I don't know, I just know I have to change my approach to life to make sure I don't need to do this all over again. If I carried on not planning and eating when/what I liked I would not be able to change my weight. Wake up call for me was hitting 20 stone and being diagnosed as diabetic. And knowing it was all my own fault !
I know and if you are anything like me you will have been amazed as the weight creeps up you try to ignore it until you get a real wake up call.
I know. I always used to get a grip when I went over a certain weight. I am now 2 stone over that weight.
I knew I was gaining weight and just kept on saying I would start a diet on Monday.
What I'm seeing in this thread is that there is a lot of variation in how easy it is for different people to diet. And I feel a touch of embarrassment that it's easier for me than for quite a few other people.
I also had the weight build up slowly, over decades. Without wishing to tempt fate, I'm heading towards my target weights. Then I have the problem of working out what to do then. If the weight built up slowly, does that mean that I can just eat what I want, but have a 'high' and 'low' weight limit. Where if I hit the 'high', I go back on the diet until I'm back down to the 'low'? While I can stick-ish to my diet reasonably well, I'm not sure I'd want to have a calorie limit for every day for the rest of my life.
Returning to the food side of things, I plan to have soup tonight, which is only 230kcal per can. But I'll make garlic bread for the rest of my family which is utter mega calories. Has anyone made lower calorie garlic bread by having thick slices and only spreading on thin garlic butter (marg in my case)? If so, how did it work?
I can diet OK, but when it hits the plateau I give up and weight goes on. Been told unless I get under 100kgs, I will need insulin injections. So anything to avoid that, I'll try. Going to start this weekend.
What I'm seeing in this thread is that there is a lot of variation in how easy it is for different people to diet. And I feel a touch of embarrassment that it's easier for me than for quite a few other people.
I also had the weight build up slowly, over decades. Without wishing to tempt fate, I'm heading towards my target weights. Then I have the problem of working out what to do then. If the weight built up slowly, does that mean that I can just eat what I want, but have a 'high' and 'low' weight limit. Where if I hit the 'high', I go back on the diet until I'm back down to the 'low'? While I can stick-ish to my diet reasonably well, I'm not sure I'd want to have a calorie limit for every day for the rest of my life.
Returning to the food side of things, I plan to have soup tonight, which is only 230kcal per can. But I'll make garlic bread for the rest of my family which is utter mega calories. Has anyone made lower calorie garlic bread by having thick slices and only spreading on thin garlic butter (marg in my case)? If so, how did it work?
I hate to say it and I used to hate when others said it to me I think it depends on how determined you are to a large degree, I can't personally risk not taking it seriously and changing my life, eating what I want got me to this position so I now eat what I need not what I want.
If I get to a weight I am happy with I will still be doing this with possibly just a couple of hundred extra calories thrown in. I know I will never be able to go back to what I was eating before so this has to be a change for the rest of my life.
And I commend my fellow dieters in arms who are living out the maximum, when the dieting gets tough, the tough get dieting.
PS: I forgot to mention to Striing, you mentioned that you eat a lot of fibrous vegetable dishes. But then you mentioned that you add rice or pasta. Perhaps the rice and pasta is where all the calories are. I was shocked when I calculated how many calories there were in the simple pasta dish I frequently made.
Unfortunately I just don't have it. I heard Sarah Millican make a joke along the lines of she's bothered about her weight - but just not enough to do anything about it! That's me when I get to a certain point. I've never, ever been a medically healthy weight (which would be under 11.10) so I don't really have the impetus to do it. All my clothes fit me at 13 stone so that's where I end up staying.
I am going to keep going until I get back to 13 though - that's a way off yet.
And it's only taken me 50 years to get to this state of mind, hitting 20 stone and becoming diabetic, don't let that be what makes you do it too, Sarah uses her weight in her comedy, not a healthy way to live IMO just look at how Dawn French for what can happen.
As I'm vegan, there simply isn't enough 'poke with a fork' stuff around for me to buy, but quite a lot of my meals are frozen prepared food with veggies/salad/rice/pasta. Though I do enjoy cooking and experimenting, so that makes it easier for me.
