Finishing my 4th month on 1500 cal/day, 60lbs lost, averaging about 0.45lbs/day. Male/50+
Lessons learned ..
- Don't try to force it. We can only lose a certain amount of fat per day, and "trying harder" does nothing but cause problems. The amount of fat we can lose per day is set, and it is determined by how much fat we have ... so if you have 100lbs of fat you can lose close to 1lb per day, but if you're much smaller and closer to goal you may only be able to lose 1lb per week. It is what it is. Imagining that you're going to be some kind of super-dieter, that you're going to be the one who lives on 500 calories a day, that you're going to be the one who only weighs 150lbs and still loses 1lb per day ... it's a recipe for disaster, all you're going to do is walk around light headed, dizzy, confused, losing muscle mass, crying and emotional all the time, hungry (until you even lose your appetite), binge eating, and generally just screwed up. So all we can do is figure out the potential we have for weight loss, calculate the deficit we need to hit that number, then watch the pounds come off over time and be glad for what we get.
- Willpower is not the key. Motivation is not the key. Enthusiasm is not the key. All of that will fail you at various times. The KEY is soldiering on, .. it's stacking days up one after the other with small weight losses each day until over a long period of time you reach your goal, it's as simple as that. Nobody is perfect, and occasionally we all screw up, but to stack up days over the long term you have to recover from your screw up, cut yourself a break, not feel guilty about it, and just get back to it and try to stay on track. You can't use your inevitable screw up to break your diet for a month, you have to just recognize that nobody including you is perfect, that the screw ups are inevitable, and that the key is consistency over time. Just get back on the right track, and get back to the day to day slog. Screw ups are not failure, ... failure is using that screw up to go off your diet for a month, a year, .. a decade, instead of just accepting that you screwed up and getting back to it, which, lets face it, isn't always easy once you've sucked down a few pizzas. Just push the empty pizza box away, use a napkin to clean up the corners of your mouth, get back on your diet, and it will all work out.
- Personally I don't think it matter what you eat. Don't imagine I've been walking around eating rabbit food because I haven't. I started my diet end of March because of Covid-19 quarantine, the reason I started losing weight is because obese people have terrible outcomes if infected, and I didn't (and don't) want to be a statistic. So I haven't been getting fresh salads, vegetables, fruits, etc, this whole time during lock down ... what I've been eating is chunky soup, candy bars, beef jerky, oatmeal, canned fruit, and whatever else I can get my hands on. It's just calories to me, as long as I hit my numbers I don't care. Now I will add this ... eating a lot of sugar does make me hungrier, so I try to keep the candy bars to a happy minimum, but I'm sorry (sorry, not sorry!) but I just want some candy sometimes, and as far as I'm concerned for long term diet success chocolate has to be included, so I include it.
- I don't think exercise is necessary to lose a lot of weight, and I hate exercise, so I'm against the whole idea. I have not exercised at all this past 4 months except for some walking around (i.e. "normal life activity") and doing some light gardening on occasion. Now I'm not swearing off exercise ... it may be the case that the closer you get to your goal weight the more you'll have to consider exercise to get rid of the last of the weight, I don't know .. but I know for a FACT you don't have to exercise to lose 60lbs in 4 months if you are fat.
- Binges may happen. I did not expect that, but it happened to me twice. I don't mean "hey, let's have a cheat day" ... I mean like a voracious physical need to eat food that just makes you go insane, like some kind of blood lust in battle, except with food. Twice it has happened to me, the first time it lasted a few hours and in the end caused me to go 3000 calories over. Second time it happened was for a few days and I went 14500 calories over. Shit happens. Get back on the horse. It doesn't do any good to dwell on it ... bodies are weird, and if your body drives you that insane it needed food and there's really not anything your brain can do about it sometimes. Just let it go and get back to the grind. You can cut down on this by following lesson learned number (1) above ... which is don't "force it" by overly restricting calories, because your body will drive you insane if you do.
- To stay motivated as much as I can I have a method I use to get "accurate" weight readings. Once every 10 days or so I spend two days eating very specific foods and not drinking any water so that I can get a repeatable weight reading. The food I chose for that is for two days I eat a jar of peanut butter, which I love ... it's high in fat, low volume, and so combined with not drinking extra water means that at the end of the second day I have a low weight reading. I'm SO GLAD that I did this over time, because the noise of everyday weight readings is just a chaotic mess, .. but I can literally use a ruler on the weight loss graph and draw a straight line through these low weight readings and see EXACTLY how much weight I have lost. I mean its super accurate .. and I can even see with this ruler line what my weight is going to be in a week, or two weeks, to within like 1/2 of a pound. This strategy may not be for everyone, but it works for me and I'm sticking with it. Outside of those "accurate" readings my weight jumps around all over the place and could be anywhere ... if I drink a lot of water and eat a lot of low calorie high volume food that retains water, I might weigh 10lbs more than these minimum readings, and I have weighed up to 12 pounds more because of the weight of the food and water in my gut. I believe its easy to think you have hit a "plateau" because of this ... because the weights are so random that any actual fat loss is lost in the noise for a week, two weeks, even three weeks ... eventually it will show up in the readings over time and your weigh will trend down, but the scales mean nothing over a period of a few days. I think the worst thing anyone could do is get up, step on the scales, and get upset because they didn't lose weight since yesterday ... that's just pointless. If all you want to do is see a weight measurement go down ... spend two days eating your calories as high fat foods, and don't drink any water, and the scale reading is going to drop like 5 pounds overnight. The reason I think this is important is because I have seen so many people get frustrated because they don't see the scales move and then the first thing they inevitable do is cut calories even more in an attempt to "jump start" their weight loss or "break through the plateau", etc ... which then starts to cause it's own problems. Don't let the scales make you crazy.
- Just be nice to yourself. You're all you have. Guilt, regret, .. none of this shit is helpful, so lay it down, just do the best you can reasonably do, try to stick with it over a long period of time as best you can, and stop trying to be perfect. Nobody is perfect. Don't let the perfect be the enemy of the good. Good is good enough.
That's about all I can really think of at the moment.
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