For those of us in very bad shape- your exercise/diet plan progress and mine

Warpath

Warpath

kiwifarms.net
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Dec 16, 2022
Dear diary,
I'm 6'3, 419lbs (at my heaviest a few years ago, I was 543lbs- sporadic keto/fasting between bouts of eating like a complete asshole got me down to where I am now). I'm almost 40. My father and grandfather died in their 40s. I'm not in great shape- throughout my 30s I've had random bouts of back pain that put me in bed for weeks at a time. Usually I'd get over it, walk with a cane for a month or so, and be back to normal in about two months. Then, a short time ago, I lost feeling and some control over my foot- a nerve in my back got pinched, and now it's unlikely to ever go back to normal (thankfully I've been doing stretches that seem to have kept me from going back into rando back pain for the last 6 months. We'll see if that holds). I've been overweight pretty much my entire life- even as a little kid I was at least pudgy. The last time I was near 200lbs was middle school. I'm genuinely terrified of going out way too young- I knew I didn't exactly win the genetic jackpot vis a vis longevity and I let myself go for far too long. So uh. It's time to put up or shut up I guess.

I'm new here. I wanted to make a topic about digging myself out of this hole I'm in, see if anyone else was dealing with similar. Share my diet and exercise details, track progress, leave that stuff open for mockery or advice. What am I doing wrong, am I crazy, will I make my goal weight, will you make yours, have you given up, etc.

According to random internet calorie calculator, someone at my age, weight, and height should be doing roughly 4k calories a day to maintain my weight, and roughly 3,200 for 'extreme weight loss.' I've been randomly dieting long enough to know that 2lbs a week being 'extreme' is a weird metric- there have been times where I've lost that much in a day. I kind of want to get used to eating the amount of food a normal person my height and build would reasonably take in. Almighty-surely-never-wrong-random-internet-calorie-calculator says for someone who works out 5 days a week at my height and weighs 220lbs, that'd be about 2,500cal. So... here's my plan-


Monday to Friday
Omelet for breakfast (6 eggs, about 420 calories, 400 calories worth of cheese cooked in about 200 calories worth of butter), side of sauerkraut (calories not even worth counting), coffee with about 200 calories of coconut oil (a spoon). Total- about 1220 calories.
500 calories of wiggle room for a snack I might have when being social. If my friend offers me a slice of pizza or some fruit or cookies or something, I don't want to be rude and this has often been what has de-railed diets for me in the past, so this time I'm just making an allowance for it. 500 calories, no mas. Most days we don't share food, so I'll often avoid any calories at this point in the day.
Pre-workout meal (final meal of the day)- 3 cups home made French onion soup (onions, butter, beef broth, dark ale, collagen, diatomaceous earth) (not sure how many calories that is, but it can't be much- 200?), 200 calories of gruyere cheese, 1 toasted home made dinner roll (all purpose flour, yeast, salt, egg, honey, EVOO) about the size of a small apple (no idea how many calories that'd be but I'm guessing 300 max). Total- maybe 700 calories.
Daily total: Between 2,420 and 1,920lbs.
Saturday- fasting- coffee, tea, water with fresh squeezed lemon or lime, roughly 0 calories
Sunday- feasting.
Basically eating whatever I feel like with the understanding that I'll try and keep it around or less than 4,000 calories.
Weekly total- maximum 16,100 calories

Exercise
Monday through Friday- First week of dedicated exercise, I want to do about 1 hour total per day. 30 minutes calisthenics/stretches/working a punching bag, about 20 minutes worth of lifting, and 10 minutes of cool down/stretching. Eventually when I'm comfortable doing so, I want my workout to basically last as long as this perfect exercise playlist: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IjP89xahSIM

I have a 15lb kettle bell, 40lbs for a barbell (which itself weighs 10 lbs), two 20lb dumbbells, an exercise bike that I'm still about 20lbs too heavy to use, some stretchy bands, a home made punching bag, and a 9lb sledge hammer & really big tire I can whack with it, and rope to drag said big tire around the yard. (for the record, for the past few months I've been exercising infrequently, and I've managed to get to 85 bench presses by doing 50 presses- 30 seconds rest- 25 presses- 30 seconds rest- 10 presses).

Goals
I have my dreaded birthday in February, and I want to weigh no more than 350lbs by that point. I haven't been that svelte since high school. By my next birthday, I want to be at or below my goal weight- 220lbs. Why 220lbs? Well, I've always been a big fellow. Thick. Meaty paws, giant cranium. The BMI says I should be 200 or less, but that just feels off. I want to be strong. Not going to fucks with being like Lou Ferrigno or whatever, but it'd be nice to look like say... Brian Blessed did back in the 70s, which as we all know is peak masculinity.

