Starting out and Scale Issues

I’ve had my scale tucked out of the way in my small bathroom when not in use. It was sitting in its side. I weighed myself this morning and was shocked to see it say I’m 15 pounds heavier than two weeks ago. So, I weighed myself 3 more times and got numbers that were actually 5-10 lbs different from the previous number every time. Should I invest in a new scale or will being flat on the floor correct it?

Also, stuck to my guns and finally started eating healthy and went to the gym yesterday. Lunch was 600 calories half sandwich, apple, and cup of soup from Panera. Dinner was chipotle for 650. A bowl with chicken, brown rice, pinto beans, fajita veggies, pico, and corn salsa.

At the gym, there was an entire college baseball team at my gym, and it was so hard not to feel embarrassed. They were all 22 or under and extremely fit. Maybe it was in my head, but I definitely felt some “wow that fatty over there is really sweating to be doing nothing” looks.

Flash forward to this morning, I was feeling so good about myself. I planned to go to the gym today. Then I stepped on the scale and saw that huge (though genuinely wrong) number. I’m laying in bed wallowing right now. Hoping I’ll get the energy to hit the gym later and likely go buy a new scale.

TLDR. Weight loss is hard, and I’m scared.

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How much should I actually be eating in a day?

I have been on a weight loss journey for about three months. In that time I managed to drop 15 pounds, going from 180 to 165. I feel really confident. My healthy weight should be about 132 according to BMI scales. I am 5'8. I was able to lose the weight without exercise (I have a job where I am on my feet about six hours a day), and keeping a more or less 500 calorie a day diet. My boyfriend and I do a Dungeons and Dragons group and he has been increasingly concerned that I am eating too little since I have been a little hangry before the groups. I have not found much on the appropriate calorie intake to lose one to two pounds a week except the American Hearts Association 1200 for women, 1500 for men, 2000 for maintenance. So I am pretty confused. Will someone tell me how many calories a day I should be eating to lose one to two pounds a week? Thank you!

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Day 1? Starting your weight loss journey on Saturday, 02 March 2019? Start here!

Today is your Day 1?

Welcome to r/Loseit!

So you aren’t sure of how to start? Don’t worry! “How do I get started?” is our most asked question. r/Loseit has helped our users lose over 1,000,000 recorded pounds and these are the steps that we’ve found most useful for getting started.

Why you’re overweight

Our bodies are amazing (yes, yours too!). In order to survive before supermarkets, we had to be able to store energy to get us through lean times, we store this energy as adipose fat tissue. If you put more energy into your body than it needs, it stores it, for (potential) later use. When you put in less than it needs, it uses the stored energy. The more energy you have stored, the more overweight you are. The trick is to get your body to use the stored energy, which can only be done if you give it less energy than it needs, consistently.

Before You Start

The very first step is calculating your calorie needs. You can do that HERE. This will give you an approximation of your calorie needs for the day. The next step is to figure how quickly you want to lose the fat. One pound of fat is equal to 3500 calories. So to lose 1 pound of fat per week you will need to consume 500 calories less than your TDEE (daily calorie needs from the link above). 750 calories less will result in 1.5 pounds and 1000 calories is an aggressive 2 pounds per week.

Tracking

Here is where it begins to resemble work. The most efficient way to lose the weight you desire is to track your calorie intake. This has gotten much simpler over the years and today it can be done right from your smartphone or computer. r/loseit recommends an app like MyFitnessPal, Loseit! (unaffiliated), or Cronometer. Create an account and be honest with it about your current stats, activities, and goals. This is your tracker and no one else needs to see it so don’t cheat the numbers. You’ll find large user created databases that make logging and tracking your food and drinks easy with just the tap of the screen or the push of a button. We also highly recommend the use of a digital kitchen scale for accuracy. Knowing how much of what you're eating is more important than what you're eating. Why? This may explain it.

Creating Your Deficit

How do you create a deficit? This is up to you. r/loseit has a few recommendations but ultimately that decision is yours. There is no perfect diet for everyone. There is a perfect diet for you and you can create it. You can eat less of exactly what you eat now. If you like pizza you can have pizza. Have 2 slices instead of 4. You can try lower calorie replacements for calorie dense foods. Some of the communities favorites are cauliflower rice, zucchini noodles, spaghetti squash in place of their more calorie rich cousins. If it appeals to you an entire dietary change like Keto, Paleo, Vegetarian.

The most important thing to remember is that this selection of foods works for you. Sustainability is the key to long term weight management success. If you hate what you’re eating you won’t stick to it.

Exercise

Is NOT mandatory. You can lose fat and create a deficit through diet alone. There is no requirement of exercise to lose weight.

It has it’s own benefits though. You will burn extra calories. Exercise is shown to be beneficial to mental health and creates an endorphin rush as well. It makes people feel awesome and has been linked to higher rates of long term success when physical activity is included in lifestyle changes.

Crawl, Walk, Run

It can seem like one needs to make a 180 degree course correction to find success. That isn’t necessarily true. Many of our users find that creating small initial changes that build a foundation allows them to progress forward in even, sustained, increments.

