The dieters' support thread

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Do it as I do....driving 20 km with the bicycle to a well known butcher, buying wonderful already marinated steaks, driving 20 km back home: Eat them without any regrets. ^^

I'm about to get my first high powered commercial quality blender, called The Blendtec. I'll be using it every day, to make smoothies, or juices, soups, nut butters, nut milks, salad dressings, sauces, and even vegetarian patties! I think I found myself a new, healthy obsession... There's no way I'm going back to being unhealthy after I get this mean machine!

Can you let me know how well it works? I have a ninja blender and it works pretty well, but there are limits to how well I can blend something.

hiya Draco
you asked for feedback so here it is- just eliminate white food from your diet, and your battle of the bulge is mostly done! by white food I mean anything with sugar or white flour or starch in it, as well as giving up fruit juice/sugary sodas. that means drastically cutting back on things like potatoes and white flour tortillas. corn also is to be limited. replace these items with things like quinoa and oats and multicolored veggies. if you must have bread, pumpernickel and rye are slower-metabolizing compared to things like whole wheat bread. if you make salad the main dish [as dr. Joel Fuhrman recommends] that will take the edge off your appetite if you eat the salad first before you eat anything else. always drink a full glass of water [sweetened with the 0-calorie thing of your choice] with each meal. you will feel better if you keep well-hydrated, especially when you exercise. speaking of that, the best exercise you could do at this point would be to just fast-walk for at least a half-hour each day, and if there are hills to climb so much the better. walk as though you are late for work, and the weight will come off. I do these things and I have successfully lost weight on this regimen. of course, your mileage may vary, as they say.
good luck to you
bruce

Sure I can do that. I also have a ninja blender and you're right, there are limits to how well it blends things. It also smokes sometimes. Anywho, should be getting the blender soon. I'll update when I get it working. I believe I'll be breaking it in with a kale shake of some kind.

hmm i think im about to start losing lots of wieght because i just dont want to eat the majority of all food everywhere lol watch food inc on youtube and you might feel the same

I got the blender. It's awesome! I can now say my kale shakes are smooth like silk. It makes stuff really fast too (30 seconds for smoothies option), so it's a good time saver as well.

I like those results, smooth kale is better than what I get. For what I put through the blender (including beets and cauliflower), I go from large chunks to smaller ones. Thanks for the info.

Haha yep! The texture is kind of like melted ice cream. It tastes better too because everything is blended so well that it mixes together better. Far better than the ninja or any other cheap-semi cheap blender. I haven't tried beets or cauliflower yet, but I have some beets waiting to be turned into a juice soon, via blendtec, it can make juices too but unlike juicers, the fiber doesn't get pushed to a separate container. I just realized I probably sound like a Blendtec Rep now, but I'm just stoked to have a real good blender. Anyways, I've found beet juice to be an amazingly good pre-workout drink for increasing endurance. Many Olympic runners swear by it! A little know fact for everyone, beets are high in nitrates, which help muscles use oxygen more efficiently. I tried it out a few times on some runs after having a bad bout with asthma, and to my surprise the beet juice made many of my runs easier to finish.

I've come to the conclusion I was eating too little calories and generally too many from fat. Now I just eat pasta and pizza all the time and can maintain/lose weight depending on how I do things. Also eating not eating at night.

I'm sold, although I'll probably keep using my ninja to break it all down a little first. I'm guessing you add some kind of fluid as opposed to just cramming it all. I buy up the produce isle and blend it all, I get watermellons and cucumbers to make it more fluid. The small ninja can cut it better, but it'll take me all day to blend with it. Not the mention the motor overheats in either case.

What does fat from calories have to do with anything? I thought the only thing that mattered was straight up calories?

Also Knives, went through this thread a bit and see you noticed the Starting Strength program. I got myself a set of barbells I'm ready to use (I'm already sticking to diet and cardio, weightlifting should be no problem), but I can't keep proper form at all. Is there anything that could help me with that?

Well early on, I tried a higher fat diet and gained weight. I rationalized it as a "bulk" from lifting, and figured most was muscle, but I felt fat nonetheless. Now I'm 185 and can see abs (though blurry) and don't have a belly anymore. More recently I cut out things like, say, things fried in bacon grease (but I still will put a small spoon of olive oil on pasta/etc) so that it's usually under 25-30% of total calories. It is basically true the fat you eat is the fat you wear, with caveats, in that you do need fat for proper hormonal response/etc. But still, your body will store dietary fat as fat if it's in excess of it's requirements, whereas carbs will go generally go into your muscles as fuel (especially if you're an athlete.)

The reason why a high fat diet "works" especially if you're "crashing" on carbs is if you have a hypoglycemia type of issue (which later usually turns into full blown diabetes,) which I was having. It's my opinion hypoglycemia is pretty much due to stress. So if you're chronically stressed, a low carb diet may "work" short term to prevent the hypoglycemia from happening, but (my experience) is once you get back to lots of carbs, whatever problems you have with carbs will be compounded until you get used to it again.

As far as carbs go, too, what's cool about weightlifting is even though aerobically, not too many "calories" are used during it (though you'd be surprised sometimes) your muscles need glycogen. Your body can make muscle glycogen from fat, but it's not ideal. From carbs it's much more ideal. So the more you lift, you'll be burning stored carbs in your muscles. Carbohydrates ARE the main fuel during lifting/anything athletic.