Just wondering, but would a slow cooker help? You can more or less just bung stuff in it including water and a stock cube maybe, hit the start button, and wait. You can load it up ahead of time with a timer set for it to be ready when you come home too. You'd probably have to chop things up a bit, but you'd have to do that for your stir fry.
Also, what about making your own defrost and nuke food by cooking large amounts and freezing in microwave safe boxes?
This is going to sound like excuses excuses but a) I have no idea what a slow cooker is but I don't like the idea of something being on when I'm not here - it sounds expensive (I'm not loaded!) and b) I don't know how to prepare food which is the problem
I can't address the issue of something being on when you're not around. I did google fire risk for slow cookers.
- if I could prepare/cook it in the first place then I guess I could freeze it (though I only have an ice compartment in the fridge - no freezer) but what would be the point - I could just eat it fresh no?
I was thinking that you could cook say four meals worth, and then freeze three of them. That would cut down on the total amount of cooking.
I'm thinking perhaps I need to put myself on a cooking course...? But then I know people who cook who are fat too!
Oh and just to clarify on the 'I can't cook' front - the notion of using a stock cube is like telling me to fly to the moon. I wouldn't know where to start.
Stock cubes are a great shortcut for stews. You can just take some random cut up vegetables, beans, meat etc, put them in a pot, add some water, perhaps some tomato paste, then crumble in one stock cube per person. (Most likely that won't be low salt cooking). Give it all a quick mix, and cook it for the right amount of time. They are a real shortcut to creating food with flavour.
The slow cooker would make it easier as you don't have to be so attentive as to how they are cooking as the food is unlikely to burn.
But I'm sure a cooking course would help as well. My cooking skills are very basic really. But it doesn't take a lot of knowledge or skills to be able to produce entirely edible calorie controlled food.
This is going to sound like excuses excuses but a) I have no idea what a slow cooker is but I don't like the idea of something being on when I'm not here - it sounds expensive (I'm not loaded!) and b) I don't know how to prepare food which is the problem - if I could prepare/cook it in the first place then I guess I could freeze it (though I only have an ice compartment in the fridge - no freezer) but what would be the point - I could just eat it fresh no?
I'm thinking perhaps I need to put myself on a cooking course...? But then I know people who cook who are fat too!
Oh and just to clarify on the 'I can't cook' front - the notion of using a stock cube is like telling me to fly to the moon. I wouldn't know where to start.
I was just reading the post you wrote before this and thought I would mention slow cookers, and then next post down somebody did. Apart from you not wanting to have something on while you are out they sound ideal for you I would say. You can get them for around £15 in Asda usually. You can make a stew by putting in raw meat, chopped veg (you can buy ready chopped veg and stewing meat in chunks) a couple of spoons of flour, water and a crumbled Oxo cube. You could use a jar of ready made sauce if you wanted. You can do curries and all sorts of things.
I had a quick look on youtube, but the demonstrations I found were all a bit overcomplicated. They weren't showing how simple it can be to use the slow cooker, they all added a few fancy steps.
Once you learn how to use a stock cube, you'll find all sorts of uses for them. There are different flavour ones as well. All you need are vegetables and other things such as beans etc. And you can vary the flavour just by bunging different stuff in, and cooking the same way. It offers an easy 'upgrade path' as you can start with simple stews that just use stock cubes and perhaps a little garlic and tomato puree for flavouring, and start using fewer cubes and more spices and herbs as you learn what you like.
We never had any problems with iron in our family as we all eat loads of hummous. The tahini (ground sesame seeds) in hummous is a very good iron source.
I had a quick look at the SW free 7 day plan but hated it instantly for 2 reasons: 1. the idea of planning food for 7 days - urrrggghhh no way! I don't know what I'll want this evening let alone for 7 days. 2. one of the first things is ham with laughing cow cheese - um nice - not! On a larger scale it looks like an awful lot of faff to cook all those different meals - I don't do that now so there's no way I'm going to sustain something like that.
Not faff, it's cooking properly rather than out of a packet, but you've explained already you aren't interested in that so I won't labour it
Re the ham and laughing cow cheese, it's actually really tasty and makes a great snack!! Don't knock it till you've tried it!! (and as you don't like faff, is extremely easy to make!)
