serious weight question

[adpreston1988]

This past summer (before my freshman year in college) I became a total health nut and became determined to lose weight. I'm about 5'10" and in high school I weighed anywhere from 150-160 pounds. I wasn't "overweight" persay, but I wasn't as fit as I had been in middle and elementary school. When college began I lost about 10 pounds and was weighing 150 pounds consistently.

Then, this past December, I became even more health conscious than I had been and started keeping track of every food I ate, along w/ the amount of calories. With this I cut my weight down even more and was consistently weight anywhere from 142-148 pounds.

However, this past January I couldn't take the obsession over keeping track of calories and completely lost control and deleted everything on the spreadsheet I had, along w/ binging out on a bunch of food that night. Ever since I haven't really been eating that healthily and I definitely haven't been keeping track of my caloric intake. But surprisingly, my weight hasn't fluctuated at all. I just weighed myself this morning and I'm about 145 pounds still.

So my question is how can I weigh the same when I eat only healthy foods and keep track of my caloric intake as when I don't eat healthy foods and could care less about the calories I eat??? Does this mean fitness and nutrition is overrated? Is it just a mental thing? Any thoughts would be helpful since I'm really disturbed by this fact. Thanks.

 

[D_Master]

why are you trying to lose weight?? Are you really 145 lbs. and worried about being fat? You could easily PUT ON about 20-25 lbs (especially muscle) and still not look big.

 

[eminence]

what is wrong with you....start gaining weight and turn it into muscle. your not a chick, you should not be losing weight through dieting in the first place.

 

[Throttle]

i seriously need to start the thread that's been on my mind lately. society tells us that fitness, nutrition, and weight are closely interlocked; fitness = cardio, nutrition = low fat diet, and less weight is better.

All of these are wrong on several levels. For starters:

- Fitness equals those activities that give you strength, cardiovascular conditioning and flexibility (among other things).

- Nutrition is balance, and most low fat diets are not balanced, substituting extra simple carbs in place of fats. They ignore the importance of getting a balance of all fats (except artificial transfats). Calories are not bad; calories are life. Less is not better. Less is less.

- Weight is utterly irrelevant as a measure of health; body mass index (BMI) is worse. Neither captures your bodyfat % or your quantity of lean muscle mass.

If your weight has stabilized it could be one of several things:

- Your obssessive journaling has made you more aware of what you eat, and in spite of some binges, you've retrained your thinking, perhaps only on an unconcious level.

- You've set a new "setpoint" for your bodyweight. The body tends towards homeostasis (equilibrium), which is a big part of what makes gaining lots of muscle or losing lots of fat so damn difficult.

- Most likely, your natural setpoint has always been around 150, and deviations within 5-10 pounds on either side of it can be explained by water retention and other natural fluxuations.

You haven't said anything about your exercise habits (or non-habits), so you haven't really addressed fitness at all.

Fitness and nutrition are irrelevant if and only if your lifespan & quality of life in the meantime are irrelevant to you. Otherwise, it is bodyweight that is an irrelevant indicator of relative fitness.