I'm Watching What I Eat.

As some of you know, I joined Weight Watchers in March 2018, when I was 193 pounds. My dream weight has been 175 pounds for a long, long time: I haven't seen that number since high school. Since I started, I've lost 25 pounds, and now weigh 168 pounds. At one point, I was down over 30 pounds, and realized I had to let up the throttle a bit. I know...it's a strange "problem" to complain about at age 56, to lose too much weight, but I think what happened here is that, by eating smarter, I woke up my metabolism. I was relieved to find that I could drink the occasional beer again and not worry too much about it.

I used to think Weight Watchers was a bunch of nonsense - really, points for everything instead of calories and fat content? - but it really works. The key, when you break it down, is that you're encouraged to eat more fresh fruits and vegetables (which typically count as 0 points). These things fill you up and are typically low in calories and high in nutrients.

A year and a half later, I'm still down 25 pounds. My food blog is where I've put some of my favorite recipes: it's not that hard to eat healthy and still enjoy great food, if you're the one making it. I have never gone to a single Weight Watchers meeting, but instead I track what I eat and how much I exercise using their app.

I was also with MyFitnessPal for a while, and I did add many of my own recipes. I lost about 5 pounds (before I started Weight Watchers), but I could never get over the hump. To me, Weight Watchers is totally worth it.
 
Lng, good on you, horses for courses I guess, my wife walks a lot and I know that keeps her weight down and her fit. A guy I know at my local has just lost about 20 kgs just by walking. He never used to walk but his doc told him to start. It's unbelievable how good he looks. Just walking. I always seem to be on the move doing " stuff" and that keeps me fit. Some say it's in your genes but a talk show host here got a roasting a few years ago, saying you never saw a fat person at concentration camps.

Russ
 
At a certain point, I have to confess that I gave up trying to cook awesome food for my family. Everyone seem to be in a mode where it was easier to just heat up something in the microwave. So, I continue to make things for myself, except at barbecues and so on, where my contributions were appreciated.

I’m sharing this picture because the rice is from a Lean Cuisine chicken fried rice entrée. By itself, it’s not that good. But, it makes a nice base for good food.

I just made Ropa Vieja from a pork tenderloin. And, I just bought some green olives. All I needed was some rice. Of course, I could have just boiled some rice. But, I’d rather repurpose a well-intentioned attempt at helping someone to lose weight.

The result was very good. It would’ve been better if I had prepared the rice myself. But, it’s still better than throwing something away.
 
Victory - the doctor has officially told my husband he needs to lose about 5kg! Finally. Shame it has taken a diagnosis of osteoarthritis to get that far, but I've been telling him for a while now that he needed to lose weight and that joining me on my diet would also help me. He has finally conceded, but is away in Melbourne with work, eating out of restaurants for the next 3 days!
 
SatNavSaysStraightOn said:
Victory - the doctor has officially told my husband he needs to lose about 5kg! Finally. Shame it has taken a diagnosis of osteoarthritis to get that far, but I've been telling him for a while now that he needed to lose weight and that joining me on my diet would also help me. He has finally conceded, but is away in Melbourne with work, eating out of restaurants for the next 3 days!
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I miss lygon st restaurants. !!

Russ
 
My sister has lost 13 kg in 3 months with good diet and workouts. I know that she never starved for food, just changed her lifestyle and the one word I always heard from her was intermittent fasting.
 
Well it's been a while since this thread was last updated. I don't know how everyone else is getting on but I'm getting there slowly.

I've finally made my weight start with the figure I want, a 6. I'm down to my first target, 69.9kg. Not quite out of the overweight category but very close. I need another 1kg off for that. However given a recent diagnosis, I still need to get write a bit more off.

The longer term aim is to get down to 65kg or lower if possible. May 2017, i was 62kg so it is not that long ago, but I'll be happy with 65kg. Ideally I'd get down to 60kg but I think that might be pushing it too far, we'll see. So somewhere between 60-65kg is now feasible.
 
My wife's always watching what she eats. I don't bother, im fit and work regularly so I'm good. Wife's only 5 foot, I'm closer to 6 foot. Being alive in our 60s is more of a concern.

Russ
 
morning glory said:
How tall are you? I know my lightest ever weight was 60kg and I was thin. Very thin. I don't weigh myself now but I think I am probably 70kg if not rather more. I'm 5ft 8. (ish)
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I've been as low as 54kg. I was thin then. Not skinny but thin. I actually have a very small pelvis naturally, my spine is the same. But I have a very larger upper body frame. My lung capacity is that of a man my size and age, not a woman. It's always been like that because of my hiking and mountaineering.

At 60kg, I was really fit and active and found it easy. My usual times for walking a set walk were at their best. It was the optimal weight to muscle ratio for me.

However at 5 foot 5½ (167cm) 69kg is the top end of the normal weight range on the BMI scale and irrespective off what people think of it, I'm still carrying a lot of fat around my waist and upper body. I've not got the classic female pear shade. My waist to hips ratio is well over 0.85 (simply divide your waist but for hip measurement). Mine is over 1. I have naturally slender hips and limbs. It's my waist and upper body where storing weight is of concern that is where I store fat unfortunately so at least another 5kg minimum needs to come off and as I said before only 2½ years ago I was 62kg, so it is more than possible.

rascal said:
My wife's always watching what she eats. I don't bother, im fit and work regularly so I'm good. Wife's only 5 foot, I'm closer to 6 foot. Being alive in our 60s is more of a concern.

