But, it's not insanely complicated, even if it's not as simple as all that. Gaining weight eating less just means you need to do things a little differently. The biggest hurdle is that the fat habit(s) are comfortable, and easy to slip back into, with only a wee bit of disruptive circumstance.

@smitty1123: Yes, but "simple" and "easy" are different concepts. But we're in agreement there.

This past summer, for about a month, I did HIIT (High Intensity Interval Training) running, where, 3 days a week, I would jog 30 seconds, sprint 30 seconds, repeat, for 4 minutes on day 1 and 2, then add a minute on day 3. I lost near 10-15 pounds (from ~175 to ~160) and felt great. Then of course I moved and didn't get around to finding a new track, so I'm fatter now than I was before. Once Spring comes around, I'm doing it again, cause I need to kick my ass in gear.

Weight Watchers could be a lot cheaper (as I'm sure it could be with other diets) if you used the publicly available "points" formula to determine the value of what you eat. Then you could take the cost of the meetings away... as long as you don't need the moral support they provide.

Maybe, -maybe- if all you eat are frozen dinners, and you don't find them on sale, but WW is built around eating whatever you like. I spend about 160 on groceries a month - and probably another 100+ on fast food, but that's because I'm made of lame, not because I have too (and I've lost 10.5 in the past month.)

I've lost 60lb in the last year, and WW costs me 16$ a month - plus the cost of food, but everyone's got to eat, and the food is no different then anyone else's.

B: Crap, this reminds me I have to go grocery shopping. -_-

@drjayphd: Actually, I said just the opposite- "This isn't Narc Anon!"

People are suffering from serious drug addictions and other real problems (abuse, rape). To me, its just a little offensive that people need someone to hold their hand while they put down the hamburger. Is this really what our society is becoming? Kids that are intolerant of everything except potatos, anti-depressants for everyone... sheesh.

The hardest part is planning ahead so that you have a grocery list. If I didn't do that, I'd waste a ton of fresh vegetables and probably have to go to the grocery store a few extra times each week.

@Miraluka, @inelegy, @brew400, @HRHKingFriday, @smitty1123: I suppose you'd tell a meth addict with a long and deeply entrenched habit to just stop doing meth. @godai pretty much nailed it in regards to the important thing being lifestyle change. If it was as simple to change years piled upon years of bad habits as you'd seem to think, don't'cha think more people would've done it and stuck to it?

@HRHKINGFRIDAY:

What about gambling?

Its just a game, but people are addicted.

For some people it is an addiction, people have been ingrained to deal with food = comfort for how long?

Baby cries they are hugged and given bottle/milk.

Kids do well and are taken out for ice cream.

Tonsils taken out, ice cream by the truck load.

There are other examples.

Yes it all boils down to

Food eaten (KCals) - Exercise done = Weight Loss/Gain

But there are issues that people have that affect how much of each one does.

Above someone mentioned appetite vs hunger, The Psychologist involved with the program I did, told us an easy way to point out the difference.

When you want to eat, Wait 20 minutes.

If you still want to eat its hunger, if not it was appetite.

Stop being lazy, stop lacking discipline, stop lacking self control.

There is too much emphasis in this country on getting what you want quickly and easily. There is no such thing.

Genetics is only a small portion of why people are overweight. The majority of it comes from your parents, your friends, the environment you grow up in. That is the biggest link between family members and being obese. Not genetics, but the fact that a child's parents don't care enough about their children to keep them healthy, don't care enough about their children to teach them lessons. They would rather take the easy way out in parenting and allow their kids to do whatever they want, eat whatever they want.

The child wants cake or it will cry. So they just give their child cake so it will stop annoying them. Well, tough luck little kid, NO CAKE. Parents with no spine lead to kids without character, without pride, without discipline.

@kimsama: Thats the exact point I was trying to make. There are so many anti-obesity programs these days that I can't believe people can't figure out that a bag of pork rinds and regular soda isn't good for you. If you have enough money for a 12 pack of budweiser, you have enough for some vegetable soup and lean ground beef. This is not Narc Anon, people. Its freakin food!

Word. What Ben's doing is tricking his psychological hunger ("appetite" -- physiological hunger is "hunger") and retraining it. Which is totally valid, and a necessary part of MOST diet plans, since eating is often less about hunger than appetite, but doing it with canola oil and sugar isn't a great way of doing it, since those calories are empty and, since he's eating fewer calories otherwise, displacing necessary micronutrients. (Actually, a big glass of metamucil would probably be worlds better than the sugar water, since it could serve the same psychological purpose w/r/t appetite and you'd be getting fiber then too!)

As a short-term solution for retraining appetite, if that's what works, it's what works. But it's not miraculously working on your physiological hunger, and it's not a good long-term solution because of deficiency problems. There are nutritionally superior methods of appetite retraining, if you can find one that works for you.

@BSTU:

I know at least in the program I went through.

