Weight / Fat loss

Dammit

I use the Tanita scales.

Clearly not as good as a caliper test or immersion tank but they give a reasonable indication as to whether I am closer to a stick of celery or a pork scratching in terms of fat.

They suggest readings are not taken immediately after exercise, immediately after waking/feeding/drinking as these all tend to affect your electrolyte levels.

You need to have the specific sports Tanita models, or you will not get an accurate BF% measurement. You will still get accurate trend measurements though, which are good enough if you are trying to track BF shift.

But for tynan's sake, don't let it come into contact with cake, or we're all doomed.

The guys at CERN are currantly propelling tiny crumbs of walnut sponge at each other in an attempt to isolate the super-dense Jamacian Ginger particle. Scientists from Dundee are assisting closely.

my scales are set to the sports function

Trees dropping their fruit at the mo, no bad thing I guess, except Mrs ROOG makes em into apple crumble, Aaarrrgggg!

yes but most people live near a fitness first and this thread is about losing a few pounds, not making onto the oxford rowing team.

"losing a few pounds" with no aim of improving your fitness or wanting to "look athletic" is very easy. You dont need a gym. Just eat less.

Works like magic, honest.

My brother was a total fatty verging on morbidly obese. He didnt increase his physical activity at all, and rides a motorbike.

He is now thinner than me, (ive always been the "thin" one of the family) wearing small-medium sized clothes when before he needed to go to special shops for xxxl stuff.

How did he do it? Just started eating marginally less, one technique was using cutlery for everything he ate. Made eating slower and helped him get full with less food. He still has a terrible diet "health wise" almost all carbs, he will eat snacks of oven chips, bread, mayonaise and large glasses of sugary mango juice with everything. So very high sugar/carb.

But he is getting thinner and thinner.

People make it seem so complicated, this is probably down to the gym and diet product industry wanting to sell you services. But really, you just need to cut your calorific input by the tiniest amount so it falls below your output. And bang! The weight will fly off.

(sorry if any of this stuff sounded patronising, I find it hard to tell)

Trees dropping their fruit at the mo, no bad thing I guess, except Mrs ROOG makes em into apple crumble, Aaarrrgggg!

This is a good example.

Roog, you can probably get away with eating as much apple crumble as you want. Even if its served with heavy cream.

You just need to cut back elsewhere in your diet. Mind numbingly simple, but true.

you can probably get away with eating as much apple crumble as you want. Even if its served with heavy cream.

balls

balls

Heavy cream balls? served with apple pie?

I jfg'led apple crumble and it told me that a portion of Somerfields variety was 450kcal.

2500kcal is the old RDA recommended for sedentary men. This is in the process of being upped to 3000kcal by the relevant authorities.

The maintenance level for a typical male who does a bit of cycling each day is going to be at least 3000kcal. But just to be extreme, lets drop it to 2000kcal.

Thats four portions of supermarket apple crumble with 200kcal to spare.

I jfg'led apple crumble and it told me that a portion of Somerfields variety was 450kcal.

2500kcal is the old RDA recommended for sedentary men. This is in the process of being upped to 3000kcal by the relevant authorities.

The maintenance level for a typical male who does a bit of cycling each day is going to be at least 3000kcal. But just to be extreme, lets drop it to 2000kcal.

Thats four portions of supermarket apple crumble with 200kcal to spare.

I thought the 2500 kcal was for moderate exercise too?

Thats four portions of supermarket apple crumble with 200kcal to spare.
Which is equivilent to 40 black coffees without sugar.

I'm starting that diet tomorrow.

**Description **Cream, fresh, double
**Serving Size **5 fl.oz (150g)
**kCal **674
**Fat(g) **72.0

This is in the process of being upped to 3000kcal by the relevant authorities.

Holy shit.

