What’s been bothering you about nutrition? Have a question you need answered?
Found a great healthy recipe?
What is a CiCo?
All that and more on today’s megathread!
Not nutrition related, but I just want to post in the megathread.
All right, folks, my fitness has been backsliding for like 3 years with occasional bouts of healthy eating, but I’ve gone from scrawny guy who could actually jog a few miles and bike for half the day to doughy guy who gets winded after biking 5 miles. I’m going to try to stick to a 30 day fitness program and hopefully move onto another. Trying this program from darebee out to get into bodyweight strength training, and I love the way these are put together. In the spring, I’m going to really make myself ride on my bike and get back my long distance stamina. I miss being able to ride all day and feel great.
I am mostly posting this so it feels more real and I really have to commit to it. Wish me luck.
random bits of nutrition i’ve learned: if you’re doing weight training and trying to add mass, you need to eat at least one gram of protein per lb of bodyweight
Started counting calories again last week, and I’m surprised by how much more than my daily limit I was eating. I had counted before, and felt confident that I had a good ballpark estimate of how many calories I was consuming, but I was clearly very wrong. We all suck at counting calories. If you’re trying to lose weight, get a calorie tracker app. It’s a bit annoying at the beginning, but it gets easier once you get the hang of it.
I’m currently using MyFitnessPal, not because it’s particularly good or user-friendly, but because it’s the most-downloaded one in the app store. That is relevant because you can scan barcodes with it and it’ll automatically add the product’s nutrition facts, and I think most of these are added by the community, rather than the people who manage the app.
Edit, forgot to add: I use the free version, which has ads and doesn’t have a few advanced features like tracking micronutrients and some other stuff which I don’t really care much about.
how can I eat healthy when i hate vegetables and im extremely lazy/drained/tired so it needs to be easy
Very hard to eat healthy without veggies. https://www.precisionnutrition.com/dont-like-vegetables talks about what to do if you don’t like vegetables, but I haven’t tried this myself
Have you tried the bag of microwaveable vegetables at grocery stores? They usually have like a mix of good stuff. You can just add like a little salt, pepper, and like either red pepper flakes or a tiny bit of honey depending on how you’re feeling.
lazy/drained/tired so it needs to be easy
Meal replacement shakes, easiest meals you can make, plenty of flavour options, mostly sweet but some savoury stuff out now also, this has helped me to be much healthier in what I eat, I do about 1/2 shakes 1/2 food most days.
Have any of you tried intermittent fasting and does it really work? The only diet plan I’ve had success with is low carb but I wasn’t very happy because I missed baking bread, pasta, and other comfort foods for me my husband. It’s not that I can’t go without carbs for a day or a meal, but to cut it out indefinitely is a real bummer. I’m an omnivore who loves pretty much any vegetable. Right now I’m eating a delicious sweet potato & black bean curry with tofu and coconut milk. It rocks your ass off.
a couple of years back I lost around 65lbs in around a semester doing IF and calorie restriction. my eating habits became sort of disordered, so that’s something important to note. my disordered eating had a lot more to do with mental health issues than what my diet of choice tho.
I liked IF because for me it’s easier to just not eat when you’re fasted than you just had a meal, especially if you’re stuck at home for whatever reason. if I have a meal there’s a greater chance I’ll get something sweet after or snack after a couple of hours, whereas if I simply not eat I can willpower fasting until when I planned my meal.
there have also been some studies that claim IF is really, really good for your overall health and longevity, so that’s also a plus.
Yes, I had a lot of disordered eating in my late teens and early twenties. It wasn’t intermittent fasting so much as just plain starving myself and the occasional binge session. I’m in a lot healthier place now, mentally speaking. I don’t think I’ll go back to that extreme. Looking back, it was very mentally taxing to be so hard on myself all the time. I don’t have the willpower to hate myself that much anymore, if that makes sense. I’ve grown soft, inside and outside!
yeah, my weight loss was definitely powered by self-hatred, as was your experience with disordered eating :agony:
if you think your mental health is in check i’d highly advise trying IF out and, if you enjoyed it, not only doing it for dieting but for the rest of your life for health reasons
I’m doing IF right now.
Disclaimer - There’s a ton reading out there for those interested, but not much research. Or at least research that agrees. Also, like most studies regarding food, you aren’t going to easily find the sponsors of current research around the topic. My point is - if you’re talking to (whom you believe is) a real person on the internet who has tried it, in my experience the feedback is pretty positive. But if you read around on the internet you’ll get the vague sense that cutting back on your calories is bad, and you should keep buying - er - we mean, you should keep eating a “balanced” diet.
So with that out of the way, I can say that so far I’ve enjoyed the experience. I feel less bloated throughout my day, and I have a little more energy during the afternoon slump than I normally do. I have lost about 3 pounds since I started last week, and I’m hopefully that trend will continue. My biggest challenge is that I had to figure when to have my calorie intake window. A lot of “research” says you should do early intake - like 8am to 2pm; but I just couldn’t get that to work. Partially because I have dinner eaters in my house and I usually give in and eat with them, but also because I like to drink on the weekends. And if I tried to restrict my calorie intake after 2pm on Saturday night, I would start drinking around 7-8pm and then be so hungry that I would snack and just go waaay over my calorie budget for like 3 days. Now I’m pushing my window back. I don’t eat until 1pm, and I try to cutoff the food by 7pm. It’s working better, and I don’t go crazy snacking when having an evening beer.
Just my two cents. Don’t be afraid to try different things to see what works best for you. I think the most important thing for seeing results is just to be consistent. Give your body the 16 hour break and let the rest happen on it’s own.
Thanks for your reply. Do you also work out? And if so, do you time your workouts during the eating window or fasting window? Or does it not matter? I prefer to workout in the mornings but like you I would rather eat later in the day than have to go without after 3pm.
