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wii (Score:4, Funny)
Weight loss and weight maintenance (Score:5, Insightful)
I was anorexically skinny in my teens, but gained a bit of weight (related to other life changes) and was comfortable in my 20s and 30s. My weight crept up on me in my 40s, and I was in a constant state of denial about it. No. I'm not fat. Who, me?
Then I decided to look in to a long-standing dream of mine and learn to fly. I got as far as the left seat of a 172 and couldn't get the seatbelt around me. Hell, I could only just barely close the door. I was crushed, but motivated. I did something about it...
I've lost a total of 160 pounds. Once again I'm skinny. Not as skinny as I was when I was 17, but nicely long and lean. I like it. No. I fucking love it. As part of my weight maintenance I weigh myself every Sunday morning. And I've beaten the odds: 90% of people who lose weight gain it back within a year. I'm coming up on two years. I hope to maintain my weight the rest of my life.
BTW: I passed my flight test last May. Flying is the most fun you can have with your clothes on. :-)
...laura
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ug. Flying is boring followed by a relief the boredom is going to end.
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ug. Life is boring followed by a relief the boredom is going to end.
such interesting (That they are uninteresting) times we live in.
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seriously? ever flown a plane? might be relaxing, but not boring.
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Congratulations on your accomplishment and thanks for sharing!
-- MyLongNickName
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I am relieved at how that story went. I was sure you were going to say you were to heavy for the plane to take off. Anyhow, congrats on the weight loss and the flying.
Re:Weight loss and weight maintenance (Score:4, Insightful)
I was anorexically skinny in my teens, but gained a bit of weight (related to other life changes) and was comfortable in my 20s and 30s. My weight crept up on me in my 40s, and I was in a constant state of denial about it. No. I'm not fat. Who, me?
My life story is similar, in that I ate like a pig in my 20s and 30s while staying skinny as a rake (75kg or thereabouts). After 40, however, something appeared to change in my metabolism or lifestyle, and I started adding weight without notably changing my diet. When it reached 100kg, I decided to turn it around, and now it's down to 85kg and I still plan on dropping it a little. Although I get a fair amount of exercise, the weight loss is not through exercise - it's just by eating less. I strongly suspect you don't lose much weight just by exercise alone (although it may give you a better fat/muscle ratio). My meals are slightly smaller, there's no snacking between meals (other than a carrot or similar), and I occasionally skip a meal without padding other meals. The take-away message is to eat less.
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Any sort of exercise is going to boost your appetite as well, so it all depends on how well you control your appetite. Something as simple as jogging for half an hour every day can cause you to lose quite a bit of weight, but it only works if you keep your intake at the same level.
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Full disclosure: I don't exercise at all, by the way, but I try to cycle with my kids to school instead of dropping them with the car whenever I can.
Congratulations! (Score:1)
BTW: I passed my flight test last May. Flying is the most fun you can have with your clothes on. :-)
And I wouldn't be surprised if your blood pressure, cholesterol, and triglycerides were all within norm.
Being thin is MUCH more than vanity.
I have the apposite problem - I can be obese and still look "normal". When I gain weight, it's evenly distributed. And when I say I need to lose weight, folks think I have some sort of eating disorder. It's pisses me off, but I just say that my doctor says so - and she does.
And that's the other thing, we've all gotten so heavy that fat people look normal now and folks
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And don't me started on the studies about BMI being "wrong". It's a great approximation and only your doctor can tell you if you should ignore it.
I see this every month or two, generally a friend posting on Facebook. One or two of them have insisted on knowing my weight, then get cross when I tell them I'm 176cm and 55kg. The BMI scale say's that's borderline-underweight, but my doctor didn't seem concerned.
I am the second- or third-skinniest person I know.
Re:Congratulations! (Score:4, Interesting)
I do sympathize with the anti-BMI feelings, though. It is only useful for people that are sedentary, and even then it is very generalized and can be misleading for people with certain body types. BMI is useful in the sense that it is incredibly easy to compute, especially for population-wide studies. But other, more descriptive measurements are far more useful and marginally more difficult to measure, particularly with regard to individual health.
