Diet/How to lose weight without bonking

[RoadRaven]

Basically, what I am doing is trying to stick to a 1500 cal/day diet, and riding 4-5 days a week, with a minimum of an hour a day, with an ever-increasing long ride on Saturday. I'm up to 80 miles now for my long ride. 50% carbs, 30% protein, 20% fat. Yes, I am hungry all the time. But so far I have lost 22 pounds! My blood work is back to normal. I am losing 2-4 pounds a week.
Nanci

You're over a third of the way to achieving your goal, Nanci - you must feel so great about that. Way to go...

Hey, just thinking about you being hungry all the time... I have heard from people I know that many diet plans (like Weight Watchers) have "free" foods - foods that have no calories and you can eat all day if you wanted... have you any of those in your plan you could eat when you feel hungry?

The other thing I always ask or suggest to those trying to reduce food intake... do you listen to you body and eat only when it says eat, and only until it says its not hungry. In the western world we are trained from infancy to to eat at certain time... and finish what is on our plates... of course, this training to eat when and what we are told, "untrains" us too.
We learn to stop listening to the messages our body gives us. It is very hard to learn how to listen again, but often, when one does, food intake begins to drop.

Good luck with it all Nanci... keep us posted so we can celebrate your goals and achievements with you!

[Dogmama]

This is really good:

http://www.active.com/story.cfm?story_id=12207

It talks about eating less vs exercising more for weight loss and also addresses the problem of losing muscle.

<"show me the science" dogmama!>

[Helen]

Hi Nanci ... How did you manage to keep track of all the calories you take or burn every day?
I only heard about online tracking services but I don't know where to start ...

[Nanci]

Hi Helen,

I use Diet Diary software from Calorie King. Http://www.calorieking.com Look under software. There is a Windows version, but I have mine on my Palm Pilot, which goes everywhere with me. It makes it easy to make choices at lunch or at a restaurant. I usually have the same thing for breakfast, so I enter in that for the whole week, then I plan out what I am having for dinner and put that in, and then see what's left for lunch/snacks. Mostly I have a bottle of grapefruit or cranberry juice for breakfast, and a couple cups of coffee. Then for lunch, chicken or fish and a veg or two- about 200-300 calories. Then dinner is something like a turkey burger or turkey mignon or grilled chicken breast, with a salad and a veg or small baked potato and a glass of skim milk.

You can buy a pretty cheap Palm Pilot for around $150, I think.

One thing I figured out to save calories- when I'd get home from work and want to ride for an hour before dinner, I'd be hungry and need some sort of snack. So instead of eating something extra, I'd microwave my baked potato for dinner and eat half.

Yesterday I did my longest ride ever! 92 miles. I had sushi for breakfast, then an 80 cal Energice gel every hour, and my Endurox R4 at 52 miles. I stopped for a Diet Coke with 30 miles left to go, yum! It's hard to drink enough when you've been out there for five hours and your water is 90 degrees...

I think my total calories for the ride were 670, and I burned 5000 something! I am doing ok, not bonking, and each ride which is 20 miles longer seems easier than the last shorter one, so I must be building up my base ok.

Nanci

[LBTC]

If chocolate is good for us, then how many normal chocolate bars can we eat in one week and not getting weight?

ahhhhhhhhhh
chocolate

I say go for quality, not quantity.
Normal chocolate bars are full of crap, filler, wax, hydrogenated oils, and very little cocoa.
Go for chocolate that is as pure as possible. Read the ingredients and make sure you can pronounce all of them. And go for a semi-sweet or a dark chocolate. It has more of the stuff that is good for you.

In the end, I don't know how much of it is the quality of the chocolate, or the otherwise healthy eating, but once I got used to this type of chocolate, I can make a bar last for a week or more!
And you can too!

Namaste,
~T~

[notsportygirl]

Hey, I lost about 15 pounds last summer, and I wasn't working out too seriously then. I ate more healthily than I ever had in my life, and felt better...and, most importantly, was never hungry. My skin also cleared up and my digestion got way better. I thought, (since I've already e-mailed the tips to people before and it's easy to copy and paste it) I'd post it here, so people could use whatever might be useful...

Of course, I wasn't cycling when I did this diet, so I don't know if you'd have to modify it to get more carbs when doing heavier work-outs. That may be...I found these things called "Organic Food Bars" which seems to have just good stuff in it, though.

