Thread: Smelly Elle's fantastic diary: Weight Loss? What Weight Loss?

Well, now then now then. This week I have lost 2lbs, which is twice as many as last week:P (incase there are those out there who really can't fathom the idea of having to solve mathematical problems). This week has been a week of realisation for me, in terms of the fact that I have realised where I had originally been hoing wrong, kind of... I had been cutting down on calories way too much, eating very little brekkie which was unable to sustain me throughout the morning and erm...well that's it I think.

Also, from this morning i'm eating porridge for brekkie with a little honey in. This morning I left making the porridge till quite late on before I had to leave, thinking "its ok, it only takes 2 1/2 minutes" Yep, 2 1/2 minutes to cook, 10 minutes to cool down, haha. Thus I have a burnt mouth this morning from trying to down hot porridge hahaha.

Ah well...onwards and upwards xxx

haha i think i should maybe post in my diary... all went a bit awry in the last few days. I was at an exhibition and it was a bit less busy as we'd hoped and there was a food section with lovely sausages and things so you all know the rest. yesterday was especially bad, but again it's a dusting off starting again thing....

i still lost weight last week which is a bit of a miracle, only 1 lb though. I'm not surprised at all, I need to boost my will power and be more stringent with what I will and wont eat. I'm not ruling anything out, but the odd treat doesnt mean 3 treats a day hahaha. I'm determined to do this 'diet' in a way that I can keep up forever. i've found that diets don't work for me at all as I end up putting weight. So sod it, i'll have the chips, or the roast potato but I'll balance it and make sure i eat as healthy as I can and not over eat. it's making my brain ache trying to get it round to this way of thinking but I WILL do it. And also either when I get home or tomorrow (depending on whether i'm tired when I get home as sometimes when I listen to it i fall asleep) i'm going to give the paul mckenna cd a listen.

I'm guzzling water as we speak and today is going well... i've had my porridge with honey, and for lunch a tuna sandwich and a nectarine. and around three glasses of water since then. desperate for the loo lol...I've decided not to weigh till friday now. I was weighing every morning in the last 2 weeks to figure out some stuff about why I wasn't losing as much weight as i'd hoped etc... now I've learnt the odd thing im going back to weigh ins once a week. We'll see if this way works and what I feel more comfortable with. On the plus size I seem to have lost an inch off my waist and and inch off my belly, although I doubt that's just from the 4lb loss as I havent measured myself in over a year lol.

Have a good day everyoooone xxxxxx

p.s. I read this article in the Sunday Times yesterday, thought it might be of interest x


Diets? Don't bother

They won't work and can even make you fatter, says author Geoffrey Cannon, the scourge of the slimming industry







Anita Chaudhuri


div#related-article-links p a, div#related-article-links p a:visited {color:#06c;}Take a stroll into any bookshop and you won’t suspect a thing: the shelves are heaving with summer-diet tomes, from Crash Diet — Lose 7lbs in 7 Days to Bikini Bootcamp: Two Weeks to Your Ultimate Beach Body and, perhaps most optimistic of all, The Revenge Diet: Make Him Sorry He Dumped You! Lose 15lbs in a Month. Yet, despite appearances, the diet industry is in the throes of a backlash. It started with The Diet Delusion and Rethinking Thin, both of which challenged conventional wisdom about weight loss. Now comes something even more revolutionary, the splendidly titled Dieting Makes You Fat. Its author, Geoffrey Cannon, is unequivocal in his belief that dieting causes the very condition it is meant to cure.
His argument is simple: in evolutionary terms, the human body cannot distinguish between dieting and famine. We are hard-wired to respond to the threat of an insecure food supply by retaining body fat rather than burning it off, just as camels are biologically designed to store fat in humps to survive forays in the desert. “The more we endure cycles of dieting, the more our bodies become trained to seek out food, slow down vital functions and conserve body fat,” he says. Apparently, it’s evolution, not lack of willpower, that causes us to seek out sweet foods. “In the forest, sweetness was nature’s way of telling early humans that fruit was safe to eat.”
For anyone who has ever tried to stick to a diet, some of Cannon’s advice might come as a shock. He says that restricting calories is the worst possible way to achieve the body of your dreams. “If you have more body fat than you want, don’t even think of going on a diet,” he warns. “Be more physically active instead, and be patient. You need to train your body to build up lean tissue, which works more efficiently than body fat.” He isn’t advocating that you go and binge on Krispy Kremes, but suggests that if you are active, then you can enjoy a balance of good food — even cake.
Cannon points out that there are huge misconceptions about the link between physical activity and weight loss. “Many people, including GPs, mistakenly believe that the amount of exercise you need to take is huge, and they’re still thinking in terms of energy balance — for example, playing two hours of squash to work off a cupcake.” Researchers at Stanford University, however, found that people who exercised regularly burnt off 500-700 more calories a day than their sedentary counterparts. Crucially, fit bodies burnt off this energy largely during the time they were resting, not just while they were pounding away on the treadmill.
Somewhat unusually for a writer in this field, Cannon has direct experience of the misery of being overweight. He battled through a childhood fuelled by comfort eating following his parents’ divorce — fish and chips with pickled cucumbers, washed down with Tizer — and he continued to struggle through his years at Oxford, where he discovered the delights of cucumber sandwiches layered with butter and salt. He writes movingly about how his emotional hunger for a true home led him to overeat through marriage break-ups and career changes, including a stint at The Sunday Times, before he became a nutrition writer and campaigner. Eventually, it was running, not dieting, that got him on the path to thin.
Nor is Cannon jumping on the anti-diet bandwagon: Dieting Makes You Fat was originally a bestseller in 1983. He decided to write a 21st-century version of the book to tackle issues such as the global obesity time bomb and phenomena such as Atkins, about which he is dismissive. “It’s quite tricky to know what he was going on about,” he says. “In as much as I understand, if you’re on 1,500 calories a day, and are not encouraged to take any physical activity, then it’s not going to work. I don’t care how many people say it does.” Fortuitously, research published by UCLA last year, while Cannon was working on the new edition, concluded that — guess what? — diets don’t work.
The lead author of the study, Traci Mann, noted: “You can initially lose 5%-10% of your weight on any number of diets, but then the weight comes back. We found that the majority of people regained all the weight, plus more.” The success rate for maintaining weight loss five years after a diet ends is estimated at only 5%.
“People make the mistake of judging the success of a diet at the point that it is stopped,” says Cannon, who points out that this is like assessing the state of your finances based on the one day in the month when your account is in the black. “It’s madness. Dieting triggers the body to go into reversal. When people come off a regime, it’s a form of the bulimic syndrome. They find they can’t stop eating. I’ve had that when coming off a diet, and it’s scary.”
Is this really true of every diet, even a teensy crash diet in the week before you hit the beach? Apparently, these are the worst: restricting calorie intake by anything more than 200 calories a day will trigger a rebound effect, and the more drastic and long-lasting the diet, the worse the rebound once it ends. In some studies, people coming off a diet were forced to eat up to 10,000 calories a day — and still reported feeling hungry.
“People often ask me, ‘If this is all true, why haven’t I heard it before?’ Well, my response is, ‘In whose interests is it to tell you?’ The diet industry sells its wares on the basis of repeat custom — if a diet doesn’t work, it’s your fault. It’s time for a paradigm shift. Much of what our bodies do is beyond the control of our minds.”
Cannon accepts that, to most people, the idea that we don’t have control over our appetites is not an attractive one. “That’s why there was such an outcry about Fern Britton’s gastric-band surgery. She knew all along that dieting wasn’t the reason she lost the weight. People don’t want to admit that. I’m sure she is by no means the only high-profile figure to have had one fitted secretly,” he observes, before speculating wildly on other — unprintable — likely candidates.
“Claims made by the diet industry appeal to our base desires, like the e-mail spam messages saying you have won £5m or can enjoy multiple orgasms for ever,” Cannon says. “The dieting business is fabulous. It sells dreams. But dreams rarely come true.”
Dieting Makes You Fat by Geoffrey Cannon (Virgin Books £16.99)

