About caloric counting

First of all, well done for losing that much - that's impressive!

Gaining and losing bodyfat happens over a long term (weeks and months rather than days). As such your average energy consumption over a week will be more important than any daily fluctuations in how much you eat. Ideally you would want to consume about the same amount each day, simply because this is the easiest to keep track of and keeps your appetite in check, but what actually matters is how much you are consuming in total.
Consuming 1000 calories one day and 3000 calories the next isn't going to be significantly different to consuming 2000 calories on each day in the long term.

If you are concerned about hurting yourself while exercising because of your weight, then you can do non-impact exercise. Things like cycling and swimming and rowing are not affected by your weight as your legs won't be supporting yourself during them.

You shouldn't need to eat more if you start exercising - you should be able to get away with doing up to about 20 or 30 minutes of exercise a day without making changes to your diet.

 

Congratulations on the weight loss! You're quite an inspiration to me. I am currently hovering around 280 pounds myself and I am struggling to lose weight. I lost about 20 pounds a month ago and I've went back up to 280 now which is a real bummer. I need to be stricter with myself like you have been, no fizzy drinks etc. I'll follow your lead!

Getting the bike is a good idea. I've taken to walking a mile or two a day, started that this week. It's low impact, I just walk fast for a short time, then slowly and then repeat. Better than nothing I suppose! Good luck.

 

If you're on an uber-tight budget, have you tried oatmeal for breakfast? Personally, I can't stand the stuff, but a lot of people like it and it's extremely healthy and cheap (like 2 bucks or less for a kilo at Wal-Mart). It's also a lot more nutritious than the majority of commercial cereals available. Cook with water, add a little milk and sugar, and you're all set.

Good for you to pick lettuce, at less than $2 a head (usually), it's one of the cheapest veggies out there. Carrots (large ones, not baby) are also cheap when on sale.

You could learn to cook things with beans maybe, especially if you get the hang of cooking your own beans (vs. buying canned). Not the tastiest things out there, but they sure are cheap and healthy...

Why are you completely cutting out carbs such as bread and pasta, though? A healthy diet contains at least some carbs, it's a myth that carbs make you fat. No harm in a pasta dinner here and there, I promise.

I hope the money situation gets better for you, $10-20 a week for food sounds awfully low, even when I factor in lower food prices in the US. (*hug*)

 

Congrats on the weight lose. When it comes to calorie counting, my fitnesspal and loseit are helpful sites. I have heard great reviews on loseit. I do not use them, but my friends have had great results with them. You can personalize them, at least I know you can with loseit, to how much weight you want to lose per week and it gives you the amount of calories that you can eat. I have heard of people having great success with these sites.

 

- I haven't have any sugary drinks since I started the diet, that includes any juice and soda. I only drink water.

This is seriously the easiest and one of the most effective thing you can do and it is brilliant that you have done it. I'd definitely suggest you do the same Tyrael. Sugary drinks and fruit juice and pretty much anything other than water has none or negligible nutritional benefits for you and is just empty energy (and expensive!).


I try to eat more veggies and fruit, but they tend to be expensive, so is not an everyday thing. I stick to bananas and apples for fruit and tomatoes, bell peppers (all the colors), spinach and dark romaine lettuce.

Yeah fresh stuff can be expensive, and depending on what it is may not last for long. However frozen vegetables you can buy in the supermarket are just as good (and often better, because they are frozen very quickly after they are picked and don't have a chance to degenerate before you eat them like fresh does) and much cheaper most of the time. You can just put a couple of handfuls of frozen stir fry vegetable mix in a pan with a squirt of chilli sauce and it's great.


You could learn to cook things with beans maybe, especially if you get the hang of cooking your own beans (vs. buying canned). Not the tastiest things out there, but they sure are cheap and healthy...

This is great advice too: beans and lentils and so on are a really excellent food and are affordable - even canned red beans or chickpeas or something isn't very expensive. However the dried ones that you soak and cook yourself are dirt cheap - you can get a kg of them dried for about $4 here and they'll more than double in size and weight once they've been soaked and cooked. And I for one love how most of them taste .

 

YAY! FINALLY A TOPIC I CAN GIVE PROFESSIONAL ADVICE ON!

*Cracks knuckles, adjusts chair*

There are approximately 3,000 calories in one pound of human body fat (this rate changes depending on many factors). The basic concept is obvious: consume less calories than you are expending. Applying this can be more difficult.

Every action requires energy (calories) to fulfill, voluntary (walking, chewing, etc.) and involuntary (heart-beat, eyelids, digestion). Most involuntary activity is generally consistent among people. It is the voluntary activity that varies greatly and contributes to the theories regarding how many calories to consume.

However scary this notion might be, when you are expending more calories than you are consuming, your body (like when you are diabetic and have a high glucose number) automatically will begin using the energy (calories) stored in your fat.

There are only four compositions in food that contribute to its amount of calories. Furthermore, their caloric value varies, too.

Protein - 4 calories
Alcohol - 7 calories
Fat - 9 calories
Carbohydrate - 4 calories

I believe it is a 1 gram (g) quantity used for these ratios.