Sorry, it's kind of long...

"So, what I did is basically the Zone, so you can look it up or buy a book and talk to your doctor about it. It's basically a really balanced diet, so you don't eat carbs unless you balance it with a protein (and the carbs are from more healthy sources), but you don't count them completely out of your diet.

I also did a kind of modified version that my friend coached me through, designed to really reduce intake of sugar and starches (a yeast reduction diet), and since I was the kind of person to want to eat the whole basket of bread at a restaurant, it made sense for me. I avoided mushrooms and vinegar, which harbor yeast, but you don't have to pay any attention to that, necessarily.

These are the foods I didn't eat at all: anything with "sugar" in the ingredients, bread, (except for this one kind that I'll tell you about), pasta, white rice, corn products (corn is not so bad in tiny amounts), cheese (including cottage cheese), milk, dried fruit...I think that's it.

The thing is, though, don't focus on what you're not allowed to eat. There's so much you can eat. Make sure you always have something handy, so you're never hungry. This is what I ate:

Breakfast:

Low Fat Plain Yogurt with blueberries and strawberries and slivered almonds on it (this tastes like a fabulous dessert, and I wanted to eat it all the time. The trick is stevia, which is a natural sweetener. You put a tiny bit into the yogurt with a little vanilla extract and it's amazing. Research Stevia online, though, because there's some controversy about it's healthfulness. I decided it was ok for me, though. Since I can't get good berries now I make a shake with blueberries, yogurt, a little no sugar soy milk, vanilla and stevia. It tastes like ice cream, which is nice.

You can also have an egg and a piece of toast (with this special bread called Ezekial bread, which only uses sprouted grains, so it's a high protein bread...and essentially doesn't have flour in it...this bread is what saves your life, too, because it's just too sad to never be able to have a sandwich or toast). You can also occasionally have a sausage if you're out to breakfast...or any kind of omelette that doesn't have cheese in it. Mix it up so you don't feel too deprived. I use yogurt on anything I would normally want to eat with sour cream.

For awhile, when I had more time, I'd make an omelette with spinach (from frozen), sauteed in onions and garlic, with yogurt on top. It's really good, and really healthy. You can have it for dinner, too.

Or if you're only having the shake and it's not keeping you full long enough, have some almonds, too.

Lunch:

Having lunch meat at hand is really helpful. You can make a sandwich with the Ezekial bread if you want, but you don't want to have too many pieces of bread per day. Ideally, make a sandwich with hummus, because legumes are better to eat than mayonnaise. Or, you can have a salad with chicken, almonds, sunflower seeds, and other vegetables in it...It makes you feel like you're eating a lot. I'm usually running around in the middle of the day, so I get one of those tossed salads. Just no cheese. You can have an almond butter sandwich (the almond butter is really fine to eat, though it is higher in fat, so don't have too much too often). Or a green apple with some almond butter and cold cuts is good. You can have a lot of different things...just think higher protein, selective carbs...Chili and brown rice is actually a really great, filling thing to eat. I'd put a little yogurt on it instead of sour cream. When I had no time to prepare something, I'd grab some lunch meat (you can eat a lot of roast turkey if you want), some brown rice crackers, an apple, and some almonds.

Dinner:

Again, low fat protein, vegetables, brown rice.

An easy thing I'd do is buy low fat ground turkey and make turkey burgers, have some brown rice, and vegetables. Or you can get those packaged, chicken sausages and cook them up...that's a quick, no fuss source of protein. You can also occasionally make a guacamole with avocado and yogurt as a treat (you don't want the avocado too often, or too much of it, because it's higher fat, but it's important to have treats).

Or again, there's chili and brown rice...very filling, and good in cold weather, when you need comfort food.

Or there's also brown rice pasta and low carb pasta sauce (you can buy it at Trader Joe's) for the occasional pasta craving, which I get (I bought some soy parmasan cheese). Put some chicken and vegetables in it, and it's a perfect meal.

Or any number of other things that you can do if you want to cook more than I did then...

For snacks:

At Trader Joe's there are some dried salted peas, which aren't amazing, but when you want to mindlessly shove food in (which I sometimes do), they're handy to have around.