I love hummus. But I have a tendency to get anaemic and the iron in meat is absorbed more quickly - or so I was told. I don't really know I was just told it's different from plant based iron. It works for me anyway. I tried supplements years ago but they tend to go straight through me or make me shaky or make the ends of my fingers numb (if they're vit B6 or 12).
I don't use the oven, other than for the odd poke with a fork so it will be more electricity for me. But - it will probably balance against not getting takeaways if use mainly veg. Obvioulsy meat is expensive but I doubt I'll ever start using a lot of it. Is there a book or website that shows how to get started? Bearing in mind I literally don't know how to do anything other than boil water and put rice in it?
I have to be careful about making nutritional advice. In some cases where people have deficiencies it can be for personal reasons such as individuals not adsorbing the nutrients. E.g. I believe that older people are more susceptible to vitamin B12 deficiencies as they lose the ability to efficiently adsorb it. Nutrition is the kind of thing where you probably want to get advice from your doctor, rather than random internet persons.
There are loads of youtube videos on basic cooking, and they're free and easily available. The quality does vary. I've just seen one where the woman cutting vegetables didn't seem very careful with the knife and I was expecting her to chop off a finger or two.
This one seems simple and straightforward, with the only special tricks being adding some spinach at the end of cooking. Her stock is prepared already. You can do this by crumbing one or more stock cubes to taste into a pyrex container, adding boiling water, and mixing.
Must be a link between B12 deficiency and anemia. My mum has to have the B12 injections every 6 weeks, otherwise she feels really poorly. I've been tested for both and show no signs of it thank God. So much medical history in my family that I would be a medical wonder if I had even half of all the problems we know about!
When I started this diet I stopped cooking for a month and started buying ready meals to break me of the love of cooking and eating and they were ready calorie counted so easy to add up.
Taught me better portion size too.
Now I am back to cooking smaller portions and enjoying the fact my food tastes so much better than the ready meals.
But what I am trying to say is you don't need to cook if you don't want to, a ping meal may not be great but anyone can do them.
Must be a link between B12 deficiency and anemia. My mum has to have the B12 injections every 6 weeks, otherwise she feels really poorly. I've been tested for both and show no signs of it thank God. So much medical history in my family that I would be a medical wonder if I had even half of all the problems we know about!
I don't understand that, the meals I ate were less than 400 cals each - 3 a day plus veg was plenty of food I found.
There's a lot of variation. There are not many ready meals that I can eat. I had a quick check, and the Innocent meals in a pot or whatever they're called are quite low calorie. E.g. this one (which I have eaten) is 300kcal, which for me is a reasonably OK number of calories for a lunch. http://www.ocado.com/webshop/product/Innocent-Caribbean-Jerk-Curry-with-Cocount-Rice-Sweetcorn--Mango-/61982011 However, I'm a bit (or more) of a skinflint, and find £3.95 for a pot of food quite a lot as it costs me a lot less to make something similar. And personally I found the Innocent 'pots' that I tried not really flavoured strongly enough. A pity, as the food looks nice and the dishes sound delicious from their descriptions.
Looking at the non-vegetarian options, there's something like this spaghetti and meatballs, which is 400g of food, and 499kcal (wonder if that's the accurate measurement or whether the marketing department argued for 499kcal ) http://www.ocado.com/webshop/product/Spaghetti--Meatballs-Waitrose/32069011 That's 124kcal/100g of food, which I don't think is too bad. But again it would cost a bit less than £2.39 to make something like that at home.
Looking at this, I think there are some ready meals (clearly not all) which have reasonable amounts of calories per amount of food, and which are suitable for dieting. However, I suspect that it's often going to be possible to produce even better diet food at home if it's specifically designed to be low calorie but filling.
This quick search has made me think that I should be following my own advice more and doing more slow cooking and freezing of my own ready meals. It'd save money, save calories, and I can put in the amount of spice that I like
Has anyone tried the 5:2 diet? My community diabetes nurse has recommended it to me, saying the diet does wonders for diabetics. I was given to understand though that fasting was bad for diabetics, but am keen to reach my final goal by the end of this year. Have already lost 30 kgs since Jan 2012, and still have another 20 to get to my goal before next Jan.