TLDR: I don't want to die, I'm almost 40, I'm fat as hell, I'm getting serious about exercise and diet, anyone else in the same hole, am I insane, where am I, what am I doing here, who are you people
 

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skate sometimes, drink more water
i'm not overweight i just have muscles made of uncooked spaghetti
 
Hey man, I'm not really close to your size (225, 6'0), but one of the things that really helped me lose weight was accepting the fact that being hungry is not necessarily a bad thing. Hunger is meant to tell you how soon to eat, not how much to eat. If you're no longer hungry, then you don't have to (and even shouldn't) continue to eat. Being hungry is a side effect from our day's as monkeys where 3 missed meals was the difference between living and dying. We have ample food in our society, we can pretty safely just ignore those signals. Once I accepted that mentality, I started dropping weight like it was nothing.

Aside from that, my biggest concern with your breakfast is that you're getting in 1200 cals with almost no fiber. You should really pad that breakfast with something that's hard for your stomach to break down so you stay fuller longer. My go to breakfast is two eggs + a small handful of cheese (~200 calls) and a small bagged salad (150 cals). That usually keeps me full until noon because the salad pads out the eggs and cheese. Your diet looks really fat heavy. I know you're trying to go for a keto diet, but that's largely been seen as a meme diet in recent years. I would really try to incorporate a lot more uncooked/processed veggies into your plan. Like munch on a bag of carrot sticks while you're working, or replace your coconut coffee with a microwaved potato.
 
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Doesn't want to die young, eats at least 5,600 mg of cholesterol a week for breakfast. Brilliant.

Wants to lose weight, has one day a week where he doesn't count calories and just lets himself go unchecked. Brilliant.

Counts calories, still puts 200 empty Calories of oil in his coffee 5 days a week. Brilliant. You can apparently go without that shit in your coffee on Saturdays, unless you're lying to yourself and us about having 0 calories on Saturdays. Cut that shit out of your coffee, and that's 1000 fewer calories you have to burn per week to lose weight. Considering 1 hour of light exercise will only burn ~300 Calories, that daily teaspoon of oil in your coffee is offsetting like 3 days of exercise. Ask yourself if it's really worth it.

How are you not dead from scurvy? Unless your daily "side" of sauerkraut is a literal gallon of kraut, there's no way you're getting enough vitamin C in that diet. And it wouldn't surprise me if 100 lbs of your weight is from an impacted colon, since your diet is seriously lacking fiber. Jesus Christ, eat some broccoli or something. Or switch out your dinner roll, which has essentially no nutritional value, with a salad or something.
 
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Shart Attack said:
Doesn't want to die young, eats at least 5,600 mg of cholesterol a week for breakfast. Brilliant.

Wants to lose weight, has one day a week where he doesn't count calories and just lets himself go unchecked. Brilliant.

Counts calories, still puts 200 empty Calories of oil in his coffee 5 days a week. Brilliant. You can apparently go without that shit in your coffee on Saturdays, unless you're lying to yourself and us about having 0 calories on Saturdays. Cut that shit out of your coffee, and that's 1000 fewer calories you have to burn per week to lose weight. Considering 1 hour of light exercise will only burn ~300 Calories, that daily teaspoon of oil in your coffee is offsetting like 3 days of exercise. Ask yourself if it's really worth it.

How are you not dead from scurvy? Unless your daily "side" of sauerkraut is a literal gallon of kraut, there's no way you're getting enough vitamin C in that diet. And it wouldn't surprise me if 100 lbs of your weight is from an impacted colon, since your diet is seriously lacking fiber. Jesus Christ, eat some broccoli or something. Or switch out your dinner roll, which has essentially no nutritional value, with a salad or something.
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Yeh, not the nicest way to say it, but I have to agree.

Guy, you’re 450lbs. You obviously didn’t get to that point through healthy intuitive eating, so you’re going to have to pivot. It won’t be easy, it won’t be fun. But if you don’t want to die within 10 years you have to take the hard road.

You should really up the healthy, lean protein. The meme meal prep for body builders is Chicken breasts, brown rice, and broccoli. I try to have that meal at least twice a week, but my go to dinner is chicken thighs, couscous, and frozen-steamed veggies. Chicken thighs are great because you don’t have to know how to cook to make them. They’re a very forgiving cut of meat and are super tender/juicy. Salt them, bring them up to room temperature, add garlic powder and pepper, then bake at 400 for 30 mins and they’ll taste amazing.

400 calories of cheese is a LOT of cheese. You should reasonably be using a quarter of that. My recommendation is to add a large serving of uncooked/unprocessed veggies to your breakfast, cut back to 3-4 eggs, and then use a quarter of the cheese. If the eggs are lacking in flavor, add spices/a vinegar based sauce on top of them for a better taste with a negligible amount of added cals.

