You have to get rid of all or nothing thinking to succeed at this.

Lurking (per usual) and seeing some posts and thought I would toss this out.

Too many people think about weight loss in a binary way. Either saint or devil. Goal calories achieved or complete failure. Instead you should think about this like, say, building a house.

If I said to you "Hey X I am building a house, I have 17 truckloads of bricks and wood and the electrician, plumber, drywallers plus the furniture delivery guys etc...etc... all coming on Monday" you would, quite reasonably, look at me like I was insane. It's pretty clear that in order for the furniture to be installed you need like walls and a roof. In other words, it's silly to have people arriving before you are ready for them.

So, to weight loss.

You have to build the foundation first. Then move up from there.

To the data!

These are my daily calories for the first two years of doing this (-136.6lbs) (The P's indicate periods with different calorie targets)

• P0 (20 wks) 2510
• P1 (26 wks) 2017
• P2 (26 wks) 1970
• P3 (8 wks) 1913
• P4 (7 wks) 1900
• P5 (8 wks) 2030
• P6 (2 wks) 2192
• P7 (4 wks) 2228
• P8 (3 wks) 2346
• P9 (5 wks) 2379

It took almost a year and a half to get to a daily regime under 1970 calories and it's not like I wasn't losing, I lost 96.8lbs over that first 72 weeks (-1.34 a week) and then I decided to VASTLY increase my weight lifting/cardio (why the calories spike back up)...and while I was losing less (-1.2 a week for the last 32 weeks) the fitness benefits vastly outweighed the slightly slower pace.

So...I took it...diet only for 20 weeks...diet plus solid exercise for 52 weeks...then basically doubled the exercise for the remaining 32 weeks (and increased calories) to finish the year at 191 (5lbs ahead of the goal)

I know it's tempting to want this off tomorrow...but it's not coming off tomorrow...

I am not saying don't start exercising right away or don't try to hit a really good calorie target...I am saying that if you're 300lbs and decide that tomorrow you are going to eat 1500 calories and walk ten miles, you're setting yourself up to be sore and hungry and vastly more likely to give up by the end of the week. Instead, decide that for 10 weeks you're going to aim for 2000 calories (or whatever) as an average and walk 2 miles a day...build the foundation first and everything follows naturally from there!

Edit: Just to add...while it is technically possible that all or nothing thinking (a hallmark of depression sufferers) is going to be wonderful for you, it's going to lead to far more failure than success. Go to your average gym on Jan 10 and see how busy it is and then go back two months later and see how quiet it's gotten. Look at stats on New Year's resolutions and how the vast majority fail within a month. Everything we know about human behaviour suggests that going from binary poles (eating junk/not exercising to eating super healthy/exercising all the time) just doesn't lead to a lot of success. Yay if you're the 1/1,000,000 who joined a gym on Jan 2 and lifted eight tonnes and was still going two months later, but that's clearly the minority.

But, at the end of the day, come up with something that works for you.

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