me to enable me to semi-starve myself in relative comfort, without drugs or bulimia.

I had to learn the difference between what I called Big Hunger and Little Hunger. Big Hunger is ravenous hunger, that “I could eat a whole cow,” feeling. Little Hunger is a controllable hunger. You would like to eat, but you still have control. If you get yourself into a Big Hunger situation, only a saint or a yogi could control his eating. Most likely you will eat anything put in front of you until it is gone or you are overstuffed. The trick is to keep yourself in a state of controllable Little Hunger, without letting yourself get into a state of Big Hunger.

To do this I had to learn how to control my eating. As children our parents put plates of food in front of us and tell us to clean our plates. “There are children starving in ----“ We are trained like dogs to eat their entire bowl in one fell swoop till it is gone, when our parents will reward us with more food in the form of sweets. We rarely develop the psychological muscles to stop eating before it is gone or we are stuffed. To overcome this I trained myself. If I bought or made a hamburger, I would eat 1/3 of it and maybe a handful of fries, stop, wrap up the rest and wait at least 30 minutes. Then spread out eating the rest over an hour or two, stopping after a few bites each time. If circumstances caused me to develop a Big Hunger I tried to eat a fourth of an apple or a few bites of something 15 -20 minutes before sitting down to eat a larger meal, to tame the Big Hunger down to a manageable Little Hunger. Then when I ate I always tried to stop eating before feeling fully sated. Eating this way, I was able to maintain myself in a state of Little Hunger without ever getting famished and losing control. This also soon shrank the stomach, so that less and less food was needed to feel sated. For over a year I mostly lived on my tasting spoon at work, giving up fixed meals. If I started feeling hungry I would go into the walk in grab a Roma tomato or a half a breakfast sausage or a couple of bites of left over vegetable, or a quarter cup of soup.

Note how this differs from most diets. Usually, on a diet, you starve yourself, then try to control yourself by severely limiting the food and quantities available to eat, then wolfing it down, then starving until the next limited meal. When you try to eat in the real world, without the artificial limits of the diet, you have no skills to control your eating and the weight rolls back on.

Also note that the plan River is using fits nicely in this scheme. The five small meals a day keep you from getting famished and losing control, and he has commented on how less food now causes him to feel sated.

I make no claims that this will work with everyone, but I thought it might help a few.

Transward

My Doctors have advocated that the 5 small meals a day is the best way to lose weight. Sadly, I eat small meals (B, L, D...or B, D, S if you prefer) and then snakc snack, snack. Not the best way to follow a five meal eating plan.

I've made it to my first measurable goal - 10 pounds gone. Amazingly, I've done this without being part of any defined weight loss program other than using a site called myfitnesspal.com.

I'm now moving on to my 10% weight loss goal, meaning 10% of my total body weight at the beginning of this effort. That goal being met will put me at about 35% of my total weight loss goal. The next goal after that will be 50% of what I've set out to lose. The next goal after that will be to get under 200 pounds, and then the goals will be 190 and then my stopping point at 180, which should be the middle to end of this summer.

If I'm feeling good about it, I may go down to 170 or so but I've always had difficulty getting that low. When I was in the army, I only managed to get down to 166 and that was with running 5-miles per day, exercising for an additional hour, and walking nearly everywhere I went.

What's making me happy is that maybe I won't be the fattest person at my High School reunion in late June.

--LT

As a packrat, I tend to keep things. While I'm not a hoarder, I have a lot of stuff, though!

I still had my parachute pants from 1984.

At the last reunion, I could still wear them. I showed up in them, a purple Bugle Boy T-shirt, and white hi top sneakers with untied colored laces. Other than the hair, I was the epitome of the 80's!

And everyone else, just about, was old and fat! LOL! I loved it!

All the old jocks who used to make fun of me, well, they can't keep up with ME now!

Congrats on your goal, LT!

Paolo wrote: Thu Mar 14, 2013 7:03 pm As a packrat, I tend to keep things. While I'm not a hoarder, I have a lot of stuff, though!

I still had my parachute pants from 1984.

At the last reunion, I could still wear them. I showed up in them, a purple Bugle Boy T-shirt, and white hi top sneakers with untied colored laces. Other than the hair, I was the epitome of the 80's!

And everyone else, just about, was old and fat! LOL! I loved it!

All the old jocks who used to make fun of me, well, they can't keep up with ME now!

Congrats on your goal, LT!

I know the feeling. Only 3 peers out of my entire class are lean and fit. I don't want to be part of the statistic of fat folk. When I find a new medical discovery that can be put into use you better believe I'm committed to it. The latest craze is how to generate internal brown fat.

I really think you should check it out. Basically after you intensely practice high interval strength , stretch and cardio training (min intervals). submerge yourself in icy polar cold baths.

This forces your muscles to generate heat by burning off that white fat by generating brown fat.

Brown fat is the fat that naturally skinny folk(ectomorphs) possess no matter how many carbs they intake.They happen to be gifted with more than both the endomorph and mesomorph bodytypes

A person possessing ton of brown fat expels energy as heat rather than store it as white fatty cells.

This is where there resting metabolic rate comes from.

Exposure to cold will increase brown fat > melt white fat

tough interval exercise > melts fat

Low GI and ketogenic foods > low insulin response

Now combine all 3 and you have a plan to stay lean and fit.

Now when I go outside when it's not ridiculously cold in the winter I take off my scarf and expose myself to the cold. I feel better than ever.

I don't get as sick as I use to when my body self regulates its own thermic heat

Id reccomend when its fall or spring just wear a tshirt and jeans and ride it out.

Toughen up, loose the sweater

NB = The only issue with exposing to cold as body self heats itself as best it can is you will get hungrier. Avoid simple carbs when trainning this way

http://youtube.com/watch?v=1N_9HZRVl-g& ... N_9HZRVl-g

I would never take it to the extreme levels such as these guys in link above.

The whim hoff method is too intense.

It is a technique developed by the russians

first used by Porfiry Ivanov

People thought he was crazy back then but..... now his technique is being used by the

human "Iceman" and is a study of major interest by doctorals around the world