A reminder (mostly to myself) of a simple perspective!

I've been trying over and over again to lose 30-ish lbs, but I'm determined to drill in this common, but new-to-sink-in perspective for good this time.

I've only been at it for two weeks, but I feel good about where I'm going right now. I thought I had "ruined everything" again because I smoked on Sunday night, got really sad about being it Sunday night, then inevitably ate a huge meal, PLUS a completely unecessary, gut-busting dessert. I was sure I had fallen back into my bad habits and felt momentarily hopeless.

I pounced back on the wagon on Monday, however, and I still see that I've lost 2 lbs in January so far. Is it fast weight loss? Not really. Is it still weight loss? Yes! The world didn't end, and as a short girl, I feel good about the 2 lbs that do make a bit of a difference. Also, starting therapy? That helped, too.

I'm a little nervous for this upcoming weekend, because there are a lot of easily calorie-heavy events coming up, and I'm not confident I can resist. HOWEVER, I've learned that even if I don't, it's okay! As long as I get back on on Monday, I'll make SOME progress, and that's fine, too.

Thanks for readin' my ramble.

submitted by /u/tashabatata
[link] [comments]

from loseit - Lose the Fat http://bit.ly/2Dgkgs3

Some gentle encouragement for my wonderful losers.

This morning I was late to work because I couldn’t put together a shirt/pants combination that fit. I’m approaching laundry day so my favorite sweaters weren’t an option. I threw on a couple shirts that I haven’t worn in a while only for them to be too snug in the arms/chest. I tossed them in a discard pile and settled on an old sweater. Totally defeated.

A little context - August of 2016 I made a decision that changed my life. I started seeing a nutritionist, bariatric physician, and therapist to get my weight under control. I dropped from 286 to 190, and I replaced my wardrobe with clothes that actually fit. Last fall I started grad school, stopped seeing practitioners (because my health insurance/schedule no longer allows it), and shot back up to 214.

Anyway, I shouldn’t have felt defeated because I’ve lost 8 pounds since the start of the new year. Those are the fun pounds too because they come off quickly as your body adjusts to the new way of eating. But my mental stability was no match for a swift kick in the ass from Life.

This is where the encouragement comes in. At times, losing weight seems so simple - eat less calories than you exert, make sure they are nutrient dense if you want to feel full, and exercise if you want to boost your energy or improve cardiovascular health. But we all know it’s not simple. What we are doing is actually really fucking hard. Sometimes you do everything right and you don’t lose weight, and sometimes you do everything wrong and you still lose weight. It’s Life’s tricky little difficulty level - hard setting. If it were easy everyone would do it.

And yet, many of you do. Hell, I have. And that’s straight up extraordinary. You persevere despite the shirt not fitting, or your coworker pressuring you to eat a donut, or every fast food restaurant you pass on the way home from work that’s seductively whispering come hither. It’s a gluttonous siren song. Because the truth is we live in a world that wants to capitalize on our fatness. We are surrounded by messages begging us to buy shitty food so that gyms and weight loss drug companies can beg us to buy memberships and prescriptions. Actually losing weight is swimming upstream, and y’all are the superheroes (with or without capes) that manage to do it.

For most people, the journey doesn’t have a true stopping point. But the hardest part (for me) is always the beginning. So congratulations on your accomplishments and know how fucking awesome you are.

So long, losers ❤️💪🏼

submitted by /u/halfbakedcatmama
[link] [comments]

from loseit - Lose the Fat http://bit.ly/2Ddl010

Advice for breaking a 3-4 month-long plateau??

Quick backstory - I am turning 30 in April, and decided last year that it was time to get serious once again about my health. Having done this several times with moderate success, I am not oblivious to the things needed for weight loss. I changed my diet, stuck to a strict eating window and decided to try my hand at Brazilian Jiu Jitsu with some Muay Tai sprinkled in. From last April until mid October, I was able to lose 60 pounds bringing me down to 305ish area. It was around that time that my body stopped cooperating. From then on, I have been stuck on a plateau of 298-305.

Here is my main issue, so on some level I am probably answering my own question. During the work week, I have no issue sticking to my eating window and making good food choices. I get plenty of sleep and drink almost a gallon of water every day. The weekend however, is a free-for-all. Sometimes I eat everything that crosses my path, and sometimes I am pretty responsible. Regardless, this respite from work and training always seems to result in anywhere from 8-14 lbs when I hit the scale on Monday. This would discourage most people, but I know my body and all it takes is one striking and one BJJ class and I am usually back to whatever I was on Friday. I will then train at least one more time before the end of the week and sometimes manage to move the scale a little.

I was hoping to get some advice from other big guys about breaking through your weight loss plateaus. I have gotten a lot of good information from people I know (these people are generally in shape already) or people online (these people I do not have direct access to). Is this issue only because of my weekend habits, or is there more I should be doing as far as my diet and activity choices overall? Perhaps this is mental? Getting under 300lbs was my initial goal and once I achieved it, my progress has slowed a lot.

I hope this wasn't too long, I can expand on any details if needed.

Thank you!

submitted by /u/TRUK7878
[link] [comments]

from loseit - Lose the Fat http://bit.ly/2Fz0BpE

Weight Loss & Your Wardrobe - What to do about clothes?

Hi all,

I'm at a point in my weight loss journey where none of my clothes fit me!

Exciting but also extremely frustrating. I feel dowdy and awful since my clothes are too big and hanging off me, and it's adding to my inability to see my progress. I recently too, washed a chap stick and it RUINED the clothes that were still kind of fitting me! AH!