It is neigh impossible to single-handedly count every calorie in hand-crafted meal. For that reason, if you're making your own food or dining out there are basic assumptions that must be made (like diabetics do for carbohydrate quantities).

For that reason, I won't recommend websites to count calories because there are plenty to find independently.

But, I will break-down the general application of each caloric food composition.

Protein is contained in all meats. Fish, poultry, and red meat. I'll expand further a bit.

Fish-- mahi-mahi, tuna, caviar (fish eggs, note this later), crustaceans, salmon, etc.

Poultry-- chicken, turkey, duck, cornish game hen, etc. Eggs, particularly egg yolks are very high in protein. Due to contaminant-free qualities, egg whites are considered the "purest" form of protein and egg yolks the "purest" form of cholesterol. Eggs contain a great deal of both.

Red meat-- swine, cattle, etc.

Also all game animals contain protein. Furthermore, lentils (beans, essentially) contain protein.

-----

Alcohol, this is obvious what/where it can be found. HOWEVER, there are small amounts in all flavor extracts (vanilla, maple, almond, etc.).

-----

Fat. In culinary terms: lipids. Crisco, margarine, butter, vegetable oils, palm oils, etc. Certain foods high in lipids are pastries (due to the necessary characteristics of the dough-- raw fat is added to flour and water), diary products, meats, etc. Agricultural products-- vegetables and fruits-- do contain fat but in negligible amounts when consuming reasonable quantities.

-----

Carbohydrates. Every food has them-- meat, alcohol, vegetables. Some have less then others. I will list the food categories in order of their carbohydrate content (general):

Meats
Vegetables
Nuts (each nut contains few, but in reasonable amounts they have considerable sums)
Dairy products
Lentils/Starches (starches are things like potatoes, corn, sweet potatoes)
Fruit (especially fruits high in fructose-- apples, oranges, grapes)
Bread products (the flours often have many carbohydrates-- nut flours can remedy this)

I hope this helps!

I would cite all the scholarly and peer-reviewed sources I got this information during my time in the culinary institute but there's just too many.

 

Oh, but oatmeal is one of the best carbs you can get! First, it's unrefined (if you just buy it plain in a big bag), and second, it has lots of fibers and protein, and third, it is what is called a long-chain carbohydrate, which means it has very long chains of carbon-hydrogen bonds for your body to break down to get energy, so you won't get hungry for a while after eating it. If you like it, you'd be infinitely better off eating that than commercial cereals. Bran flakes are just fiber and there's only so much energy you can get from that, and cheerios are very refined and full of air (and sugar, if you get the honey-nut kind). Basically, what I'm trying to say is that oatmeal is just as much a whole grain as whole wheat, and that it has tons of benefits that completely outweigh the (good) carbs that they contain. If your want to make it in the microwave, put it in a deeper ceramic or glass bowl and cover with water half an inch over the oats. Microwave for 3 min and watch that it doesn't boil over.

 

Yes, I agree. You look very handsome in all the pictures but the 2008/hottest one. Good luck on your journey!

 

Cocoa powder has about 70% as much energy as an equivalent amount of sugar - brands will vary though.
However that doesn't mean you shouldn't ever have it - you've got to enjoy what you're eating! Some sugar (or cocoa powder, or other equivalent) is perfectly fine, just don't go overboard.

 

Well, yes, we do have "grits" here, the real word for them is Liberals (as in the Liberal Party of Canada)! If you mean the corn type of grits, now that I look it up, I know what you are talking about except it's extremely uncommon. I've made it a few times because I needed to eat something and I had corn on hand (I usually use it for cornbread), but it's definitely not a common dish at all. If I remember correctly, it's very filling, but mostly carbs. A quick google search led me to this page Dr. Gourmet Says... Eat - Don't Eat : Grits vs. Oatmeal, which pretty much confirmed what I already thought. This Red River® Hot Cereal 1.35 kg | Walmart.ca is also a decent choice if you can get it in the states, although it's more expensive than plain oatmeal, and takes a long time to cook (you need to do it in a pan, unlike oatmeal, it doesn't really microwave well at all). It is full of fiber and gluten (aka protein) and is quite filling. Can't compare nutritional content to that of oats, as this is not my specialty lol.

Re. cocoa, I don't see the harm as long as you don't use too much. Bear in mind that the taste may be quite strong if you don't use any sugar, though.

If you decide to go with canned beans, watch out to get the no-salt-added kind, otherwise that stuff is full of salt... Lentils are actually not bad, I have to admit. You can make a nice soup by cooking a bunch, adding them to a chicken/beef broth mix to which you add cooked onions and some garlic. Throw in some carrots, herbs if you feel adventurous (no clue which ones lol), and add some lemon juice to it after you serve it. Great with a piece of bread and margarine on the side!!

For another version of this, I do the same basic recipe, but with less water and throw in some cooked rice, a pack of frozen chopped spinach, and some frozen corn. Cook the whole thing until it looks like a kind of a stew. I would skip the lemon juice with this, but that's just me.

I usually use plain brown lentils, they're cheap and easy to find.

OH HEY! Look, a website full of lentil recipes! XD http://www.lentils.ca/