I lost just under 8lb in 6 weeks using 5:2 and it really wasn't difficult. You do need to stick at it as it is designed to be a long-term lifestyle change and not a 'diet' as such ('cos we all know those don't work, right?;)).
The great things about 5:2 are its simplicity and flexibility. You pretty quickly work out what 500 cals (or 600 in my case as i'm a bloke) looks like so there's no complicated meal planning or associated shopping. In addition, if you have an unexpected meal out or something, you just pick another day that week as one of the restricted calorie days.
Psychologically, it is much easier. With a traditional diet, you're normally facing potentially months of calorie-counting, meal planning and general deprivation. On 5:2, you've only ever got to hold out for a day. I mean, as I tell myself, you can stick to something for a day, can't you?:p
It's also very cheap - no books, classes, shakes, bars etc to buy. No tracking down organic quinoa or a specific brand of green tea. In fact, you save money because you're just eating less than you were before over the course of the week. On restricted days, I have pretty much the same thing on each 'fasting' day - a couple of eggs, scrambled with a tiny bit of butter(!) for breakfast and half a carton of fresh soup with either a single crispbread or half a slice of toast for lunch and dinner.
Woah ! That's a lot ! I'm keeping main meal down to under 500, and breakfast about 300, supper about 200.
This was bulk cooking, I ate about a quarter of it as part of my dinner. I'm going to divide the remainder into three portions, two of which will be frozen and the other in the fridge to take to work tomorrow. My :eek: was concerning my surprise at the number of the beast staring back at me from the calculator.
I seem to have moved down from 1800kcal a day to 1700 kcal a day as I went over my limit on two days and am compensating. Even now, I usually end up with much more than 666 calories available for my evening meal. As someone said many pages back, it is easier if you're a moderately big bloke and naturally have higher calorie requirements. That's one of the things I was thinking about a few pages back when I said that I'm lucky in that dieting is easier for me than for some other people.
Comments
I was watching a rerun of Rocky and when they weighed in before the fight I just thought "shit I weigh more than a heavyweight".
I know. I always used to get a grip when I went over a certain weight. I am now 2 stone over that weight.
I knew I was gaining weight and just kept on saying I would start a diet on Monday.
I also had the weight build up slowly, over decades. Without wishing to tempt fate, I'm heading towards my target weights. Then I have the problem of working out what to do then. If the weight built up slowly, does that mean that I can just eat what I want, but have a 'high' and 'low' weight limit. Where if I hit the 'high', I go back on the diet until I'm back down to the 'low'? While I can stick-ish to my diet reasonably well, I'm not sure I'd want to have a calorie limit for every day for the rest of my life.
Returning to the food side of things, I plan to have soup tonight, which is only 230kcal per can. But I'll make garlic bread for the rest of my family which is utter mega calories. Has anyone made lower calorie garlic bread by having thick slices and only spreading on thin garlic butter (marg in my case)? If so, how did it work?
I hate to say it and I used to hate when others said it to me I think it depends on how determined you are to a large degree, I can't personally risk not taking it seriously and changing my life, eating what I want got me to this position so I now eat what I need not what I want.
If I get to a weight I am happy with I will still be doing this with possibly just a couple of hundred extra calories thrown in. I know I will never be able to go back to what I was eating before so this has to be a change for the rest of my life.
And I commend my fellow dieters in arms who are living out the maximum, when the dieting gets tough, the tough get dieting.
PS: I forgot to mention to Striing, you mentioned that you eat a lot of fibrous vegetable dishes. But then you mentioned that you add rice or pasta. Perhaps the rice and pasta is where all the calories are. I was shocked when I calculated how many calories there were in the simple pasta dish I frequently made.
And it's only taken me 50 years to get to this state of mind, hitting 20 stone and becoming diabetic, don't let that be what makes you do it too, Sarah uses her weight in her comedy, not a healthy way to live IMO just look at how Dawn French for what can happen.