Russ
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That was our position until quite recently (8 years ago we were cycling around the world, 5 years ago I had an 80km round trip cycle commute 3-4 times a week plus was riding socially at the weekend as well, usually 125km cycle rides, but sometimes more. I had just completed my first 100 mile bike ride. I was regularly cycling 1,500km a month) but health issues (disc failure in my spine leaving me in a wheelchair with a partially paralysed right leg, followed by double pneumonia 6 days on life support, 12 days on ICU and 2 months inpatient rehab followed by a double disc failure in the cervical spine and life saving surgery plus 4 months of rehab as an inpatient, all in the space of 5 years) have meant our active lifestyle and fitness went to pot. I'm still in a wheelchair when out socially (so pretty much anytime I leave the house) and we now both face the hurdle of my husband needing major surgery to his feet to keep him walking (both ankles need fusing due to severe end stage osteoarthritis). If that wasn't enough, I've literally just this week also been diagnosed with severe end stage osteoarthritis in one of my hips and have the same pains in my other hip and both knees. I have yet to see my doctor for a surgical referral but am looking at a hip replacement, possibly total hip replacement. Who knows what an MRI of the other hip and both knees will produce but both of us silently know the outcome. My knee issues have been there all of my life. As a child I was told it was cramp which I just accepted, but by secondary school I knew it wasn't because cramp is muscular and these pains were not muscular. I was fobbed off in my teens by my parents telling me they were 'growing pains'. My mother had the approach that if you could walk and/or talk you were fine (she was a nurse before retraining) so some pretty serious underlying health conditions of mine didn't get diagnosed or treated until I was old enough to take myself to the doctors and no longer needed parental consent. However by then I had lived with the knees and pains in them for more than 1½-2 decades so given more pressing health concerns just carried on living with them. I may well just carry on living with them for the moment, but the hips have reached the critical point and it appears that not all of the pain I'm in with my hips is related to dislocating one of them recently (the one that got scanned). I've torn various muscles/tendons in the dislocation and/or relocation. Hypermobility syndrome is a pain in the backside literally at the moment! (I dislocated my jaw at the same time and it had gone again since then, but it had done it before along with both wrists which routinely dislocated. I'm used to relocating those myself. )

So the osteoarthritis comes as no surprise. And It would explain the knee issues I have had all my life. I just had hoped to get a little more warning than just finding out when it is beyond any non-surgical options. (We know this because mine is at the same stage as my husband's that was diagnosed last month and we have seen the surgeon and set a date for the first of the surgeries he requires, so we are not exactly jumping to any conclusions here and I have a history of major medical conditions only being diagnosed when they are critical or life threatening (done that one twice now).)

So getting my weight back down, my fitness back up plus the fat off my waist is essential. Ironically I actually have a heavy bone structure, with a higher than average bone density despite having spent most of my life needing steroids to stay alive (I have Addison's disease, so am scanned regularly).
 
SatNavSaysStraightOn said:
I've been as low as 54kg. I was thin then. Not skinny but thin. I actually have a very small pelvis naturally, my spine is the same. But I have a very larger upper body frame. My lung capacity is that of a man my size and age, not a woman. It's always been like that because of my hiking and mountaineering.

At 60kg, I was really fit and active and found it easy. My usual times for walking a set walk were at their best. It was the optimal weight to muscle ratio for me.

However at 5 foot 5½ (167cm) 69kg is the top end of the normal weight range on the BMI scale and irrespective off what people think of it, I'm still carrying a lot of fat around my waist and upper body. I've not got the classic female pear shade. My waist to hips ratio is well over 0.85 (simply divide your waist but for hip measurement). Mine is over 1. I have naturally slender hips and limbs. It's my waist and upper body where storing weight is of concern that is where I store fat unfortunately so at least another 5kg minimum needs to come off and as I said before only 2½ years ago I was 62kg, so it is more than possible.