I also think you’re likely undercounting the cals in your French onion soup. First of all, man cannot live on French onion soup alone, so I would cut that back to being a once or twice a week meal. Second of all, onions are super high in sugar by weight. Caramelized onions are not a euphemism. When cooked low and slow, onions release enough sugar to become covered in sugar. Your soup very likely contains next to no nutritional value, and is comparable to drinking a glass of coke with butter, cheese, and bread in it
 
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Sniperwoof said:
Lmao what the fuck. I drink, smoke, work a desk job and spend most of my time reading and playing vidya and I'm 6'1 168.

What kind of mongrel le 56% genes do you people have?
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Being of a healthy BMI doesn't mean you can lead an unhealthy diet and sedentary lifestyle without consequences.
 
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Honestly, I'm not trying to be mean, but your entire OP reminds me of lolcow April Lauren. She has all these big goals and exercise plans, and none of it has ever worked. She's been yo-yoing the same weight for years. She tries all these plans and has all of these ideas about her health, yet she never does the one thing that would actually save her, and that's eating less calories. I would suggest you check out her thread and see first hand how this kind of mindset will never lead you to weightloss. Don't end up like April.

It really isn't complicated to lose weight, you just have to stop eating so much. Forget focusing on exercise right now, you can't work off enough calories to negate the amount of calories you are currently consuming, and it's likely a hazard to your health from risk of injuries at your size. You can literally lose the weight while sitting on your butt playing video games all day, as long as you actually cut calories.

And forget cheat days. Cheat days are for people with discipline and the ability to actually count calories and stick with a long term diet, which you clearly lack to end up in this situation in the first place.

You have to be honest with yourself, REALLY honest. You know you're unhealthy and you want to make a change. That's a great start. Now be honest with your calorie cutting and counting. You have to learn how to count calories and log them correctly or else you'll never lose the weight.

Stop making grand plans and goals. When you make big plans like this this, you will inevitably fail and that will demotivate you. Stop making this complicated. It really isn't. You don't have to do anything special. Just commit to cutting 800-1,000 calories a day and stick with that until you reach maintenance weight, then cut more calories. I promise you will lose weight and lose it quickly if you do this honestly and consistently.
 
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1) Don't be surprised if you lose multiple lbs a day at the weight you are. 2lbs being "extreme" is for people closer to a healthy weight.
2) Don't look for kudos on day 1. In fact, don't look for kudos at all. In much the same way a crackhead doesn't deserve asspats for "turning their life around" i.e. behaving like a normal person, fat people don't deserve asspats for maintaining a healthy weight.
3) Don't weigh yourself every day. Your weight will fluctuate over the course of a week. Buy a calendar, weigh yourself on a Monday and note it down on the calendar. This will help you see how your weight is trending.
 
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Cut your calorie intake to below 2000. There's no reason you need to be eating 2400 cal, and I guarantee you're eating more than that, especially with daily wiggle room cheating. At 419 lbs you really just need to eat enough to keep from becoming vitamin deficient and feeling like you're starving. Avoid "white" foods; white rice, bread, potatoes, all that bullshit. Sugar is white, too. The only white things you should eat are cauliflower and hardboiled eggs. Drink a lot of water. You don't need all that cheese if you're not doing keto. You don't need MCT coffee if you're not doing keto. No pizza or cookie wiggle room — that is what will destroy you.

Broccoli. Broccoli broccoli broccoli. Spray that fake butter spray on it if you need to.

If you're doing that Sunday 4000 cal cheat you're undoing everything you just did for the week. Why cheat?

If you can afford one, get a wifi scale. A lot of people say not to weigh every day but not weighing consistently is probably how you got to where you are. Weighing every day with a smart scale will give you an idea of trend. You're going to fluctuate up and down from day to day but that doesn't really matter; what matters is which direction that trend line drawn through all the data points is heading.
 
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PL but years ago on a different forum I frequent (Fitness related), we had a fella who used to try to “troll the trolls”. Turns out he was massively morbidity obese and basically house bound, being bathed by his mother in a metal tub outside.

The people of the forum rather than laughing at him actually rallied round to help him…. He lost a huge amount of weight and most of it was by using MyFitnessPal, keeping himself accountable by posting updates and by (mostly) discovering a sport that he loved. I believe in his case it was racquetball.

That whole saga stuck with me, You need to find an exercise you enjoy. If you can eventually make it a social thing then even better. But if you aren’t enjoying the exercise then you are doomed to fail at it.
 
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I need to admit, I'm a bit on the heavy side myself. roughly close to 300 pounds, but yet I only am really fat in the gut and some bit in the upper thighs. a good chunk of my weight gain was the result of some medication I took in my 6-8th grade years. I went from being the skinny kid to double the weight in a year. The weight gain still continued after I stopped it, just not as much. Eventually I more or less hit a platau and have been stuck around it forever. I do go out on a walk everyday, except for lately because of the shitty temperatures. I can handle rain and snow, just not having my face absolutely freezing at single digit freedom unit temps. I was born with a heart defect and even when I was skinny I never performed well at physical activity at all. I've tried multiple times to turn things around and I always fail.
 
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