Just wondering, but would a slow cooker help? You can more or less just bung stuff in it including water and a stock cube maybe, hit the start button, and wait. You can load it up ahead of time with a timer set for it to be ready when you come home too. You'd probably have to chop things up a bit, but you'd have to do that for your stir fry.
Also, what about making your own defrost and nuke food by cooking large amounts and freezing in microwave safe boxes?
Slow cookers are available at various price points. E.g. here's a £25 one. http://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/B0045YO74W/?tag=hydra0b-21&hvadid=9550932549&ref=asc_df_B0045YO74W Here's a £20 one. http://www.argos.co.uk/static/Product/partNumber/4228826.htm There are cheaper ones, but these have good reviews.
I can't address the issue of something being on when you're not around. I did google fire risk for slow cookers.
I was thinking that you could cook say four meals worth, and then freeze three of them. That would cut down on the total amount of cooking.
Stock cubes are a great shortcut for stews. You can just take some random cut up vegetables, beans, meat etc, put them in a pot, add some water, perhaps some tomato paste, then crumble in one stock cube per person. (Most likely that won't be low salt cooking). Give it all a quick mix, and cook it for the right amount of time. They are a real shortcut to creating food with flavour.
The slow cooker would make it easier as you don't have to be so attentive as to how they are cooking as the food is unlikely to burn.
But I'm sure a cooking course would help as well. My cooking skills are very basic really. But it doesn't take a lot of knowledge or skills to be able to produce entirely edible calorie controlled food.
I was just reading the post you wrote before this and thought I would mention slow cookers, and then next post down somebody did. Apart from you not wanting to have something on while you are out they sound ideal for you I would say. You can get them for around £15 in Asda usually. You can make a stew by putting in raw meat, chopped veg (you can buy ready chopped veg and stewing meat in chunks) a couple of spoons of flour, water and a crumbled Oxo cube. You could use a jar of ready made sauce if you wanted. You can do curries and all sorts of things.
Once you learn how to use a stock cube, you'll find all sorts of uses for them. There are different flavour ones as well. All you need are vegetables and other things such as beans etc. And you can vary the flavour just by bunging different stuff in, and cooking the same way. It offers an easy 'upgrade path' as you can start with simple stews that just use stock cubes and perhaps a little garlic and tomato puree for flavouring, and start using fewer cubes and more spices and herbs as you learn what you like.
We never had any problems with iron in our family as we all eat loads of hummous. The tahini (ground sesame seeds) in hummous is a very good iron source.
BTW: I looked it up, and it seems that using a slow cooker does consume a bit more power than using a standard oven, but not many times more. http://www.stretcher.com/stories/01/010528j.cfm#.UTd5nBkUYqB
Not faff, it's cooking properly rather than out of a packet, but you've explained already you aren't interested in that so I won't labour it
Re the ham and laughing cow cheese, it's actually really tasty and makes a great snack!! Don't knock it till you've tried it!! (and as you don't like faff, is extremely easy to make!)
I have to be careful about making nutritional advice. In some cases where people have deficiencies it can be for personal reasons such as individuals not adsorbing the nutrients. E.g. I believe that older people are more susceptible to vitamin B12 deficiencies as they lose the ability to efficiently adsorb it. Nutrition is the kind of thing where you probably want to get advice from your doctor, rather than random internet persons.
There are loads of youtube videos on basic cooking, and they're free and easily available. The quality does vary. I've just seen one where the woman cutting vegetables didn't seem very careful with the knife and I was expecting her to chop off a finger or two.
This one seems simple and straightforward, with the only special tricks being adding some spinach at the end of cooking. Her stock is prepared already. You can do this by crumbing one or more stock cubes to taste into a pyrex container, adding boiling water, and mixing.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y3ug_Ybp6ws
Taught me better portion size too.
Now I am back to cooking smaller portions and enjoying the fact my food tastes so much better than the ready meals.
But what I am trying to say is you don't need to cook if you don't want to, a ping meal may not be great but anyone can do them.
