[Pansy-Mae]

I've recently started calorie counting and for the first time in a while I am losing weight. I'm a healthy vegetarian in the first place, but I was stuck at 180 pounds for a while. After nearly 3 weeks to a month of calorie cutting, the first 2 weeks being rather extreme -- I'm somewhere in the 165-168 range now.

http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/

This Hacker's "Diet" is a non-bullshit approach to weight loss and weight management from somebody in a similar position as yours -- he does a lot of sitting in front of a computer. He's an engineer, and wrote some of the original AutoCAD software.

You don't have to go extreme, but you do have to eat less for it to work. I cut my calorie intake for a couple of weeks way below my fat burning threshold for my weight (I probably took in 1000-1200 calories at most) when 1500 was considered "fat burning"

At first I felt a lot of hunger pains but I treated this as "My body is dipping into my fat reserves. Each time I had these I let them go on for about a hour and then ate a light snack to curb them. This worked incredibly well for me. Lately I feel constantly full and don't really need to eat much to be satisfied.

Good luck

Hi D,

you need great strength of will to count calories... well done you, if you can!

My feeling, for people who don't have the additional challenge of vegetariansim, is that carb counting is effective without the requirement of feeling hungry!

In the last week or so, I've managed to lose 4 of the 5lbs that I put on whilst away over Christmas, although i still have make inroads on the extra 5 or 6 lbs that I've put on in the previous 12 months. I use Tesco's low cal ready meals as a basis, they come in at about 35-450 Cal ( according to the label that is!). They aren't exactly haute cuisine but they are reasonably edible for a week or two. The trick is then not to fill up on snacks when you think you get hungry, but eating more fruit instead of a bag of crisps deals with that. Largely it is simply a question of training the stomach not to expect large meals.