Brown rice crackers are great (they're the small crackers, not rice cakes...those are fine, too, but they don't taste as good). They come in different flavors. Make sure you don't buy a kind that has cheese in it, and it should be brown rice. I'd just be careful about portion control, and would separate some into a little ziplock bag (that helps with almonds, too, since I can't stop eating them sometimes). You can have some other nuts, too. Some are higher fat than others...I think macadamia nuts are the worst, if I remember correctly.

Flavored sparkling water (the unsweetened Poland Springs or Perrier kind) with a little stevia mimics soda and makes you feel really full. It's handy to have around. If you drink one of those, you often don't want to eat anything afterwards.

Popcorn (check ingredients...there are some that have a lot of bad crap...whole foods should have a good kind) is a good snack. I like putting garlic powder, salt and pepper in it, so it turns into a real treat.

A little bowl of yogurt with stevia and vanilla in it is a really good dessert. (If you want to go hard core, you can get nonfat yogurt, but I didn't and I swear it worked anyway...the texture is a little better). Even a little soy milk with stevia and vanilla is a good sweet treat. Apples and pears...

Unsweetened carob covered almonds are good to have around in case you really need a chocolate fix. Very occasionally you can also have these carob covered rice cakes. I've also recently discovered Rice Dream "Ice Cream", that has no dairy or sugar in it and is really yummy.

I think the idea is to keep your blood sugar stable. To eat a really balanced diet, so you're not eating too many simple carbs that cause your blood sugar to spike and then drop. Lots of vegetables and low fat meat (fish is great, just too expensive for me). I was told that some fruits are higher in sugar than others, and that as a rule of thumb try to eat fruits from colder climates rather than things like bananas and mangoes. No juice (it's full of sugar). Berries are really good for you, frozen or otherwise. You should never be hungry, and you get into the habit of making sure you always have food with you that is good for you to eat, so you never feel deprived, and your body feels good."

[DirtDiva]

Read the ingredients and make sure you can pronounce all of them.

I like it. Unfortunately, two thirds of the papers I did at university were chem/biochem.

I swear by the "don't go to the supermarket when you're hungry" rule. Kinda helps that I can't afford treats at the moment, too.

[Helen]

ahhhhhhhhhh
chocolate

Go for chocolate that is as pure as possible. Read the ingredients and make sure you can pronounce all of them. And go for a semi-sweet or a dark chocolate. It has more of the stuff that is good for you.

In the end, I don't know how much of it is the quality of the chocolate, or the otherwise healthy eating, but once I got used to this type of chocolate, I can make a bar last for a week or more!
And you can too!

Namaste,
~T~

I am sure I CAN'T but I will surely try.
I read somwhere that we really need chocolate and it should not be avoided because eaten in small quantities can bring us energy and other stuff important to our bodies ...

[Helen]

I noticed that when I eat good chocolate, even if I eat too much, my stomach doesn't feel upset. As for low-quality chocolate bars, I always feel strange after I eat a little too much than usual. I think this happens because of the hydrogenated oil ... at least this is what I read on another forum.

Yes but you will still gain weight even if its high quality chocolate so ... try to burn the calories from your chocolate otherwise ... your body weight will increase.

[SnappyPix]

Just been reading through the threads ...
Gosh, I'm now sooo hungry and craving chocolate!
Another point I'd like to add - often our bodies think they need food, but what they really need is water. Especially after a long ride, it's so easy to become dehydrated, but our brains often translate this into needing food NOW!
Sometimes it's a combination of the two, but we go for the food, as psychologically we think we've earned it and that's what we crave.
Congrats to everyone who's slowly slogging away at the pounds and kilos.

Charlie & the Chocolate Factory is just being released here - I'm surrounded by Wonka Bars - my life is a living hell!
So glad to be back, amid women who understand !!

[natheless]

KSH... that site is gone... I would LOVE to look at it... ('cause I'm NOT 122 lbs and 5'4"! sigh.... )

http://www.caloriesperhour.com/ (There was a little typo in the original link.)

http://www.fitday.com is a great site for tracking nutrition, if anyone is interested.

(Hi, all!)

be well.../julia

[Helen]

Yes ... fitday is ok but aren't you tired of filling all those forms ?
I'll wait for the http://www.lifestylescanner.com to open its services and see what's with that little scanner. It could save my hands from typing all those info for fitday .. at least I hope so.