"Info" wrote in message
.. .
If this is a duplicate, please accept my apologies.

I weigh 184 and am 5'7". I need to lose twenty pounds and I cannot
exercise because I'm in a wheelchair.

What is your daily calorie intake and what do you eat to keep your taste
buds interested when you've cut back on food or calories?

I eat All Bran with skim milk in the AM and at least two apples a day. I
drink four or five glasses of water a day, some decaf tea and two
Metamucil cocktails. I also take several B-Complex vitamins. I ran into
some 90 calorie "garden burgers" and 230 frozen dinners. I hardly ever
use salt. Sometime I have half a sub from Subway. A dietician said that
is OK.

I stopped chocolate and ice cream months ago. Fat free pudding and fruit
are my dessert, if I have any.

Do you eat soy burgers or other soy products? I can make them taste good,
if I add a little low-cal salsa or other spicy stuff.

Ideas welcome. Thanks

Hi there,

Let me try and break this down.

I've been on the "Special K diet" for about 6-7 weeks. Thing is, I don't
really like to call it a "diet" as such, because I do eat a bowl for
breakfast and a bowl for lunch, with basically whatever I want in the
evening, but I guess millions and millions of people eat cornflakes in the
morning anyway so are they all "dieting" in one sense of the word?

In those 6-7 weeks I've lost 6-7 kilos, or about 13-15 lbs. In other words,
about a kilo or 2lbs a week. I'm 6'1" and weighed 113 kg (248 lbs), now I
weigh about 106kg (233 lbs).

First of all, you say you need to lose 20 lbs, but how quickly are you
proposing to do it? If you aim to lose 20 lbs in about 8-10 weeks, then I
think that's quite feasible and won't do you any harm. On the other hand,
if you're trying to lose 20 lbs in 4 weeks, then not only are you going to
find it difficult, but you'll probably be restricting your body's
nutritional intake to an extent that isn't healthy.

I started by looking at the recommended average daily calorie intake for a
man. It's supposed to be 2,500 for men and 2,000 for women.

I then said to myself "ok, factor in your exercise level and job". I have
an office job, and exercise is something I get around to once every few
weeks. So I figured that if 2,500 is the average, I probably needed to
reduce the "baseline" a bit. So I set my "baseline" at 2,000 calories a
day. I think this is an important step because if you don't exercise and
don't have a manual job that requires energy, and you're still looking at
2,500 as the minimum, then you won't really see results. On the other hand,
if you're a lumberjack by trade and finish it off with a game of squash at
the gym, then your basic requirement is going to be somewhat higher.

Of course, that figure is the basic number of calories that you are supposed
to consume to be at a stable level. If you're looking to lose weight, then
your target has to be a bit lower than that. So I said to myself that I'd
aim for 1,500 to 1,750 calories a day.

Now some people will be quick to say "oh calorie counting doesn't work".
Well it doesn't work for many people simply because a) they don't have the
discipline to follow it and b) it's not always obvious how many calories
they're consuming.

In my opinion, calorie counting *has* to work. When you strip away
everything else, you're left with a basic, fundamental principle, that what
goes in minus what goes out equals what's left. Of course, different
people's respond differently to different things, but ultimately if you're
expending a certain amount of energy which is greater than the amount of
chemical energy contained in the food you eat, then your body will look to
burn its own fat reserves to make up the deficit, rather than the opposite
scenario when you consume more than you expend such that the body stores the
additional chemical energy as fat.

I suppose I'm fortunate in that I've never had an addiction to sweet food
and chocolate. I enjoy them, yes, but I can go for ages without them and
not miss them. Rather, my weakness is to takeaway food so part of the plan
was to cut that down. By implication, cutting down on these foods reduced
my calorie intake, since most are very high in calories, but the key point
was that nothing is off-limits.

The cereal in the morning is about 250 calories, same again at lunch.
Sometimes I'll actually substitute the lunchtime bowl with some fruit, also
does the trick. This way, if I've used up about 500 calories, I can enjoy a
nice meal with 1,250-1,500 calories in the evening.

Yes, there are some people that will say "oh but you need more calories in
the morning", and others will say "you shouldn't eat after such and such
hour", but I think they're missing the point.

The point is that we are not trying to fine tune our bodies to the degree
that an olympic athlete requires, only eating foods from a prescribed list
and at certain times of day. What we are trying to do (at least what I was
trying to do) was to begin to invoke a general trend in my eating habits,
resulting in a gradual weight loss. What many people tend to do is hit the
spring, fresh from the excesses of Christmas/New Year and start thinking "oh
I need to get that bikini body" (I don't wear one myself...) or something
like that, and then try to achieve the impossible in a short space of time.