So sometime around this time last year, I realized that if I lost 1 lb a week for an entire year, I'd lose 52 lbs.
The "Too Long; Didn't Read" summary is that I did not meet my goal of losing 52 lbs in one year.
No one really knows what the trigger will be to jumpstart motivation. I'd already started earlier last year with the goal to be able to run 1 mile uninterrupted, and I kinda thought weight loss would be a natural side effect. But by this time last year, I still wasn't able to run 1 mile and my weight hadn't changed at all. But the 1 yr=52 lbs thought somehow clicked with me, and I decided to focus on losing weight.
Somewhere along the way I learned that it's actually a bit of a myth that exercise alone will get you to lose weight. Exercise can help you lose weight, but 95% of losing weight is how many calories you can burn versus the number of calories you bring in. (Some would say that's actually 100% of the equation.) And Americans as a whole tend to overestimate how much exercise burns and underestimate how much they bring in through eating.
So I decided to watch what I eat and document it. There are several apps you can get on your phone for this, but I ended up using one called Loseit. If I wanted to lose 52 lbs in a year, I needed to eat less than 1700 calories a day to start with. That number would shrink as I shrunk, but that was the start. On a day where I just ate whatever I wanted, I easily ate 2200 calories. On particularly bad days, it'd be close to 3000 calories.
I quickly learned that losing weight for everyone is custom to everyone. I met people who absolutely could not cut out sugar, but they could limit themselves to a single piece of chocolate rather than the whole bar and feel satisfied. That was not me. I met people who absolutely had to have flavored drinks, but would drink zero calorie packets in water and feel satisfied. That was also not me.
I had two particular culprits that caused me to overeat: 1) I loved and craved sugar. 2) I preferred to eat until I felt satiated and full.
It took weeks, if not months, to kick the sugar addiction. Any time I tried to cut cold turkey, suddenly I had to have ALL THE SUGAR! I spent weeks slowly cutting back the sugar in my coffee and finding substitutes that somewhat satisfied the sugar addiction. I found dark chocolate peanut butter cups that I didn't eat by the bag full. I found chocolate popsicles that kinda filled the ice cream void. Nothing was a 100% perfect replacement, but the less sugar I'd manage to eat in the day, I found myself craving it less.
Like any addiction, even when I was eating the healthiest, I never could get the thought of how comforting an entire box of cookies would feel to eat.
Eating until full has always been an issue for me. I've often gone out to dinner and crammed my face full of tortilla chips and salsa and then try to eat as much of my dinner as I could. I'd do this until my stomach felt uncomfortably full, then I'd get pretty grouchy because I'd actually eaten past the point of being full. It became apparent there was a delay from when my stomach filled with food to when my brain received the message that the stomach was full. I tended to keep eating until my brain received the message, which was usually too late.
It also took weeks, but I had to train myself to eat a reasonable portion and then stop even though I felt completely unsatisfied. I had to keep telling myself that I'd feel that satisfaction if I just gave myself 30 minutes, but those were long, nearly unbearable minutes. I had to find distractions that were better at keeping my mind occupied than the thought of eating. The more I managed to do this, the easier it became to simply wait.
Even though I trained myself to wait, the thought of how great it would feel if I could just eat to fullness would continue to pop up every time I was hungry.
While I said exercise is not the main factor in losing weight, it did help by putting my body through a routine. At my best, I was having a light lunch, an afternoon snack, and then could actually wait to cook a small dinner after exercising in the late afternoon.
I made it from 233 lbs on August 15 to 187 lbs on March 10. Not only was I going to lose 52 lbs in a year, it looked like I might even lose more than 52 lbs.
Of course, then the pandemic hit and I stopped caring. Suddenly the box of cookies and that satiated feeling were a lot more tempting. So as of today, I weigh 192 lbs. I suppose I should be glad I only gained 5 lbs in the four months since I stopped caring.
Anyway, it's 6 months until my birthday. If I lose 1 lb a week, I'll be 166 lbs on my birthday. I'm actually aiming for 170, so we'll see in 6 months.
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from loseit - Lose the Fat https://ift.tt/3hEhhen
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