See I knew the first time you posted on this site you had no diary...and I never checked since...until today.

But now I have found it...and it shall be getting read!

So keep it updated

haha my first frequent reader. thanks muchas hope you enjoyed satc. i shall be on a bit later with an update

Hi Hun, just thought I would drop by and say well done on your losses to date xx

A loss is better than a gain isn't it? I read that article too... quite made my day it did

AAAAALRIGHTY THEEEEN. lets get this diary post over with lol. I did SAY i was going to not weigh myself till fri, didn't i puggs? didn't i? haha. not so. day 2 and i failed again. but the reason was that yesterday i had a day full of exercise, i walked mega amounts and then went and played tennis with my little sis for an hour which was fun but tiring. hence i wasn't on last night as i kind of collapsed on the sofa when i came in haha. anyway, i weighed myself, came out at 14st 2lbs! which is one less than yesterday. but im not keeping my hopes up as in week one, since I know what's possible lol. I'm so going to be heavier tomorrow morning but it doesnt matter, at least i'm less than when I started. and today I bought a SIZE 14 dress. granted it's from new look, who have notoriously big sizes. but it's still a big deal for me. and i tried on some size 14 shorts and they fit too. so im very happy.

today's been pretty cool, porridge for brekkie with honey, think i calculated that at around 224 cals. then my lunch was from boots lol, 285 tuna sandwich, 44 cals for apple and grape pack + water. so thats like, 553. and i had a coffee and chick pea stew and salad and, like, 2 chips (literally) aaaand a few prunes and dried figs. oh and 2 apricots. hmmm.... maybe ive had a bit too much hahaha. i really dont know how much that is altogether but i hope its under 1500....

xxxxxxxxxx

Sounds like you have had a good day, doesn't sound too bad at all. Good for you, for tackling all that exercise in one day, that would certainly tempt me to the scales so your not alone there.

Congrats on your hard work so far to be able to buy a size 14 dress, I bet your really pleased. Keep up the good work, I will keep reading your diary with interest.

Take care and have a beautiful day tomorrow, no matter what.

thanks time lady i'll certainly try...although it will be packed full of..ironing haha. this is what i do with my days off.. how woeful lol x

Originally Posted by Dorcas

A loss is better than a gain isn't it? I read that article too... quite made my day it did

so i presume you're doing it the same way as me dorcas?? woop! how's it going for you?

I'm gonna keep shouting at you until you stop weighing yourself :P

haha i can't hear yaaaa. just one moooooore time?? purleeeease. one more time tomorrow...thursday...and then weigh in on friday hahaha. i'm a sly beehatch sometimes, am i :P

*cough*

May have had a wee look on the scales today *cough*

But know I certainly wont after the days after today and tomorrow!

Originally Posted by elle2585

thanks time lady i'll certainly try...although it will be packed full of..ironing haha. this is what i do with my days off.. how woeful lol x

Hiya, how has your day been? Did you get any ironing done? You can see it as a bit of exercise for your arms

Did you resist getting on the scales today? It looks like your mate puggso caved lol. To be honest so did I, I had a peek too. So you are not alone.