Hi there,

First off I wouldn't eliminate exercise altogether just because you're
in a wheel chair.

I assume you can use your arms??

If so you can easily do bicep curls, shoulder presses and an
assortment of other exercises while sitting in your wheel chair.  Just
by doing some of these exercises will help you burn some extra
calories and ultimately help you lose some weight as well as increase
your lean muscle which will help increase your metabolism.

Everyone's daily caloric intake is different.  However it seems that
you are on the right track in terms of eating healthy foods.

What you can do if you have a craving is to put some dark chocolate in
the freezer and when one of the cravings hit you, suck on the piece of
chocolate as if it were hard candy.  This will allow you to enjoy the
chocolate for a longer period of time without indulging.

Remember everything in moderation should be key, it seems like you
have a ton of discipline at this point so don't stop and keep going!

havent tried the soy burgers, but I am a big fam of veggie and turkey
burgers...salsa's always a nice treat!

Hope that helps.

Marci Lall
http://www.marcilall.com

My baseline metabolic rate is around 2200 (although I suspect it's
gone down a bit, as I've lost weight).  Right now, I'm taking in
anywhere from 1000-1500 calories a day.  Most days I hit 1200 pretty
consistently, but no diet is without falter.

I'm a resident undergraduate student, so my choices are unfortunately
somewhat limited, but on a average weekday:

Breakfast (~300 cal)
Generally, nothing.  But if I do eat something, it's a bagel with
cream cheese & black coffee

Lunch (~500 cal)
A wrap or sandwich (anything from buffalo chicken to turkey club)
A bag of chips (generally try to stick to something in the 200 cal
range)

Occasionally, I'll opt for a 6" sub instead (turkey+green peppers).

Dinner (~600 cal)
This is my grabbag meal.  I generally end up with some kind of meat/
veggie mix from an all-you-care-to-eat facility, but sometimes I opt
for two slices of pizza or something instead.

Snack (80 cal)
I chow down on a Dannon Light & Fit Yogurt.  They're the best I've
found, to date.  Sometimes I stir in a little granola.

Subway is a tough call.  In pop culture, it's the "healthy"
alternative.  In reality, a lot of their sandwiches are going to do
you a lot worse than a fast-food burger.

Stick to cold subs there (and in general; Quizno's etc.), and take a
look at their nutritional information.  Most of the information is
fairly on the level, but the sodium level in a lot of the subs is
somewhat disturbing.  I generally stick to Ham & Turkey (+green
peppers and black olives.  Shredded lettuce is a waste of time, and
peppers are more satisfying), or maybe an Italian if I've got calories
to spare.

I've heard mixed things about double-churned ice cream, but it seems
like a reasonable way to go, if you want to spoil yourself.

I know SmartOnes also makes a small icecream/cookie dessert that
weighs in at about 130 calories.  It's not very much at all, but it
takes the edge off sometimes, and it's very tasty.  (I'd say overall,
not worth the money, though)

The thing about dessert is that it's almost impossible to moderate.
It's hard to self-discipline to eat just one cookie, etc.  Modern
portions and bulk sales unfortunately hurt everyone here.
Alternatively, I suppose you could use some plastic baggies and make
little dessert "packages" for yourself.  Stick to the package, and
you'll know what you've eaten.

I'm not sure I've tried a soy burger before, but I've tried some
variety of veggie burger before, and it was awful.  It's just not
worth it to me.  The appeal of a burger to me is a big juicy slab of
meat between bread with some veggies.  Take away the big slab of meat,
and I'd just as soon rather switch up and make some other dish that
avoids the meat.

Somewhat unconventional, but take a look at individually packaged
soups.  I eat Cup O' Noodles often enough, and I find it very filling
for only 300 calories (and hot!).  I don't worry myself to death about
the sodium, because I'm hydrating so much anyway.  Alternatively,
Healthy Choice also makes AWESOME soups (vegetable/roast/etc.) for
about 200 calories apiece.

In general, it seems like filling yourself with something HOT really
helps satiate the hunger without going over on calories.

The one thing I think a lot of people overlook on a diet (myself
included) is variety.  If you eat the same thing, or the same variety
of things all the time, you're going to get bored.  When you get
bored, you'll start craving something else.  And if you don't answer
that by trying new things and experimenting, you'll snap and break a
pattern eventually (Pringles are my personal demons).