They were emphisizing how this wasn't meant to be a diet and instead were trying to make the healthy eating a habit which leads to it being a lifestyle change.

100% of all plants bought die.
So there's a 100% failure rate.
How long the plant lasts is how long you take care of it.

How many of 95-99% failures happened even with the person sticking to the eating/exercise plans?

Yes there are times when a person will not loose weight even if they are doing everything properly. But I doubt that is happenning for that large 95-99%.

Heck I didn't follow my eating /exercise plan 100% of the time but i still managed to loose weight.

Diets are the only product with a near universal failure rate which gets consistantly blamed on the user. Try to imagine this with other products. Imagine a car line where only 5% of them actually worked. Would we blame the drivers? Or a cell phone plan where only 5% of your calls went through. Were you just calling the wrong people?

I switched to whole foods about 2 years ago and am much healthier feeling (I already exercise a lot, so I didn't drop any weight, but my BP went down, and I'm getting a lot more nutrients now).

Anything worthwhile takes time and effort. And for those saying it's too expensive, you just have to be creative (beans instead of meat sometimes, or curries/noodles/soups and stews, which seem to be less expensive than most other foods and are easy to make and filling

And yes, produce costs more than twinkies, but damned if my broke-ass low-SES relatives don't buy $60 worth of cigarettes a week. I'm thinking that would cover, oh, 100% of my groceries.

So I started to lift weights 3 months ago, got protein powder (~$75 for 10 pounds), Chicken breast (expensive), protein bars, fruits (oranges, bananas, apples, pears). I found it sickening how the fruit is more expensive than a bag of potato chips, and how all the sales are for junk food every damn week. Needlessly to say, I put on 15 pounds of muscle, weigh around 133 now, and have been lifting ~170 in the weight room. Basically, when you eat 5-6 times a day...it's more expensive than eating out. I can easily get 2500 calories a day by getting a $5-6 meal at McDonalds. No wonder people are so overweight.

Plus, the home cooking tastes a lot better!

I've only lost 4 pounds and an inch or two from my waistline, but it is a start.

Man, tough room!

All the canola oil/sugar water is doing is decreasing your appetite. I can't imagine how adding sugar to the water is beneficial in anyway. You might be better off eating celery sticks to decrease your appetite.

Heh. I'm still shocked that people need "group therapy" to figure out that reading the side of a box can make a big difference. Seriously. Compare a bag of baked lays and regular lays. Which one should you buy???

the ymca is aprox. $20-30 a month..... you could also put down the fork

There's more saturated fat in Ramen noodles than you might think. I actually gained weight during that period in college when I was eating almost nothing other than ramen.

Reducing your daily caloric intake by 25%-50% = $0

@ParadigmABQ: Best typo I've seen this week!

I lost around 40 pounds a few years ago doing to mixture of Atkins and South Beach. It didn't really cost me anything except for a reference book for each diet (probably $20 total) and then the cost of food (which I would have bought anyway). I didn't buy any of their branded products . . . . just a lot of meat & other proteins to start and then slowly phasing into a normal diet rich with fresh greens and protein. About the only thing I gave up totally were bad carbs and sugary sweets. I also exercise about 3 times a week. It really wan't very hard and I've been steady at 180 lbs (6' tall) since.

"Slim Fat"? There's an oxymoron for you.

...mmm scurvy.

I actually just speant $1000 to loose 22 pounds over the last 3 months.

The $1000 was for a nutritional weight loss program at a local hospital. 6 people in the class, 2 dropped, i don't think the rest lost as much as me.

But even though thats more then the other programs, its still worth it since the program was made to meet the requirements of my insurance company.

I'm planning on getting bariatric surgery in January and a strict physician diet is required by the insurance. (Yay for hoops)

As for the plan, the cost wasn't worth what you got if you don't take into the account how much the insurance is going to pay for the surgery.

What we got from the plan:

Body measurements/calculations
Food logging software
Class once a week.
Exercise clas once a week
3 month membership to YMCA

No suppliments or such. Basically a nutritionist would go over the food logs, make suggestions, etc.

It was interesting but i doubt i would of taken it if I didn't need the insurance to cover the operation which runs $10-20K

At least I have the worlds fastest metabolism and don't worry about gaining weight.

Cost for my diet plan? Paypal me $100 and I'll do the math for you.

@econobiker:

Ramen Noodles & Mountian Dew. The 2 worst possible food substances you can eat on a regular basis. :D

::sigh:: college

@HRHKingFriday:

the brownie that looks like a cheap cut of steak has scared me away from their meal plan.

Eat only ramen noodles for a month - about $15.

To be fair though, how much does it cost to be fat? I'd guess a lot of people spend more than 200 dollars on regular food too. The most expensive diet though is the Whole Foods natural diet- which is sad because thats a lot better for you than all the artificial stuff in Nutrisystem. A friend of mine got that one time and half of the stuff is in gel packs. Like Pizza. In a gel pack. gross.

4 T of canola oil would make me bulemic...