Don’t put too much stock on the flight of stairs thing. I asked my cardiologist why I can run a decent pace for 5 or 10 kms, just out of puff, yet if I have to nip upstairs to our meeting room two flights up, I feel like I’m about to pass out. Often it’s because you’re starting from zero (i.e. from slumped in a desk chair or, in your case perhaps previously just strolling along after being relaxed on the previous train on your commute), and the body has to immediately respond to quite a vigorous demand from nothing.
You only need to worry if you have chest pains or it’s prolonged breathlessness.
One question I have has never been answered to my satisfaction:
What effect has a stomach removal?
Reduce the amount of food intake? I am sure that can be achieved with diet and exercise.
So, if a person watches his intake, with view on amount and composition, eats well balanced low on carbs and sugar, I weigh the amount and come to a daily consumption of somewhere between 700 and 1100g per day, drink plenty of water avoid alcohol (to an extent) exercise regularly, in short I try to do the right thing and still cant loose weight.
What good is a removal then; there must be something else at work.
You literally have very diminished stomach capacity for food, and lack the musculature to massage and move and digest it, so you’re physically unable to eat (or drink) much at all, for months/years. Of course the weight will fly off!
Doc is probably right. Stretch, warm up and all is fine.
Anyway, I miss the stick insect version of myself who could handle the 1 flight of stairs without rising the heart rate because 5 seconds it’s not “vigorous demand” at all.
I eat more calories than that just for breakfast and my ‘diet’ would be considered pretty healthy a lot of the time - and I’m not overweight.
As @Bowlie remarked, the recipes you show on the cooking thread may be tasty but they are not low calorie.
There are good carbs and bad carbs - if you want to exercise for weight loss - you’ll need to do it for hours and at an intense rate.
Better to exercise for general health and lose weight through your diet.
You won’t be able to do that on a low carb diet as it’s carbs that provide the fuel for high intensity, prolonged exercise so unless a doctor has told you to stay off the carbs, it’s better to eat a normal amount of low-glycemic index carbs like oats.
Out of interest, when you say you are 5Kg overweight - overweight from what?
I’ve got this theory ‘that’ most people have a normal weight (when I was younger, there was always one fat kid in class, but only one).
People will generally stay at this weight and it will probably increase overtime before going down again as we reach old age.
This is probably the weight that most people were at, up to around the 1980s and before.
One of my kids eats quite slowly - he eats enough, but quite slowly and is, according to BMI etc, in the healthy percentile.
He has just spent a week in hospital but when he came out, he spent the next week shovelling down food like there’s no tomorrow, and eating more of it.
When he reaches that target weight, I’m sure he’ll go back to what he was eating before.
I think that the modern diet, UPF, excessive junk food, takeaways and so on and the culture that now sees fizzy pop as an everyday drink rather than a birthday party treat and so on has meant that this sync we have with our bodies has been screwed up.
The other “invention” pushed by food manufacturers is that “snacking” is normal - between meals, in the evening and so on. It’s not. It’s a new thing.
If you show a photo of a group of people from fifty years ago to people nowadays, many will say that the people in the photo all look malnourished which simply isn’t true.
Not exactly. What is a theory that’s been going around for a long time, and the Dr I saw reiterated, is that everybody’s body has a “preferred target weight/state” and will fight endlessly to maintain it, whether it means eating more, eating less, or regulating energy expenditure. Though indeed, up until the 80s in the Western world, and I’d say up until the early 2010s in deprived parts of Europe overweight people would be rare. I am sure manual labour made a difference, as well as iffy public transport and most people not having cars that helped a lot.
If you look at old photos, including the “These five friends have taken a picture every year for the last 50 years” type, you can see that thin people remain thin (or become thinner as they get older), and overweight people remain overweight (often becoming more overweight). More colloquially, we talk about frames like “he/she has a wide/robust/thick frame”, “he’s/she’s stick thin/lanky/skin and bones”. I believe that, not all bodies are the same, they can’t be. Some people are built like tanks, while others like…bicycles?