For example, my BMI puts me at borderline Obese Class I and Obese Class 2, but by body fat percentage I'm on the borderline between average and overweight.
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20-22% is the minimum limit where you start to see negative health effects, and 25-30% is where you start to see dramatic negative health effects. Gettin
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And don't me started on the studies about BMI being "wrong". It's a great approximation and only your doctor can tell you if you should ignore it.
BMI is a poor approximation of "fat" but a good predictor of heart problems. Body builders who don't do cardio are as bad or worse than fat people. Michael Clark Duncan wasn't in bad shape (not fat) when he had his heart attack. But being heavy, even if the heavy is muscle, is hard on your body. Skinny will lead to a longer life than large, regardless of whether large is from fat or muscle. But BMI is a bad predictor of "fat" and "obese" is "very fat" and one of the BMI results. The health problems BM
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Interesting story, especially the part about where you say "I'm not fat. Who me?" You should be modded "Inspirational".
I worked out 3 hours/day in high school, a mix of swimming, water polo, and weight training. In general I was in great shape. College rolled around and I ate like I did in high school sans the working out. Got married relatively young to someone i started dating when i was 20, but it was a bad relationship and I was too dumb to admit it. The stress, bad habits and bad eating meant tha
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No diet, no nothing, just calorie watching, healthier eating,
Someone needs to learn what a diet is. "I changed my eating, but not my diet" is self-contradictory.
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Who says you have to have your clothes on? :D
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Go go pilot!
And a female too.
Props....pun intended.
I got a few months of GI Bill left since my graduation few years ago. Been tempted to use it on starting my own flight training. Always wanted to fly. Love all aircraft. Someday when Im not so broke maybe.
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Good on you! I got my US cert more than 15 years ago. Got one in New Zealand soon after.
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Rarely. (Score:2)
Yep, still 165lbs.
Frequently. (Score:2)
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some UK scales have switch for lbs., kg, or stone. Hope you can get down to 160 on one of those....
Almost daily... (Score:2)
... even multiple times per day. Yeah, I am addicted to that with OCD. :P
I also made a similiar poll on my own web site: http://aqfl.net/node/10137 [aqfl.net] ... ;)
At the Grocery store... (Score:2)
1st - the grocery store provides a free scale which is pretty consistent
2nd - seeing how much I weigh before I walk in helps keep my purchases healthier in nature by the time I leave
3rd - because I'm too lazy to buy a scale for at home.
I only truly grocery shop every 3 weeks or so, and many times I forget to check the scale if it's a quick trip.
must maintain weight! (Score:2)
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Being extremely skinny is just as much a stereotypical geek physique [tvtropes.org] as being overweight is.
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In the late eighties... (Score:1)
Body by Diabetes (Score:2)
I'm a type 2 diabetic. Couldn't get any meds to work for me so I control it using diet an exercise. Lots and lots of boring, boring exercise. I check my weight every now and again because it's a pretty good checkpoint.
Not that it's changed more than normal +/- 5lbs in the past two years.
current vs. usual behavior (Score:2)
I'm actively trying to lose weight, so I check it almost daily, to track my progress. When I was/will be simply trying to maintain my weight, I check much less often. But part of the reason I now have to lose weight is the fact that I stopped checking it at all.
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But part of the reason I now have to lose weight is the fact that I stopped checking it at all.
Missing option: "so that the weight x weighting frequency is constant" (as in "the more obese one is, the less frequent the weight checks are").
And thus a new derived measure unit is born: "peace of mind weightage" = "the ratio between the weight of a standard human being measured in Earth's gravitational field at the sea level and the period of 1 Earth year between weight checks" - approximately equal with 27 microN/s
In kg ! (Score:2)
I measure my weight ...
In kilograms.
(By the way, I see people giving their weight in pounds, I thought they would rather use stones ?)
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(By the way, I see people giving their weight in pounds, I thought they would rather use stones ?)