I still have about 25 pounds or so to go until my GW and don't want to invest in a whole new wardrobe until I'm comfortable with where I'm at.

How do/did you guys deal with clothes?

Did you buy only a few new things?

Did you donate all of your old clothes? Did you hang onto a few things?

I'm not sure where to go from here, but it's getting harder and harder every day to look professional, feel good in my clothes, or be comfortable!

Thank you!

submitted by /u/shanialabeouf
[link] [comments]

from loseit - Lose the Fat http://bit.ly/2sxrEct

Step out of your comfort zone!

I think weight loss is like a lot of things in life, you never really get anywhere until you try something different.

Us as humans have come to expect a certain comfort level in life. We take hot showers, we adjust the indoor temperature of our buildings so it's comfortable, we eat whenever we get the slightest bit hungry, every advancement we've made has been to make life easier and more comfortable for us. So when it comes to making changes to our daily routine we resist because it makes us uncomfortable, a feeling that we are not used to.

This generally leads to making up a lot of excuses. I don't want to exercise because I don't know what to do, people might judge me, it's hard work and I'm used to being comfortable and lazy. I had never tried keto before because I told myself I like bread too much and could never do it. I told myself CICO was too much work to track everything I eat and most things would be too hard to figure out. In my mind I wanted to make changes, but the other part of my mind was sabotaging it before I could even start. I was so used to eating good food I forgot how to just eat food as fuel, it doesn't always need to taste amazing. Or is can taste amazing and be healthy, even better.

We do this with all aspects of our life, we are creatures of habit because the things we do as a habit feel comfortable.

Then I started to try to put things in a different perspective. There are a lot of people in this world who are hungry and can only eat what's available to them. I didn't think I could give up bread, but what if something happened where it wasn't available to me? Like the zombie apocalypse, I became allergic, my wife and I lost our jobs and bread was an extravagance we couldn't afford, etc. Then could I survive without bread? You're damn right I could! If my survival depended on it I'm pretty sure I could adapt. And then I realized that I was going down a long road of poor health and my survival did depend on it. Not necessarily giving up bread, but giving up some of the things that I thought were comforting and it was time to try something different.

So lately I've been making it a goal of mine to try new things and step out of my comfort zone at least once a week. I've actually started keto, tried cooking some new foods, tried yoga, taken a cold shower (okay, maybe luke warm), I try a different exercise at the gym every day, woken up early to exercise, etc. Basically I'm just trying to challenge myself and come out of my comfort zone more so making changes will not be as difficult. Most of the time it's not even that uncomfortable at all, it's actually exhilarating and it makes me feel more alive! I've even learned a few things.

So, people of loseit, I challenge you to step out of your comfort zone and try something different today. It could be something very small, or try to recognize something you might want to do that you've been making excuses for. What will you do?

submitted by /u/SpartEng76
[link] [comments]

from loseit - Lose the Fat http://bit.ly/2QUFVtk

Day 1: Enough is enough!

Time to take responsibility for this.

So, a bit about me: I am a 27 year old woman. For most of my life I was very skinny, to the point where I didn’t grow boobs until I was past 20, and got my period very late and never had a consistent cycle. Still, I didn’t have an unhealthy lifestyle or an unhealthy relationship with my body, I ate what I wanted and took the weight for granted. I had a very active lifestyle.

When I turned 19 I moved out and entered the adult life, got in my first relationship, started cooking for myself and buying whatever I wanted when I wanted it. I stopped my healthy lifestyle because I no longer needed to do it (I used to bike 15-20km (9-12miles) km almost every day, but it was because my bike was my means of transportation, and I was always late so I had to bike really fast).

I started gaining weight. In the beginning I didn’t mind, it meant boobs and hips – which I appreciated. Then things got out of hand. Over the course of maybe 3-4 years I went from 58 kg (127 lbs) to 75 kg (165 lbs). Then I was stable for a while, but over the last two years I went from that to 88 kg (194 lbs). That was my all-time heaviest. During the summer I was ashamed when I went to pick out bathing suits and bikinis, I didn’t feel good in any of them. I had tried to count calories, to exercise, but nothing helped (of course, in retrospect I know I was cheating and in denial about how ‘healthy’ I actually was). I realized that a big part of my personality growing up, was that I was a skinny girl. Suddenly that was no longer true, and I struggled immensely with my self-image.

Fast forward to this fall, where I realized I’d had enough. I became stricter with my food consumption, and over the course of two months I lost 8 kg (17 lbs). I’ve kept them off, but I’ve been feeling so good about my weight loss that I stopped making an effort. Now I’m back to start again, and get my body to where I want it to be – a middle ground between my skinny ass teen-self, and my fat 2018-self. This time I want to keep myself accountable by joining a network of some kind, so I figured r/loseit could be a good place to start.

Edit: To add lbs/miles

submitted by /u/Old_Lingonberry
[link] [comments]

from loseit - Lose the Fat http://bit.ly/2swSVvG

A pound means nothing to me

I hope someone can help me shake this awful perspective I seem to have.

I understand that logically and scientifically it is healthy to lose 1-2 pounds a week. I accept this, and yet, I also know water weight can account for a lot of weight too. Therefore, I find myself in this terrible spiral that one pound means nothing to me. I always think it could be water weight, therefore, the process of weight loss seems to be taking so much longer because when the scale goes down, I always think there's a high probability its just water weight. I never truly count a loss unless I've gone down 5 pounds, and that takes quite a long time that I'm discouraged by then.

Does anyone else struggle like this? Or is willing to provide perspective?

submitted by /u/juneyluney
[link] [comments]

from loseit - Lose the Fat http://bit.ly/2Ryjb7O