Weight Loss Thread

They won't last til mid February.

Also... how do you work with housewives? Do you help them post checklists of how important they are on Facebook or something?

Housewives is just my term for any obese woman between the ages of 25 and 55.

I've been contemplating something, and I only have a personal anecdote to go by, but I think the importance of sleep is being vastly underestimated when it comes to weight loss.

Late last year I had a pretty big shake up in my life, and without going into too many details, I spent a little over a week basically just sleeping. Afterwards I had morning classes and evening training to keep me on a schedule with about 5 hours in between. During this time I didn't have a smart phone and only used my computer to watch TV (no games), so I slept when I was tired and woke when I wasn't. At first I fell asleep as early as 9 but usually around 10, waking at 8 (without an alarm clock) and frequently but not always taking afternoon naps. Eventually my fall asleep time crept up to about 11 where it stabilized.

After about 2 months of this I never felt better in as long as I can remember and the weight just melted off me at a shocking rate, about 2 kg a week, to a point I would consider it a little unhealthy. While I did eat better and train more, these were all things I have done before (with slower success), the drastic increase in sleep was the new element.

I, unfortunately, don't have the same schedule anymore and while things are going fine I don't sleep nearly as much or as well as I was and I can feel it in the morning.

Could we be underestimating the role sleep plays in all of this? While stuffing your face with potato chips and hohos while awake and sleeping the rest of the time obviously won't cause weight loss I find myself wondering where working on your sleep becomes more important than training more or eating less. Could that point be sooner than we thought? Could paying back your sleep debt and not accruing more play a much larger role in a healthy life than we've given it credit for?

Funny thing about the counting steps bullshit. I got into it and I still track it everyday. I ended up losing 70 lbs but put 5 back on. I have been living in the South for a few months for work. Damn food here...

Anyways I got a fitness watch so I had heartrate monitor. Then as the weels went on I got into walking more to make 10k to supplement my yoga. You are right though the fatties think it is some magic bullet. They fix a few things in their diet and think 20 years of bad habits go away. Gotta make a complete change in your way of thinking. I give people 6 weeks at the most from my experience and those watches go right to the junk drawer.

Sleep is very important people. Especially for weightlifting. If I don't get a good nights sleep, or I find myself losing two hours every night for a week, no shot I'll even come close to 90% of 1RM. Today I went in on 4 hours of sleep and pulling 87.5% was a fucking struggle. 4x5 + an AMRAP of 10. Horrible. I feel depleted, time to eat and sleep tonight.

TL;DR - Sleep & food are super important for health and weight loss, especially if you lift weights.

Can confirm, my recovery time sucks shit if I stay up until 2am or something dumb playing vidya and only sleep for 5 hours.

For me, the most important part sleep plays in losing weight is simply the fact that I can't eat when I'm sleeping. If I stay up really late, I tend to eat or drink more junk. If I get a solid 8 - 9 hours of sleep a night, it limits the amount of snacking I do.

McCheese said:

For me, the most important part sleep plays in losing weight is simply the fact that I can't eat when I'm sleeping. If I stay up really late, I tend to eat or drink more junk. If I get a solid 8 - 9 hours of sleep a night, it limits the amount of snacking I do.

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I was going to write this until he began to explain he felt better and began shedding weight after some time. But yes, an important part is late night binge-ing and being sure to avoid it.

The worst I can binge on is cheese. I have no awesome snacks like McCheese. Find me in my fridge at 2 am eating broccoli with Greek yogurt.

I found that the temptation to snack in the evening was reduced if I made sure my evening meal was nutritious (get some veggies etc). Snacking is also largely habitual (if you always get a bag of popcorn/chips when you put a movie on, that habit gets built up and it becomes an automatic association). What also helped when I got the munchies was chugging some water and waiting a few minutes, often the munchies went away.

At work today we were sitting around at lunch munching on the leftovers of a cheese platter from an earlier event. One of the aforementioned obese housewives who is counter her steps to lose weight was there talking about her steps and weight loss. Literally not two sentences later she commented on how she and her husband often eat an entire cheese platter each as their dinners.

I wouldn't shit for like 3 days if I ate an entire cheese platter.

Itlan said:

I wouldn't shit for like 3 days if I ate an entire cheese platter.

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I used to feel like this until I started eating high fat, low carb. These days I eat all the cheese I want and in fact poop less and on a better schedule than I did when I ate lots of carbs.

You must be eating a lot of fiber from somewhere dude because keto diets cause some serious constipation if you aren't supplementing fiber.

LiquidDeath said:

I used to feel like this until I started eating high fat, low carb. These days I eat all the cheese I want and in fact poop less and on a better schedule than I did when I ate lots of carbs.

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I did keto. I wouldn't dump for days at a time. Constantly bloated.

Never again.

I also didn't eat veggies. I just ate burgers and steak all fucking day.

Khane said:

You must be eating a lot of fiber from somewhere dude because keto diets cause some serious constipation if you aren't supplementing fiber.

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I eat greens but not like I probably should. I don't eat shitloads of protein, though, just lots of fatty foods. I eat cheese everyday and all I do is morning coffee before I shit. No constipation.

Itlan said:

I did keto. I wouldn't dump for days at a time. Constantly bloated.

Never again.

I also didn't eat veggies. I just ate burgers and steak all fucking day.

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That sounds awful. You drink coffee? It seems like the only time my morning coffee doesn't really get me moving to the toilet is when I'm on vacation.

LiquidDeath said:

That sounds awful. You drink coffee? It seems like the only time my morning coffee doesn't really get me moving to the toilet is when I'm on vacation.

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Not a coffee drinker. It was horrific. If I ever get fat again I won't do keto, or perhaps I'd do it with some fiber supps but even later on in the diet I still wasn't pooping.

Honestly, I've come to appreciate soft, runny carb + coffee poops. That shit flushes so easily. When I eat really clean with lots of protein and veggies, my poops tend to be big and solid (although they feel great coming out, so smooth and effortless), but they have this horrible tendency to land perpendicular to the toilet hole, so they won't go down. They just kind of bend a little with each flush.

You need a better toilet McCheese. You with a low flow toilet is just a catastrophe waiting to happen.

Seriously, I think the problem is the toilet not your diet here man. Protein poops are the best, I don't even wipe anymore!