I manually calculated my daily calorie intake requirements and what I found was that my actual requirements were hovering around the 1600kcal mark, so far short of the RDA. This was about 3 or 4 years ago when I was fatter than I am now but got significantly less exercise. This also explains why it's so easy for me to put weight on without appearing to really eat obscene levels of scran. It also demonstrates that these official guidelines are absolutely terrifying.

How big are you bothwell?

Your size makes a massive difference to how much calories you need for maintenance, aswell as activity levels obviously.

Apparently the relevant authorities found out that they had been way to cautious with the 2500kcal thing, and that most men need more especially if they are doing the recommended amount of physical activity (I think 45 minutes a day of walking or whatever).

Look it up though I cant remember the specifics.

I think it is a step in the right direction. According the the BMI charts, I at 5'8" am overweight at the 12 stones I weigh. This is quite frankly ridiculous, I have a totally average body, with skinny limbs/frame. I am trying to put on about 3 more stone to be more athletic, I have such a lack of muscle in my upper body that my shoulders jump out of the sockets causing me lots of pain.

The BMI charts say I would be healthier at 8 stone! This is what shocks me! I would be a sick little wealking at that weight.

I'm a tiny little munchkin with a bird-like frame so probably not really within the "average" bracket anyway. My BMI (such as it is) is apparently normal - another half stone or so and I'd nudge into the overweight range.

The problem with all of these official guidelines is that they really don't take into account individual factors - how could they? Trying to cater for everybody in a single average figure is never going to work. It leads to people like me seeing recommendations to massively over-eat and people like you being advised to give anorexia a go. Terrible stuff.

The only way to be sure is to actually do the calculations yourself but it's not so easy to fit the instructions for that on the back flap of a Kit-Kat wrapper :/

What calculations are you making to come up with these numbers?

IK=300KJ at room temp. So, taking a datum of 3 Francs to the Centigrade, that's roughly 27 Deg West, magnetic. All that over a cubic Scout, and you get roughly 3 cream cakes to the statute inch.

Which is equivilent to 40 black coffees without sugar.

I'm starting that diet tomorrow.

Black coffee without sugar has calories?

Coffee, Black

                                                                   1 mug/270ml
                                                                   **5.4**

I'm rightly scared to argue math with Object but can't the poor man have 400 coffees a day with 200kcal to spare?

What calculations are you making to come up with these numbers?

Pretty simple maths, tbh: there are 3500kcals in 1lb of fat, so you measure your weight every day and plot it against a chart that separately details what your daily calorie intake is. You can use the average of the difference between the two to determine what your energy expenditure is. Note that this needs to be done over a fairly long period of time to cover the days where you eat ten pizzas during a marathon PS3 session or Ramadan begins.

Here is a superbly boring but illustrative spreadsheet with all these things filled out and a moving average line for extra nerd-cred: http://jeremy.zawodny.com/blog/archives/006851.html

I'm rightly scared to argue math with Object but can't the poor man have 400 coffees a day with 200kcal to spare?
Not if he's eating 4 portions of apple crumble a day as well as drinking coffee.

Bothwell, how does that account for days when you are more hydrated? If you drink more water you will be heavier but have consumed no extra calories. I thought that was why it was advised to only weight yourself once a week, so you aren't worrying about fluctuationa from day to day.

Bothwell, how does that account for days when you are more hydrated? If you drink more water you will be heavier but have consumed no extra calories. I thought that was why it was advised to only weight yourself once a week, so you aren't worrying about fluctuationa from day to day.

It accounts for it through the moving average - extreme peaks and troughs are smoothed out over time as you increase the size of the data set. It's not really that great for people who tend to freak out at daily fluctuations, but if you recognise that those fluctuations are normal and that they happen to everybody (sometimes with no apparent reason) then it becomes a very powerful tool for seeing what happens to the fuel that you put into your body.

But it's no use measuring them for a couple of weeks then pretending that's enough of a data set - you're talking a period of 5-6+ months before you get a genuinely useful average out of the data that accounts for natural peaks / troughs.