Many (some?) British people would use stones for body weight; the rest would use kilograms. I've never seen anything except human body weight measured in stones.
Americans use pounds.
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In kilograms.
I measure my weight... Never.
My mass, on the other hand, I measure on a balance scale monthy-ish.
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With human weight and height though the metric numbers just don't work for me - I have no sense of what they mean - but if you say someone is 5' 10" and 185 pounds I immediately know what they look like.
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I measure my weight ...
In kilograms.
You're doing the wrong way then. Being a force on an object due to gravity, weight should be measured in Newtons.
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I measure my weight ...
In kilograms.
You're doing the wrong way then. Being a force on an object due to gravity, weight should be measured in Newtons.
Naw, my scale measures gravity too and just factors it in.
Boring... my scale measures in Kelvin (via "energy equivalent of mass" as expressed in eV then transforming it in the temperature of the protons in a fusion plasma)
all that's needed (Score:3)
never? (Score:1)
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It is a rather meaningless number in the end of the day. In general, it doesn't take a scale to judge one's health, relative obeseness, etc. Weighing yourself isn't always that useful.
Overweight sugar addict here (Score:3)
I could previously answer this poll with something along the lines of "yearly" or "twice yearly" as someone who can get depressed and "eat away the pain" (it doesn't work, I've tried for over 30 years, I've not found a recipe for long term happyness at the bottom of any comfort food)
Now, while still overweight, I am monitoring it weekly and finding the healthier I eat the better I feel. Sure a pizza and beer or chocolate / sugar definitely can cheer one up but it's quite brief and cyclical too.
My weight has fluctuated from about 75kg to 115kg over the past 15 adult years and it's not just up, it's been up, down, up down many times. If I can give any advice regarding food at all, avoid sugar at all costs. (Youtube: Sugar, the bitter truth)
Oh and I weigh myself about weekly now, I can still fluctuate 2 or 3 lbs a week but it's better than it used to be.
Change of priority (Score:1)
I'm getting old. Now my fear is not my weight, it's my height.
Health before weight (Score:4, Informative)
It was the sad realization that I was becoming diabetic, that forced me into doing something about my weight and eating patterns. After a couple years of failing by following the Usual Advice(c) of eating less and moving more, avoiding fats especially saturated ones, etc... I decided to learn human biochemistry directly, discovered a lot my doctor apparently didn't know about diabetes, glucose metabolism, and yet some more... I successfully replicated Tom Naughton's "improving your blood lipid panel while eating fast food for a month by applying one caveat" experiment in April 2007, and picked up low-carb paleo by winter that year as I kept reading more. This cured all the diabetic symptoms I had suffered for years in a matter of days. Interestingly, I also went down from size 12 to size 4 over the following 9 months without any calorie counting or sport, cured myself of a long-standing depression, a creeping arthritis in my left knee, gastric reflux, insomnia and bruxism, and I regained the running endurance I had in my teenage years - without training.
Nowadays I only weigh myself from time to time to make sure it keeps working, and so far it does.
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After a couple years of failing by following the Usual Advice(c) of eating less and moving more, avoiding fats especially saturated ones, etc... I decided to learn human biochemistry directly, discovered a lot my doctor apparently didn't know about diabetes, glucose metabolism, and yet some more...
Someone please mod that up! Doctors usually know nothing about how to loose weight, and the recomendation to cut fats mostly lead to failure
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Any good learning material that you can point us to?
Every time I button my pants. (Score:2)
Yep since loosing 175lbs, I'm neurotic of regain (Score:1)
Lost 175-180lbs over the last 3.5 years. I weigh daily, sometimes twice or three times a day. I keep a log - 'any' upward trend over a period of 3 days, I drop way back the next two days to get it in order.
No Scale (Score:4)
I don't bother weighing myself. I know I'm fat and I feel like shit from it. I get out of breath bending down to put my socks on and my shirts bulge around my middle... I don't need a scale to tell me I need to do something.