That was our position until quite recently (8 years ago we were cycling around the world, 5 years ago I had an 80km round trip cycle commute 3-4 times a week plus was riding socially at the weekend as well, usually 125km cycle rides, but sometimes more. I had just completed my first 100 mile bike ride. I was regularly cycling 1,500km a month) but health issues (disc failure in my spine leaving me in a wheelchair with a partially paralysed right leg, followed by double pneumonia 6 days on life support, 12 days on ICU and 2 months inpatient rehab followed by a double disc failure in the cervical spine and life saving surgery plus 4 months of rehab as an inpatient, all in the space of 5 years) have meant our active lifestyle and fitness went to pot. I'm still in a wheelchair when out socially (so pretty much anytime I leave the house) and we now both face the hurdle of my husband needing major surgery to his feet to keep him walking (both ankles need fusing due to severe end stage osteoarthritis). If that wasn't enough, I've literally just this week also been diagnosed with severe end stage osteoarthritis in one of my hips and have the same pains in my other hip and both knees. I have yet to see my doctor for a surgical referral but am looking at a hip replacement, possibly total hip replacement. Who knows what an MRI of the other hip and both knees will produce but both of us silently know the outcome. My knee issues have been there all of my life. As a child I was told it was cramp which I just accepted, but by secondary school I knew it wasn't because cramp is muscular and these pains were not muscular. I was fobbed off in my teens by my parents telling me they were 'growing pains'. My mother had the approach that if you could walk and/or talk you were fine (she was a nurse before retraining) so some pretty serious underlying health conditions of mine didn't get diagnosed or treated until I was old enough to take myself to the doctors and no longer needed parental consent. However by then I had lived with the knees and pains in them for more than 1½-2 decades so given more pressing health concerns just carried on living with them. I may well just carry on living with them for the moment, but the hips have reached the critical point and it appears that not all of the pain I'm in with my hips is related to dislocating one of them recently (the one that got scanned). I've torn various muscles/tendons in the dislocation and/or relocation. Hypermobility syndrome is a pain in the backside literally at the moment! (I dislocated my jaw at the same time and it had gone again since then, but it had done it before along with both wrists which routinely dislocated. I'm used to relocating those myself. )

So the osteoarthritis comes as no surprise. And It would explain the knee issues I have had all my life. I just had hoped to get a little more warning than just finding out when it is beyond any non-surgical options. (We know this because mine is at the same stage as my husband's that was diagnosed last month and we have seen the surgeon and set a date for the first of the surgeries he requires, so we are not exactly jumping to any conclusions here and I have a history of major medical conditions only being diagnosed when they are critical or life threatening (done that one twice now).)

So getting my weight back down, my fitness back up plus the fat off my waist is essential. Ironically I actually have a heavy bone structure, with a higher than average bone density despite having spent most of my life needing steroids to stay alive (I have Addison's disease, so am scanned regularly).
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As I often say to friends, ain't it great to be alive. I know of so many school mates etc that have passed. Just enjoy life!

Russ
 
rascal said:
As I often say to friends, ain't it great to be alive. I know of so many school mates etc that have passed. Just enjoy life!

Russ
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We have no issues with what had come our way. No regrets. We have had 2 opportunities of a life time come our way and we have taken both of them. We're well travelled and were exceptionally fit and active in our 20's & 30's plus neither of us were idle in our teens either. I was already mountaineering and winter hill walking by the time I was 15. I have camped all my life from 6 months old and have literally just changed tents to accommodate the changes in our health. So neither of us had complaints or regrets (just a lot of pain currently and that too will pass with time). It's just a bad patch right now, testing us more than either of us needed, but if I need both knees and both hips replacing and hubby gets both ankles fused, we'll be up and running again in a few years time.

I've just got to get the remainder of that weight off. I've lost more than 16kg so far, another 8-10kg would be fantastic. Another 5kg essential. So I'm either ⅔rds of the way there or I'm ¾'s of the way there. Either way, I've done most of it and have about another 6 months of dieting and trying to exercise (difficult when walking is so hard as it is (wheelchair and crutches even before this week's surprise) ). But the 'local' swimming pool (local equals an hour away) have said I can attend alone and they will use their lifeguards to get me in and out of the pool. I'm independent out of and in the pool. It's the transition I need assistance with. I'm swimming 1.1km every Sunday as it is.
 
It was early July when I last saw this thread.....well done to everyone who's continued to lose weight :highfive:

I've successfully maintained at just below 75kg since the beginning of March - which I'm very pleased at (for my height the highest "healthy" BMI is 83 kg). I've kept my WLR subscription going and still calorie count Monday to Thursday with my target weight set at 70kg - though I'm not too bothered if I don't make that. The subscription isn't too much per month and it keeps me motivated (if I'm paying for something then I'm not going to waste it!).

I don't always count and log food at the weekends any more - I just try to just be sensible instead. Though given I'm maintaining rather than losing I think that I'm probably indulging a little too much at the weekends. But that's fine....so long as I stay under 75kg then I'm happy. And on holiday I don't count or log anything at all - but I'm MUCH more active on holiday than I am at home when I'm working so even though I'm eating and drinking more, I don't tend to put on weight when we're away.

I had a really nice experience a couple of weeks ago: we were visiting relatives who for one reason or another we hadn't seen for about 18 months (I weighted 92kg when we last saw them) and got some very nice compliments :D
 
I haven't been losing, and I "should". I know this is a bad time of the year to start working at it in earnest, but I need to do so.

I want to kick up physical activity - without having to drive to the gym each time. I think when I get things really underway farming next spring, that will help. Right now my main physical activity is lugging 25-30 pounds of chicken feed at a time about 200 feet from my house ever so often - oh and buckets of water. Getting stronger, but not necessarily more fit in other ways.

I'm determined to eat veggies with each meal - at which I failed this morning, but possibly yesterday's breakfast (salad) made up for that? Also, if I can switch to two meals a day (most days) this will also help. Can only eat so much at any one sitting. Today, however, will be three since I had an early breakfast which was not remotely big.
 
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