As far as SS goes, well, I didn't really use SS really. I just kinda did whatever the hell I wanted in the weight room, usually I'd always work up to a max every session and hope to break one. This is kinda taxing on the nervous system/body, and I don't know if it can be done long term. I couldn't, but then again it coincided with eating like no carbs. I did very low volume lifting, usually triples or under and lots of sets. Looking back, probably due to low carbs. I can't actually do an SS style program, as I basically will bite off more than I can chew as I always keep wanting to add weight to the barbell too fast and I won't hit my rep/set goals and will stall. My best programming advice was actually from weightlifter Mikhail Koklyaev. I do 5x5 now with about 70% of my max, and I waveload 5lbs more up and down per set (10lbs on lower body lifts.) The waveloading is my own thing I like to do.
http://www.allthingsgym.com/mikhail-kok ... ed-elbows/



As far as form, this goes with what Mikhail is talking about. You really just have to cut the ego out and use whatever weight you can lift with good form. For me anyway, 70% of max goes up with good form. I mean, there's some obvious stuff. You can video tape your form or have someone more knowledgeable than you at your gym check it, and then also you can stretch to get into positions better (ie, deep squat needs hip and hamstring flexibility, you probably also should be able to touch your toes if you're deadlifting, too) but I feel the main thing is just ego. Of course Rippetoe's program is about adding weight to the barbell until you can't anymore, which works for someone new, but I don't think it's really great for good form acquisition because the form needs lots of reps for it to become learned in your brain.

Let's see, what else. Rip is a dick on his forums and seems like in general a pretty irritable old man who tries to sell everyone strength training with dreams of becoming a manly Viking warrior or something. I'm torn as he is a decent promoter of actual strength training instead of 5lb dumbells on a bosu ball, and much of what he says is correct, but some of his theories are pretty out there and I can't say I really like him personally anymore.

Sucks when you gotta reverse a bunch of your opinions. Feels bad.

Thanks for the info, although it ran on for a bit.

Where are you getting all this from, by the way? It'd be nice if I could know the WHY in what I'm doing, which is what you've already done in your post.

I just spend all day doing google-fu.

http://www.drmelsiff.com/10352/russian- ... -and-diet/
Russian study from the 1980s about weightlifters and diet.

http://anthonycolpo.com/why-low-carb-di ... es-part-1/
http://anthonycolpo.com/why-low-carb-di ... es-part-2/
Decent article set.

But what do you want more specifics about as far as why they work? Again, they're only my opinions. You should read a vast variety of opinions and decide. Sometimes even biased opinions do help. IE, vegans are big on "the fat you eat is the fat you wear" and it's true, to a point. I'd say their ideology is wrong, but they make a valid point, just as low carb/keto/paleo makes the valid point that your body needs fat to make hormones so you shouldn't be afraid of fat.

Also, for lifting imo, if you wanna nerd the hell out, look up Soviet stuff. Bud Charniga sells a bunch of Soviet weightlifting sports science books translated. I personally think the Soviet stuff is most scientific. The Chinese and Bulgarians/some other Eastern Euro countries have done OK in weightlifting, but the Soviets have always done consistently good from the 1950s until now. That and from what I read about Chinese methodology, it's actually an evolved Soviet system with more variety.

As far as scientifically why I believe 60-70% works well like Mikhail Koklyaev says, well, first, the Soviets were big proponents of staying in that sorta range for most of training. If you look at, say, Sheiko powerlifting routine, it's pretty much like that with a lot of volume. But the bigger reason is simple mathematics.

Do you know how horsepower or watts are calculated? It's force x distance ÷ time. Since I'm big into cars and stuff, that's the analogy I'll use. Take a bicycle. On a bike, you can probably output a pretty high amount of torque. Probably even like 100lbs or more per pedal push. There are some car engines that output that amount of torque. But on a bike you spin only, say, 75-100rpm usually. So theoretical bicycle with 100 ft/lb torque and 75RPM would only be 1.5HP (which is extremely high for a human on a bicycle, just an example.) However, if you have a car with 80 ft/lb torque, that spins, say, 6000RPM, it'll be 91 horsepower. The bike has more torque, but the car has more power.

As far as strength training goes, most people go by feel. Most people don't stopwatch their reps or play them back from a slow motion camera to know the exact time they're doing stuff, nor have they usually measured distance. Force is pretty easy to measure, as you're lifting a bar with weight on it. I guess my theory (and maybe I should write this all somewhere besides an Aspergers forum) is that a middle ground of weight/speed is needed to improve power production. So you either need to improve speed or improve torque for more power. So going with what the Russian's like saying about spending lots of time in 60-70%, it makes sense, as at that range you'll still be moving the bar quickly but it still takes a fair amount of force, thus you won't plateau in that range. Like uh, if it takes you 5 seconds to lift 200lbs, but 2 seconds to lift 150, 200 is your max, it's pretty unlikely you'll be able to use more force and have it take, say, 6 seconds. So thus working at 150 would build more power. Then in athletics/etc, you usually don't have six seconds to push something or jump, too, so training for power is more beneficial.

I don't know how to not be wordy.

Not that this is a problem for most people here, but it's oddly hard to get 3000-4000 calories a day unless you're eating junk food. My weight loss was stalling back to when I was eating whatever, and it was probably less total calories, but inconsistent. I guess I gotta be a slave to myfitnesspal forever.

Like for example, here was yesterday. I went skating 25 mins. Before skating I had a piece of bread with hummus on (which I forgot to count) then after I had a burger. I was totalled out to like 1000-1500 cals left, then I had 500 cals of instant noodles (not fried ones) with cabbage and stuff I put in, and some eggs. Then I went (inadvertantly, didn't mean it this long) for a 3 hour walk. Bam, another 1000 calories. If I went "intuitively" I would have had like another thing of instant noodles, but then I'd have been 1000+ cals under my 1000 calorie deficit. Obviously 2000 cal deficits are not good for your metabolism. I solved it by eating 1/2 of a pizza with part skim cheese, and another bowl of instant noodles, but yeah.

Conversely, there'll be days I don't do s**t and eat fast food with my family and go like 1K over.