I didn't used to be like this, but at some point, living in India and being overfed by my then-fiance and her mother, tons of delicious, rich, greasy Indian food, it just caught up. I'm not sure I even realized I was putting on weight until the first time I couldn't breath while bending over to tie my shoes because my gut was in the way.
I came back to the U.S. and lost some weight in the year and a half before my wife got her green card and joined me. Now I'm back to more of a struggle between pleasing my wife by eating what she wants to feed me and pleasing myself by eating what I'm comfortable with. She puts on a lot more pressure...
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My father on Mondays goes on a water-only fast until he hits his target weight. If he needs to lose pounds, he only targets a few pounds of loss a week. By the time the next weekend (with buffets and deserts) rolls around, he's where he needs to be.
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I think that you need to explain it to her....
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It may hurt her feelings a little bit now, but not nearly as much as it will hurt if you say nothing and she accidentally kills you.
Every other year (Score:2)
Just to check if it's still the same.
After I take a dump .. (Score:2)
No point weighing something that is no longer a part of my body.
INCONCEIVABLE!!! (Score:2)
As I said: inconceivable.
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Because scales measure weight not mass. Although they are calibrated to display calculated mass, assuming Earth gravity, very few of us have the means to measure our mass directly.
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Don't the scales with the little weights actually measure mass? If you took one of those on the moon, they'd show the same reading, wouldn't they?
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That's a good point. Well spotted.
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You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
Specifically, when you step on a scale, you measure weight. To your measure mass, you'd need to do something like smack yourself with an object of known mass and velocity and measure how your velocity changes as a result, which is both difficult and dangerous.
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Can't you just use those scales with the little weights and the slider?
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That just measures relative weight. It compares the forces of gravity acting on two objects, and slides if one is being pulled harder than the other.
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And obviously, by doing so, it measures mass.
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Rulers don't measure exact distance because they aren't exactly straight, aren't labeled exactly and furthermore expand and contract based on their temperature. Barometers don't measure exact air pressure. Speedometers don't measure exact speed. News at 11!
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Once a week. (Score:2)
Never (Score:2)
Now, if I were to start working out (which I should, skinny != healthy), I would probably gain a good 20 lb of muscle weight, as I used to weigh 160 lb when I was a teenager working in industrial manufacturing.
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weekly... (Score:2)
Well, *I* don't check it weekly, but my doctor does.
Bone marrow transplant a couple months ago means I visit doctor weekly (soon to change to every other week), so my weight is pretty closely monitored.
Along with pretty much everything else, really.
Oh, and I'm now 100% chimera - no trace of my own bone marrow remains, it's just the donor's now. Two different sets of DNA, depending on whether you check my blood or do a cheek swab....
Re:no subject (Score:5, Interesting)
Jersey drivers are notoriously bad; the roads south of the George Washington Bridge are in horrible disrepair, and drivers have the mentality that the road is completely theirs and nobody else has the right to be on them - cyclists least of all. I LOVED riding 10-20 miles per day to work and back each day while living in Manhattan. Nowadays, what should be a 6-mile commute is a 25-mile commute, because I have to either take the PATH train, or ride 20 miles out of my way to the GWB on dangerous high-speed roads that do not accommodate cyclists.
Contrary to logic and popular belief, I find New York City to be extremely cyclist-friendly. I take up a lane, ride the speed limit, stay out of people's way, and obey most traffic laws. IMO, bicycle lanes are THE most dangerous place to be - nobody respects them, doors fly open, people double-park in them (cops and delivery trucks especially)... New York City drivers - and buses and taxis - are aware of how many cyclists are on the road, and are generally on the look-out for us (and this goes hand-in-hand with the cyclist obeying the laws and using 'common' sense). It is the *out-of-towners* who are the most dangerous on the roads, because they are either oblivious to cyclists, or have that "you don't belong in the road" mentality.
I am moving straight back to Manhattan early in 2013, and can't wait to get back on the road - and lose all this fucking fat!!