P.S. I like this forum, the mustache forum where everything was about shaving 0.0001% off VT is very stifling and boring.
P.S.2 You know how we all have a friend who “eats like a pig and never gains weight”? Well, I remember watching a short UK series where they asked for volunteers the exact people who claim to be that (they also asked for nominations). They followed them closely and gave them exact amounts to eat which’d induce moderate weight gain if nothing else changed in their behavior. A few weeks later the results showed that most people didn’t (couldn’t) eat all they were given, yet some (most) did put on weight anyway. All except one guy who ate everything and put on muscle (without exercise). That’s…lucky genes! However the series showed that “that friend of mine who eats like a pig and never gets fat” is mostly bullshit, they may eat like a pig once per week.
There’s lots of newish evidence to show that exercise won’t really burn excess calories and hunter-gathers burn the same number of calories as sedentary people who sit in a office all day.
Yes, but there were a lot fewer overweight ones in the years gone by in those photos.
I do agree there is a genetic component to this - I can see it in the differences in my own children and it’s clear from this, and other features/traits they have as to which genetics they have inherited from which line.
Maybe some people’s genetics mean that they are able to stay at one weight more easily by (sub-consciously) knowing when to stop eating, eating more slowly and thoughtfully and knowing that hunger is healthy and is an evolutionary reminder that it’s time to think about that next meal (rather than that one is about to keel over).
I don’t buy with the theory that says that some people think - that some people can eat whatever they want and never gain weight.
That’s not scientific and has been disproved in many studies.
Me neither, it’s anecdotal and fails when studied under controlled conditions. But we all have that one friend who comes to the restaurant, eats everything including the waiter, and is always stick thin, don’t we?
I’m told that I am that person. I tried that experiment once in the US, eating fast food for lunch everyday and eating at restaurants in the evening - I put on loads of weight (I also ran a half marathon one morning before work too).
A newish Danish study of over 85,000 people (not peer reviewed).
" In the data, presented as a conference paper at the Annual Meeting of the European Association for the Study of Diabetes, being underweight carried the greatest danger. People with a BMI below 18.5 were nearly three times more likely to die prematurely than those with a BMI between 22.5 and 24.9.
Those at the lower end of the “healthy” range also faced higher risks, with BMIs between 18.5 and 19.9 doubling the likelihood of death. Even people with BMIs between 20 and 22.4 were at a 27% higher risk of an early death compared with the reference group. These findings seem surprising, given that the BMI range of 18.5 and 24.9 is usually considered optimal.
At the other end of the scale, carrying extra weight did not always translate into greater risk. In the study, people with BMIs between 25 and 35 (typically categorised as “overweight” or “obese”) showed no significant increase in mortality compared with the reference group.
Only those with a BMI of 40 or more saw their risk of death rise substantially, more than doubling (2.1 times)."
I have read other similar studies, the reason given is that modern medicine has made a big difference vs earlier studies. Take the tablets your doctor prescribes like for blood pressure etc. and you can enjoy some level of overweight.
I must confess an interest my BMI is 29.5
Edit: The SHEP studies over 30 years ago showed treating people aged 60 years and older with systolic blood pressure between 160 and 219 mm Hg and diastolic blood pressure below 90 mm Hg halved their heart failure rate
So it is not surprising the definition of morbid obesity has to be adjusted.
Notice I talk about weight and not calories, the reasoning being that there are only so many calories you can pack into so many gramms of food.
I know about good and bad carbs and already avoid bad carbs and take in enough of the good ones to sustain a fitness programm.
Now, I have a diet that I call “The Auschwitz diät” it works very well as historical documents show, but it is rather brutal, KZ inmates received between 700 and 1500 calories amounting to roughly a kilo per day the trick using the basic idea as a diät is to drop the intake to around a kilo but keep the nutritional value.
Last time I did it some years ago I dropped up to one and a half kilos a week.
After two months you can no longer eat a mass of food as your stomach shrinks but the main thing is that a kind of switch in your head toggles and you carry on the same path for a long time.