Have you tried weightlifting? I can well believe that it doesn’t work for you—just want to check :). It is the most time-efficient way of affecting your weight through exercise, way better than cardio. It has the biggest endocrinological effects so I would think it would work the best against a stubborn body.
I’m currently trying it. If it works at all, it’s working at the rate of something like 1 pound per two weeks, and I’m not sure it’s working at all. (A two-week Clenbuterol cycle is enough for metabolically privileged people to lose 10 pounds of fat, apparently.)
EDIT Nov 2012: It didn’t really work at all so far as I can tell.
I have the same problem you do (am clinically obese despite a relatively active daily schedule—I walk three miles a day, don’t drink soft drinks, don’t eat junk food, eat lots of fresh fruits & vegetables etc). I’ve come to a lot of the same conclusions, especially that insulin resistance probably has a lot to do with my problem. I switched to whole grains years ago (brown rice, whole wheat pasta, whole grain bread etc.) but my weight continued to creep up. These grains (along with others like bulgur and couscous) do make up the bulk of my diet, and my recent reading has led me to believe that the glycemic load of these foods combined with my own insulin resistance is probably what’s making me fat.
I know you tried a low carb diet in the past, but you mentioned mostly eating turkey and bananas—bananas are a relatively high glycemic load food (http://www.lowglycemicload.com/index.cfm?ID=69) so that could explain why you didn’t see much progress low-carbing it. (Low carb diets do work for me, but like the vast majority of people, I’m not able to maintain a diet based on such sweeping restrictions in the long term: and when I go off the diet, I quickly gain back the lost weight plus extra pounds.)
I’m taking the glycemic load approach now, which is a lot more flexible in terms of what it allows you to eat. (It’s worth noting that there’s a distinction between the “glycemic index” and the “glycemic load” charts, and that the glycemic load charts are much more useful for practical purposes.) I’m also supplementing with cinnamon and apple cider vinegar, both of which seem to have a beneficial effect on insulin resistance.
I’ll try to put up another post in six weeks to report the results.
Updated results: I got pregnant, which pretty much kiboshes the experiment. I don’t think the pregnancy is attributable to a low-glycemic-load diet, however!
Newer research has revealed that certain chronic conditions seem much more common than is thought. It could be that a relatively large portion of the population is suffering from certain conditions which don’t exhibit severe enough symptoms to be diagnosed with anything or that symptoms are ignored by harmful social paradigms, e.g. someone with a mitochonodrial disorder is labelled as “lazy” despite inability to properly metabolize energy.
Lyme Disease is one disease which could be extremely prevalent but be underdiagnosed because of the difficulty in which it is diagnosed and the lack of reliable tests. There are plenty of other candidates as well. If one has any persevering health problems, it bears that one should try to objectively judge one’s physical& mental abilities for the possibility of physiological abnormalities.
My experience is years of frustration with my health, being overweight, low energy all the time, and it turns out that the lyme disease I had been treated for back in high school had survived and continued to plague me beyond my immune system’s capacity to completely eradicate. It returned periodically for years, and only during periods of extremely low stress when I was out of school was I able to live comfortably at all. What tipped me off to getting treatment was comparing my physical abilities during high school as an athlete to my abilities up to this point in which I can barely engage in anaerobic exercise.
Do you think Clenbuterol is more effective or has fewer side-effects than Ephedrine or Amphetamine?
More effective (for weight loss) and less side effects than amphetamine (at weight loss dosages of the latter).
More effective but with more sides than ephedrine (Clen isn’t a toy!). But at doses needed for ephedrine to compete with Clen in desired effects ephedrine has more sides. Essentially both substances work via the same mechanism (beta adrenergic receptor agonists) but Clen is much more specific to beta-2.
Clenbuterol really comes into its own when used for cutting (losing weight after already gaining a lot of muscle). In this situation losing weight is already easy enough—aside from the energy use by the muscle tissue the bulking cycle has probably already involved force feeding—eating less is the default. The trick is to lose the fat quickly while minimising the loss of muscle. The mild anabolic effects of clenbuterol (through mechanisms completely unrelated to that of androgenic substances) partially offset the overall muscle catabolism.
Clenbuterol is also rather handy for cardiovascular and endurance performance—it’s an asthma drug after all. If a cyclist is banned for doping and it isn’t for EPO it is probably for clenbuterol.
Such developments are hard to notice in someone you see every day e.g. yourself. Did you ask someone who hadn’t seen you in a while (or maybe look at a picture of yourself from before you had started weightlifting)?
[weightlifting] is the most time-efficient way of affecting your weight through exercise
Affecting it upwards, you mean. The goal of body builders wasn’t exactly to become skinnier last time I checked. (The caveat is that muscle is denser than fat, so if you gain muscle while keeping your total weight constant you’ll look skinnier.)
Affecting it upwards, you mean. The goal of body builders wasn’t exactly to become skinnier last time I checked.
Bodybuilders generally aim to build muscular mass through a cycle of high-intensity workouts under high-calorie conditions alternating with near-fasting (along with some even sketchier practices), but that doesn’t say much about weight training in general; modern bodybuilding is incredibly specialized and has little to do with any kind of athletics.
By varying diet and the conditions of training, it’s possible to use weights to increase endurance, build muscle mass, burn fat, or build strength, and while these all overlap to a certain degree they’re not really all that strongly linked. An exclusive focus on one will tend to improve that one much faster than the others.
I don’t understand how eliminating fat in this scenario merely makes me merely “look skinnier” rather than actually being skinnier. Constant mass + increased density = reduced volume = (in this case) skinnier… doesn’t it?
I was using skinnier as a one-word shorthand for ‘less heavy’, but you’re right that a volume-based definition is closer to the common understanding than a mass-based one. (Cf massive which is also about mass in technical speech but about size in colloquial speech, though for a different reason.)
(Plus, in most cases of people trying to lose weight, they would actually care more about fat mass than total mass if they fully understood the difference and could measure both.)
(In Italian we have a phrase falso magro lit. ‘false lean [person]’ for people who weigh more than one would guess by looking at them.)
Also, a person with lots of muscle definition won’t look “fat” even if they weigh much more than average. They won’t look skinny either, but large-and-muscular is generally considered healthier and more attractive than large-and-flabby.
I don’t understand how eliminating fat in this scenario merely makes me merely “look skinnier” rather than actually being skinnier. Constant mass + increased density = reduced volume = (in this case) skinnier… doesn’t it?
The parenthetical distinction was between ‘losing weight’ and looking (and even being) skinnier. ie. Gained weight, lost volume and subjectively appear to have lost even more volume.
Have you tried weightlifting? I can well believe that it doesn’t work for you—just want to check :). It is the most time-efficient way of affecting your weight through exercise, way better than cardio. It has the biggest endocrinological effects so I would think it would work the best against a stubborn body.
Yup. I didn’t notice any muscle development; I did seem able to lift somewhat larger weights over time, but that could have been placebo or skill.
Since the thread has been resurrected already… have you tried Clenbuterol? That’s something that can bipass pesky genetic inconveniences.
I’m currently trying it. If it works at all, it’s working at the rate of something like 1 pound per two weeks, and I’m not sure it’s working at all. (A two-week Clenbuterol cycle is enough for metabolically privileged people to lose 10 pounds of fat, apparently.)
EDIT Nov 2012: It didn’t really work at all so far as I can tell.
Wow. I was not expecting that answer. It’s the sort of suggestion I throw around expecting people to be far too squeamish to consider it seriously.
I have the same problem you do (am clinically obese despite a relatively active daily schedule—I walk three miles a day, don’t drink soft drinks, don’t eat junk food, eat lots of fresh fruits & vegetables etc). I’ve come to a lot of the same conclusions, especially that insulin resistance probably has a lot to do with my problem. I switched to whole grains years ago (brown rice, whole wheat pasta, whole grain bread etc.) but my weight continued to creep up. These grains (along with others like bulgur and couscous) do make up the bulk of my diet, and my recent reading has led me to believe that the glycemic load of these foods combined with my own insulin resistance is probably what’s making me fat.
I know you tried a low carb diet in the past, but you mentioned mostly eating turkey and bananas—bananas are a relatively high glycemic load food (http://www.lowglycemicload.com/index.cfm?ID=69) so that could explain why you didn’t see much progress low-carbing it. (Low carb diets do work for me, but like the vast majority of people, I’m not able to maintain a diet based on such sweeping restrictions in the long term: and when I go off the diet, I quickly gain back the lost weight plus extra pounds.)
I’m taking the glycemic load approach now, which is a lot more flexible in terms of what it allows you to eat. (It’s worth noting that there’s a distinction between the “glycemic index” and the “glycemic load” charts, and that the glycemic load charts are much more useful for practical purposes.) I’m also supplementing with cinnamon and apple cider vinegar, both of which seem to have a beneficial effect on insulin resistance.
I’ll try to put up another post in six weeks to report the results.
Updated results: I got pregnant, which pretty much kiboshes the experiment. I don’t think the pregnancy is attributable to a low-glycemic-load diet, however!
Newer research has revealed that certain chronic conditions seem much more common than is thought. It could be that a relatively large portion of the population is suffering from certain conditions which don’t exhibit severe enough symptoms to be diagnosed with anything or that symptoms are ignored by harmful social paradigms, e.g. someone with a mitochonodrial disorder is labelled as “lazy” despite inability to properly metabolize energy.
Lyme Disease is one disease which could be extremely prevalent but be underdiagnosed because of the difficulty in which it is diagnosed and the lack of reliable tests. There are plenty of other candidates as well. If one has any persevering health problems, it bears that one should try to objectively judge one’s physical& mental abilities for the possibility of physiological abnormalities.
My experience is years of frustration with my health, being overweight, low energy all the time, and it turns out that the lyme disease I had been treated for back in high school had survived and continued to plague me beyond my immune system’s capacity to completely eradicate. It returned periodically for years, and only during periods of extremely low stress when I was out of school was I able to live comfortably at all. What tipped me off to getting treatment was comparing my physical abilities during high school as an athlete to my abilities up to this point in which I can barely engage in anaerobic exercise.
Do you think Clenbuterol is more effective or has fewer side-effects than Ephedrine or Amphetamine?
More effective (for weight loss) and less side effects than amphetamine (at weight loss dosages of the latter).
More effective but with more sides than ephedrine (Clen isn’t a toy!). But at doses needed for ephedrine to compete with Clen in desired effects ephedrine has more sides. Essentially both substances work via the same mechanism (beta adrenergic receptor agonists) but Clen is much more specific to beta-2.
Clenbuterol really comes into its own when used for cutting (losing weight after already gaining a lot of muscle). In this situation losing weight is already easy enough—aside from the energy use by the muscle tissue the bulking cycle has probably already involved force feeding—eating less is the default. The trick is to lose the fat quickly while minimising the loss of muscle. The mild anabolic effects of clenbuterol (through mechanisms completely unrelated to that of androgenic substances) partially offset the overall muscle catabolism.
Clenbuterol is also rather handy for cardiovascular and endurance performance—it’s an asthma drug after all. If a cyclist is banned for doping and it isn’t for EPO it is probably for clenbuterol.
Such developments are hard to notice in someone you see every day e.g. yourself. Did you ask someone who hadn’t seen you in a while (or maybe look at a picture of yourself from before you had started weightlifting)?
Affecting it upwards, you mean. The goal of body builders wasn’t exactly to become skinnier last time I checked. (The caveat is that muscle is denser than fat, so if you gain muscle while keeping your total weight constant you’ll look skinnier.)
No, downwards. For anyone with a significant amount of fat and underdeveloped muscles.
It usually isn’t. Yet this is not incompatible with body building being an efficient form of weight loss.
Bodybuilders generally aim to build muscular mass through a cycle of high-intensity workouts under high-calorie conditions alternating with near-fasting (along with some even sketchier practices), but that doesn’t say much about weight training in general; modern bodybuilding is incredibly specialized and has little to do with any kind of athletics.
By varying diet and the conditions of training, it’s possible to use weights to increase endurance, build muscle mass, burn fat, or build strength, and while these all overlap to a certain degree they’re not really all that strongly linked. An exclusive focus on one will tend to improve that one much faster than the others.
I don’t understand how eliminating fat in this scenario merely makes me merely “look skinnier” rather than actually being skinnier. Constant mass + increased density = reduced volume = (in this case) skinnier… doesn’t it?
I was using skinnier as a one-word shorthand for ‘less heavy’, but you’re right that a volume-based definition is closer to the common understanding than a mass-based one. (Cf massive which is also about mass in technical speech but about size in colloquial speech, though for a different reason.)
(Plus, in most cases of people trying to lose weight, they would actually care more about fat mass than total mass if they fully understood the difference and could measure both.)
(In Italian we have a phrase falso magro lit. ‘false lean [person]’ for people who weigh more than one would guess by looking at them.)
But… wouldn’t that make them truly lean? Or falsely fat?
Dammit… I meant “more than one would guess”. Fixed.
Also, a person with lots of muscle definition won’t look “fat” even if they weigh much more than average. They won’t look skinny either, but large-and-muscular is generally considered healthier and more attractive than large-and-flabby.
The parenthetical distinction was between ‘losing weight’ and looking (and even being) skinnier. ie. Gained weight, lost volume and subjectively appear to have lost even more volume.