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The problem is it only takes one accident and your dead. Perhaps very strict laws enforcing bike lanes equivalent to DUI for each infraction. I'm fortunate to be able to get about half way to work on residential streets and the second half is all one street so no turning issues on my end just have to make sure if I stop at a light I'm far enough back that idiots that don't look and decide to do a right turn don't cream me.
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It's not against the law to ride 2 abreast most places. Drivers just "think" it is. If the cyclist are not impeding traffic, it's allowed with some exceptions. 3 abreast however is bad form.
Re:no subject (Score:4, Informative)
It may not be against the law, but most times it IS fucking stupid.
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Quite the reverse actually, as I commented above, it has two greatly positive effects:
1) It stops drivers squeezing past when there's someone coming the other way, and hence helps prevent accidents
2) It means drivers don't have to be along side cyclists for as long when there really is room for them to pass.
Here, it's encouraged for cyclists to ride abreast rather than in a line.
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In the UK it's actually encouraged for cyclists to ride abreast, because it stops moron car drivers squeezing past where there isn't room, and means they can get past faster when there is room.
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I say make bike get license plates, --hear me out-- place RFID in them --hear me out-- and place sensor in all cars that give a proximity warning noise. Make the Bike pay a small part of the road fees. Also separate traffic Curitiba style, make Bus and Bike streets not lanes.
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The problem is it only takes one accident and your dead. Perhaps very strict laws enforcing bike lanes equivalent to DUI for each infraction. I'm fortunate to be able to get about half way to work on residential streets and the second half is all one street so no turning issues on my end just have to make sure if I stop at a light I'm far enough back that idiots that don't look and decide to do a right turn don't cream me.
Sounds to me like you're the idiot, if you think every other driver should be watching your ass for you, when you pull up along side their cars.
Where I live, there are bike lanes (that my fuel and auto sales taxes paid for, youareverywelcome), and riding outside of them or cutting lanes is very much illegal.
Cyclists in general I don't have beef with, but the ones who bitch and moan about how the automobile owners who pay for the construction and maintenance of the roads don't acquiesce to their ever
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Where I live, there are bike lanes (that my fuel and auto sales taxes paid for, youareverywelcome), and riding outside of them or cutting lanes is very much illegal.
Where is this? I have never heard of a single place where riding a bike outside a bike lane was illegal.
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Sounds to me like you're the idiot, if you think every other driver should be watching your ass for you, when you pull up along side their cars.
If you were in the second lane, and turned right into a car, who's fault would it be? The same applies here.
Eat less (Score:2)
I was able to lose 22 pounds in 6 months. All I did was eat less. I never skipped a meal. I didn't change my activity. I ate the same kind of food (omnivore) . I'm back to my university weight.
This is basic thermodynamics.
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I'm amazed at how people will argue about this.
A long time ago, I realized I was eating more, and gaining weight.. I reduced my total intake of food, and started exercising. Girls seem to like buff nerds more than fat ones. :)
After an accident, I had to stop exercising. Well, the doctor told me to. Several doctors since then told me that was the worst thing I could have been told. Instead of exercising, I just kept my activity up, and kept my intake down.
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And I exercise quite a lot as well (weight lifting). I weigh myself every day at the same time (right after I wake up). Now I'm not too concerned with day-to-day fluctuations but by having data points for every day I can more accurately adjust my calorie intake to match my current exercise goals (if I'm trying to bulk and I'm losing weight then I need to up my energy intake, if I'm trying to cut and I'm gaining weight then most likely I need to eat less).
I also keep track of my daily energy and nutrient int
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I'm in shape... If you consider that "round" is a shape...
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Cool story, athlete.
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You can measure methane (Score:2)
Like this:
http://www.livestockemissions.net/user/file/32/d1_Vlaming%20Current%20methane%20measurement%20techniques.pdf [livestockemissions.net]
http://www.ehow.com/how_7834233_measure-methane-gas.html [ehow.com]
http://phys.org/news/2011-03-methane.html [phys.org]
I love the blurb on that page: