At this moment I feel like I’ve arrived at the end of the line. 

As a 5’0” tall, “reduced obese” sedentary 70 year old female, my weight continues to creep upward, no matter what macronutrients I eat or don’t eat; no matter how small I keep my portions; or how hard I work to keep my calories low.

This last calendar year I continued with my best efforts at recording every bite taken in a computer food journal, every single day.  Sometimes I ate large amounts of food, and sometimes I ate tiny amounts of food.  Sometimes I ate a “balanced diet” and sometimes I ate “low-carb; sometimes I ate “high-fat, moderate protein, low-carb”;  sometimes I worked to keep my calories around 1000 calories per day; sometimes I worked to have only two 5-bite meals of whatever.  My computer eating records show that my overall 365 day calorie average was about 780 calories per day.  That number was the total of all my big eating days combined with my small eating days, divided by 365 days. 

At this point in my life, I am elderly, and although I am in excellent health overall, I have developed a problem with my right hip which restricts my activities, and I lack the ability to do physical “exercise” except for brief periods of slow walking.  However, over the past ten years I’ve run many extensive personal experiments on how various exercise affects my own bodyweight, and the results have proven to me that however much or however little I exercise has almost no effect.  Apparently my metabolism adjusts down to keep me from dropping weight during periods when I engage in heavy exercise… however it does NOT adjust up to keep me from gaining weight when my food intake goes up whether with or without exercise.

During most of this past year, I’ve weighed in my mid-130s - which gives me a BMI in the “overweight” range.  During the past 9 years I’ve worked and worked on maintaining my large weight-loss, and tried to drop as low as possible inside the “normal” BMI range.  The middle of a “normal” BMI range is, for me, 115 pounds.  I struggled to drop and stay below that number for the first couple of my maintenance years, without success, then … while continuing consistently with my ongoing struggle at a food intake averaging around 1050 calories daily … my weight began climbing.  Instead of bouncing within a 5 pound range between 110 and 115, it bounced between 115 and 120.   Then despite a few more years of working hard to drop back to those lower numbers, my weight climbed to bounce between 120 and 125; then over more time, while eating even fewer calories, and additional exercise, my weight climbed to bounce between 125 and 130; then between 130 and 135.  This past several months, my weight has been bouncing between 135 and 140. 

There appears to be no end in sight.  This has been happening over a 9 year period. Since my activity cannot...

About 23 years ago I had an RNY gastric bypass surgery. You can learn more about that, and my subsequent years of dieting, by reading ABOUT ME. This resulted in me eating an extremely low-calorie diet during the first 6 months after surgery, and a very-low-calorie diet during that following year. This type of eating caused me to lose 110 pounds during that time period.

The dieting industry makes billions of dollars every year by marketing its foods, supplements, and services. It encourages people to use MORE foods and other diet products, while people actually need to use far LESS. As a result, most people are unaware of how VERY LITTLE FOOD is required by a person wishing to lose weight - especially by a person who has an obese body with a great deal of stored fat which needs to be used as energy.

For the first few months following a gastric bypass surgery, a person’s calorie intake is between 300 and 600 calories per day. The recommended meal portion size is 1/4 cup for a solid meal and 1/2 cup for a liquid meal.

The volume of the plated meal in the picture at the top of the page is about 1/3 to 1/2 a cup which is MORE than 1/4 cup of food.  To reduce the amount food on that plate to 1/4 cup, visualize removing some of that little round potato. 

Immediately following surgery, the stomach size is very small - about 1/4 cup, or the size of an egg. The opening that allows food to pass out of one’s stomach is also very narrow. For this reason, it is important to take only two to three sips or bites at a time of any NEW food and then wait 10 minutes before taking more. This will help a person learn one’s limits and tolerance. Liquids will empty faster from the stomach than soft solids.