That's pernicious anaemia, slightly different to normal anaemia. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pernicious_anemia
There's a lot of variation. There are not many ready meals that I can eat. I had a quick check, and the Innocent meals in a pot or whatever they're called are quite low calorie. E.g. this one (which I have eaten) is 300kcal, which for me is a reasonably OK number of calories for a lunch. http://www.ocado.com/webshop/product/Innocent-Caribbean-Jerk-Curry-with-Cocount-Rice-Sweetcorn--Mango-/61982011 However, I'm a bit (or more) of a skinflint, and find £3.95 for a pot of food quite a lot as it costs me a lot less to make something similar. And personally I found the Innocent 'pots' that I tried not really flavoured strongly enough. A pity, as the food looks nice and the dishes sound delicious from their descriptions.
Looking at the non-vegetarian options, there's something like this spaghetti and meatballs, which is 400g of food, and 499kcal (wonder if that's the accurate measurement or whether the marketing department argued for 499kcal
Sainsbury's Vegetable Chili is one of my go-to foods for when I need to fill up but don't have many calories left. It's £1.39 for a 400g tin, and 232 calories for the whole tin which is 58kcal/100g. http://www.mysupermarket.co.uk/sainsburys-price-comparison/Tinned_Vegetables/Sainsburys_Vegetable_Chilli_in_a_Rich_Spicy_Sauce_400g.html But that's a bit of a cheat as it doesn't have the rice that the Innocent pot has, and that's where a lot of the calories are. Whether tinned food has all the nutrition of fresh ready meals is another question. But I think this leads back to slow cookers, where food such as vegetable chilli could be cooked easily and perhaps even more cheaply (depending on ingredients). Just looking, and the chilli con carne has almost twice the calories per weight. http://www.mysupermarket.co.uk/#/sainsburys-price-comparison/tinned_meat_and_poultry/sainsburys_chilli_con_carne_400g.html
Looking at this, I think there are some ready meals (clearly not all) which have reasonable amounts of calories per amount of food, and which are suitable for dieting. However, I suspect that it's often going to be possible to produce even better diet food at home if it's specifically designed to be low calorie but filling.
This quick search has made me think that I should be following my own advice more and doing more slow cooking and freezing of my own ready meals. It'd save money, save calories, and I can put in the amount of spice that I like
I lost just under 8lb in 6 weeks using 5:2 and it really wasn't difficult. You do need to stick at it as it is designed to be a long-term lifestyle change and not a 'diet' as such ('cos we all know those don't work, right?;)).
The great things about 5:2 are its simplicity and flexibility. You pretty quickly work out what 500 cals (or 600 in my case as i'm a bloke) looks like so there's no complicated meal planning or associated shopping. In addition, if you have an unexpected meal out or something, you just pick another day that week as one of the restricted calorie days.
Psychologically, it is much easier. With a traditional diet, you're normally facing potentially months of calorie-counting, meal planning and general deprivation. On 5:2, you've only ever got to hold out for a day. I mean, as I tell myself, you can stick to something for a day, can't you?:p
It's also very cheap - no books, classes, shakes, bars etc to buy. No tracking down organic quinoa or a specific brand of green tea. In fact, you save money because you're just eating less than you were before over the course of the week. On restricted days, I have pretty much the same thing on each 'fasting' day - a couple of eggs, scrambled with a tiny bit of butter(!) for breakfast and half a carton of fresh soup with either a single crispbread or half a slice of toast for lunch and dinner.
But when I put in all the ingredient calories and hit the 'calculate' button, I found that in total it has 666 kcal :eek:
This was bulk cooking, I ate about a quarter of it as part of my dinner. I'm going to divide the remainder into three portions, two of which will be frozen and the other in the fridge to take to work tomorrow. My :eek: was concerning my surprise at the number of the beast staring back at me from the calculator.
I seem to have moved down from 1800kcal a day to 1700 kcal a day as I went over my limit on two days and am compensating. Even now, I usually end up with much more than 666 calories available for my evening meal. As someone said many pages back, it is easier if you're a moderately big bloke and naturally have higher calorie requirements. That's one of the things I was thinking about a few pages back when I said that I'm lucky in that dieting is easier for me than for some other people.