drnorm wrote:Hi! I'm Val and drnorms spouse. I read your reply and continue to be frustrated as you must imagine. I like norm have eaten the exact same food and juices; however, he has lost a great amount of weight while I stayed the same. I even gain a few pounds when I eat veggies out. I don't get it. Perhaps you can suggest what I can do. Five of my girlfriends have the same problem and say they have done the same diet. I have been doing the Forks over Knives for about one year. Help?
Women can NOT eat the same amount of calories as men and expect the same outcome. As a peri/post-menopausal woman you're going to have to find the right balance of starches vs green/yellow vegetables and amount of exercise that will lead to weight loss.
In Dr. McDougall's newsletter of November 2005 titled Volume Eaters he talks about the original Rice Diet. He mentions how many of the people have to go down to as little as 400 calories before they start losing weight.
Many of the women here, including Star McDougallers, have found that they have to eat very little amounts of higher calorie starchy food and load up on the non-starchy veggies or they fail to lose, or even start to regain. If you read into the journals of some of these women and pop their daily meals into the CRON-O-Meter you'll see many of them usually average 1200 calories a day and under. Long-time McDougaller
Marla is currently journaling her meals and entering them into the CRON-O-Meter and has found she has to keep the calories between 1000 - 1200 a day. Look it over and see the amount of food she's taking in for those calories. She averaged 2.2 pounds lost per week.
Jeff Novick has said a number of times that if you're not losing weight you have to eat less starches and eat more less calorically dense foods so your total caloric intake is reduced without having to count every calorie.
Even Dr. Fuhrman, to whom you're been referred to above, has said a number of times in his own forums that most women need to eat only 1000 calories a day. That's regardless of whether they have weight to lose or not.
What it boils down to is that the McDougall program has to be treated as a regular old low calorie diet if you want to lose weight. If you're not losing you have to eat less higher calorie foods, less total calories. Many of us have found that to lose weight we do have to keep our calories really low, some of us need to eat less than 1000 calories a day to lose. Some can lose at 1200 a day, others at 1500. Many men can eat over 2000 can still lose weight. I don't know of
any woman, especially older, post-menopausal ones, that can do that. If you're eating the same 2000 calories as your husband, you're not going to lose anything and will most likely gain a bit. You've got to eat less than him, not the same amount.