See Below for the standard Dietary Guidelines for after Bariatric Surgery, provided by the University of California San Francisco Medical Center:  

Dietary Guidelines After Bariatric Surgery

General Guidelines
• Eat balanced meals with small portions.
• Follow a diet low in calories, fats and sweets.
• Keep a daily record of your food portions and of your calorie and protein intake.
• Eat slowly and chew small bites of food thoroughly.
• Avoid rice, bread, raw vegetables and fresh fruits, as well as meats that are not easily chewed, such as pork and steak. Ground meats are usually better tolerated.
• Do not use straws, drink carbonated bevera...

                                      
 I recently read a short e-book, “Talking Back to Diet Gurus” by Mike Howard, who is an online fitness guy. I like the way he expressed his point of view on the Calorie issue in the article below, which was posted at Tom Venturo’s website, burnthefatblog.com.

Calorie Denialism: Why It’s Hurting Your Fat Loss Efforts 
             by Mike Howard

Calories have become a perfect target for diet book authors and gurus alike to play on the emotions of those who struggle with weight. In the typical diet book and health blog world, calorie (and any mention of counting them) is met with an illogical amount of hostility. It has become one of the greatest sources of confusion in the world of fat loss and has undoubtedly led to much frustration for those looking to shed pounds. Rest assured you are not alone if you are befuddled by the whole thing…

My aim here is to untangle some of the misconceptions regarding calories, food and eating for fat loss. I wish to arm you with the best knowledge we have regarding fat loss to make the best decision for YOU.

The Anti-calorie Arguments

There are a number of different ways people will try dismiss or at least downplay the importance of calories when it comes to fat loss. How many of these have you heard before?

• Advice to eat less and move more implies that you are calling people gluttons and sloths.
  
  
• Overweight people eat no more than do skinny people.
  
  
• Counting calories doesn’t work.
  
  
• Counting calories is obsessive (extreme, OCD, orthorexic, etc)
  
  
• It’s the carbs/insulin that increases fat – not calories.
   
• Focus on the QUALITY of food because QUANTITY is less relevant/irrelevant
  

In essence, counting calories is responsible for the obesity epidemic, obsessive compulsive disorder and The Kardashians.

Is a Calorie a Calorie?

The answer to this question is a resounding …“kind of”. I’m going to make this as mercifully short and un-nerdy as possible. The calories in/calories out model is an imperfect one due mostly to the differing affects carbohydrates, proteins and fats have on the body during processing. In this case, protein is more metabolically costly to handle than carbs or fats. This renders the model imperfect but not incorrect.

My thesi...

 
Much of the weight-loss and maintenance information available to us is both inaccurate and unhelpful. Like Dorothy of Oz and Alice of Wonderland, during my lifetime of research on those issues, I've seen some "weird shit".

Here in my DietHobby online scrapbook I work to sort out and save reasonably accurate information that might prove helpful to me and perhaps to others.

The article below deals with the issue of Energy In and Energy Out, which is not as simple as most people believe.

People have different body weights because each of them has an individual physiology and psychology which ultimately determines their own individual levels of "energy in" and "energy out" AND which also determines how their own individual bodies respond to it. 

A snapshot of the unaveraged data contained in scientific research of Individual BMR or RMR (metabolism rates) bears a strong resemblance to a blood spatter pattern at a violent crime scene. Metabolism rates are all over the place, but these widely varying numbers are then averaged out to create the calculations we see formulas like Harris-Benedict, Mifflin, etc.  An Average is a Statistical number for mathematical convenience. It is not an accurate number for Everyone, and sometimes is not even accurate for Anyone ... similar to the following joke: 

A biologist, a chemist, and a statistician are out hunting.  The biologist shoots at a deer and misses fifteen feet to the left, the chemist takes a shot and misses fifteen feet to the right, and the statistician yells "We got 'em!"

People the same sex, age, and size can take in the same amount of "energy" and do their best to engage in the same amount of activity, but wind up with very different weight results. 

In tightly controlled feeding studies, the same absolute amount of extra calories can result in very different amounts of weight gain. Also, the exact same amount of caloric deficit will result in widely different amounts of weight loss. 

In general, this basic fact of human nature is overlooked, or ignored. 

Here is a recent article by obesity specialist, Dr. Sharma addressing this problem. 

Why The Energy Balance Equation ...