I would advise you to learn to cook. And stop polluting your body with
industrial food and stuff made in a laboratory. Are your B-Complex
vitamins made from coal? If you visited the place where they produce
and saw the making from A to Z, I'm sure you would say "no thank you!"
if offered to try the pill. Extremely disturbing.

You should have AT LEAST 6 glasses (eight ounces each) of water per day.
Check out the government food pyramid for calories requirements and
nutritional requirements. They list recommendations for losing as well as
maintaining weight.  If this is too confusing, joint Weight Watchers and
follow their points system.

There's a huge variety of fruits and vegetables available and these should
be your mainstay.  If you want to avoid sodium, use fresh or frozen ones or
read the labels very carefully to find the no sodium added kind.

Why did you include the eating disorders group in the list?

Note that insurance tables tend to run 10 pounds to light.  If you
used insurance tables to set your goal then you actually need to
lose ten not twenty.  Just how did you select your goal?  It
doesn't seem far enough from a practical goal that you'd include
the eating disorder group.

Exercise is relative to one's current fitness level.  Don't get duped
by the falacy that it has to be in the gym to count as exercise.
Any level of movement that stretches your current level of fitness
is exercise no matter that level of fitness.  This could be from best
efforts to move your limbs around to control your power chair with
your hands instead of your tongue all the way through doing a 10K
run because you're accustomed to doing 5K runs.  What you can
do is what you can do and it counts in your own context.

What I do to keep my tastes interested is low carb not low fat.
You did include a low carb support group in your posting after all.
Not only does low carb work as well as low fat, I think the foods
taste better and they are just as filling even if they aren't as
bulky.

Dieticians rarely have a clue about low carb and often blindly endorse
low fat without any idea of why.  Not that there's anything wrong with
going low fat if it works for you without hunger but it is most
certainly
not the one healthy way and only magic cure to all the worlds ills.

Okay for low fat.  Your choice in that.  Dessert as a goal or a
regular
feature of meals isn't compatible with watning to lose weight in my
very biased opinion.

I have no interest in meat substitutes.  It's one of the advantages of
low
carb that my meals are generous portions of veggies with actual meat
cut from delicious animals.  I'm happy to have tofu along with the
standard
generous portion of veggies but it's not something I do every week.
Yes,
spicing the soy up is the way to go.

Drop all the processed foods. Eat simply prepared fresh/whole fruits,
veggies, beans and limited grains, nuts, meat, dairy, etc.
Supplemental fiber (extra carbs), OK.

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.

My mom was about 290 lb and 5'1" for a long time, and so many times her Dr
would tell her she need to lose the weight it is affecting the hart, Her
Blood Pressure and it was the resin why she would get tired fast.

Her girl friend from China told her about Wu Yi tea and she gave it a try. I
think it was about a 6 months the next time I saw her and almost didn’t
recognize her I had never seen my mom that small ever even when  was a kid.
It was a different person standing in front of me. She had lost over 80 Lbs I
was so proud of her. “She is my Queen” As if you could not tell already. Any
ways I ran across the same tea on a site the other day my mom used.  Hope I
didn’t bore you all too much just wanted to share a proud moment. I don’t
know if this may work for every one but it sure worked for her.

Oh that site was: http://hjlas.com/click/s=63706&c=101201&subid=jberm If any
one want to take a look.

I weighed in at 184 on Nov 24 at the hospital I went to for an out-patient
visit.  I went to the local office of my HMO today and clocked 179.  Five
pounds in two weeks is too much.  I need to up the calorie intake a  bit.
I'll increase the morning bran cereal breakfast.  The extra fiber will also
help.

you are amazing
you are taking the steps to give yourself lot of living energy
keep it up

IF YOUR FED UP WITH YOUR WEIGHT CONTROLING YOU BEFORE OR AFTER SURGERY
AND YOU WANT TO GET BACK ON TRACK THEN CYNTHIA CAN HELP SHE WILL BE
YOUR PERSONAL WEIGHT LOSS COACH AND SHE IS FREE  EMAIL HER AT
cynthia@accessmedicalsolutions.com   and get a helathy you