Coaching my morbidly obese friend, I had him eat his normal diet but track everything for two weeks. Here’s what we learned.

Hey all, I’m not sure if this will help everyone but I’m sure it will help someone. I’m coaching my friend in his pursuit of a healthy weight and at the beginning, I told him to take two weeks and eat everything how he normally would, just track it along the way. He was given a food scale and I paid for his MFP premium membership. He admitted to not measuring everything but he said he did log everything. Here were the five biggest takeaways.

1. Condiments

Over the two weeks, thousands of calories were condiments. Between the mayonnaise, ranch, and chick fil a sauce, the condiments alone made up 10% of his overall diet. And I’m more than willing to bet these were under reported as the serving size is so small.

1. Health foods are only healthy in healthy portions.

Over the two weeks, he ate four containers of hummus and five bags of pita chips. He ate multiple bowls of Raisin Bran and bags of pistachios. Salty foods are just as addicting as sweet foods and oftentimes have a lot of fat and are calorically dense.

1. Activity

While I didn’t ask him to log exercise or activity, we talked about it and he frequently mentioned how he’d “get his steps in” but overvalued the burn. He said he drank a ton of water so at work he’d stand up (office job) and get his steps in by walking to the bathroom and back. He guessed this was roughly 1,000 steps each time so he’d take 10,000 steps a day just on his bathroom visits. Upon him mapping out his office floor, it was maybe 150 steps round trip.

1. Don’t eat before bed

There is a myth that eating before bed causes the food to just sit in your stomach and is somehow worse so he would eat an enormous post-supper snack at 7:00 so he didn’t eat before bed at 10. Not only has that myth been mostly busted, he’d follow his 2,000 calorie supper with a 1,000 calorie snack an hour later.

1. The power of five

This is somewhat of a personal “rant” of mine that he alluded to many times. Basically, the US is so obese in general that just being overweight is often overlooked as being unhealthy. Just being five pounds overweight can have detrimental effects over times but he just kept saying he wants to not have to shop in special stores for clothes. While that’s an incredible intermediate goal, I’m having a hard time selling him on how important it is to not be overweight. I’ll need to work this in gradually.

Anyways, this may not apply to you but I thought it was an interesting conversation. He’s so motivated, I can’t wait to watch his transformation.

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source https://www.reddit.com/r/loseit/comments/xz7f4k/coaching_my_morbidly_obese_friend_i_had_him_eat/