Acceptance

You will struggle. We have all struggled. This is natural. There is no tip or trick to get through this though. We encourage you to recognize why you are struggling and forgive yourself for whatever reason that may be. If you overindulged at your last meal that is ok. You can resolve to make the next meal better.

Do not let the pursuit of perfect get in the way of progress. We don’t need perfect. We just want better.

Additional resources

Now you’re ready to do this. Here are more details, that may help you refine your plan.

• Quick Start Guide - Build your foundation!
• Loseit Compendium - Frame it out!
• FAQ - Answers to our most Frequently Asked Questions!

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A backless top and my brain’s a bully

It’s my birthday in a week (yay! 21! Whooo so exciting!) and I’m looking forward to going out for dinner with my family and enjoying myself! Due to an ongoing illness and a complicated relationship with food, it’ll be my first proper birthday celebration in about 4 years, so I really want to let go of my insecurities and just have a good time.

Here’s the problem; my brain is a freaking asshole!

I’m around 15kg (30lbs) down from my highest weight but I’ve gained quite a bit from my lowest recently due to developing a binge eating issue, and my brain is telling me two things:

1. I’m too fat to wear the backless top I never even would have dreamed of wearing outside at my highest weight (https://imgur.com/gallery/4XT0VSH) and that I should save it until I’m thinner.

2. That celebrating my birthday with some food and cake (like a normal person) would ruin my weight loss progress and that I should avoid eating and stick to my lower calories.

It’s driving me absolutely nutso, I feel so torn.

Does anyone have any advice on how to beat that nasty inner voice? Or is it actually a voice of reason that I should listen to a little bit more? I have no idea!

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How did you personally deal with food addiction, and how were you able to harness the discipline to overcome it? Was there any "epiphany" that happened for you?

To start things off, I'm 6'2" 180lbs. I've been running and going to the gym sporadically for years and years now. I'm not necessarily overweight, but I do have some fat on my lower midsection that I've been trying to lose and keep off for as long as I can remember.

For the life of me, I can't seem to permanently lose any amount of weight. It's not that I don't know how, it's that I lack the discipline to actually stick with any sort of weight loss efforts. Despite being a fairly normal and healthy weight, I 100% have an unhealthy relationship with food. I'll eat absolute garbage, completely let myself go for a month or two, gain 10lbs, then start going super hard, running and lifting every day, cold turkey on junk food, and lose 10lbs. I've literally been doing this exact same thing for years, just swinging back and forth.

When I was younger, between the ages of 8-13ish, I was very overweight, most likely obese. Peaked at 210lbs when I was 13. Granted, I was super tall for my age, but STILL. I discovered the gym, and lost about 65 pounds really quickly. In retrospect, I wasn't losing weight in a mentally or physically healthy way. Basically just ate like 600 cals of salad a day and ran my ass off on a treadmill for 6 months, terrified that I would gain it all back if I ate so much as a hershey kiss. Since then I've stayed a normal weight but never really managed to have a healthy relationship with food. Like so many people, it's a source of comfort and temporarily relief from stress.

My issue is that I struggle to do anything in moderation. If I decide to not follow my diet/exercise plans for the day, I stuff my face like I'm a god damn caveman after killing a mammoth, knowing he might not eat for another week. When I do decide to actually be healthy, I'll lift and run 6 days a week and eat SUPER clean. But as soon as I slip up, my body is like ALRIGHT GAME ON, and thus begins another binge period. Again, it's not that I don't know how to lose weight, it's not that I don't know how to use MyFitnessPal and eat healthy and treat myself in a reasonable way, it's that for some reason I'll wake up on certain days and not give a single fuck about my weight loss efforts or progress. I have no long-term discipline, just bouts of frantic motivation until I succumb to the comfort of binge eating.

So my question is, how did you go about breaking long-term habits that you've have ingrained in you for 15+ years? How did you change the way you feel about food in general? I understand that I've spent over a decade reinforcing these bad habits, and there's not going to be a quick fix. But what I'm doing clearly isn't working. How did you personally BEGIN to address your unhealthy relationship with food? I'm looking for personal, anecdotal insight.

In the short term, it would be great to lose that 10lbs I've lost 20 times before. But the long term goal is to keep the weight off, and more importantly, establish healthy and STABLE eating habits. It's only going to get harder as I get older and take on more responsibilities, so I want to ingrain good habits while I'm still in my early 20s.

I know this type of thing has probably been asked a hundred times before on this sub, but I'd appreciate ANY and ALL advice, no matter how brief. Thanks! :)

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Why am I still not slimming down?

I'm really frustrated by my progress. I want to lean down, and I've actually lost weight in the past 5 months, going from 120 to 114 pounds (it's not the fastest weight loss, but I finally feel like I'm maintaining my lifestyle this way). However, my biggest insecurity are my legs, which have always been thicker and annoyingly fatty around my knees. I've been going to the gym 6-7 days a week and spend at least an hour each gym session.

I spend half the time on cardio (treadmill, stairmaster,etc) and half the time on resistance machines. I really focus on my legs at the gym, which I don't know if that's a good or bad thing for leaning them out. My upper body has been toning really nicely, but even though my legs are becoming stronger and gaining muscle, they aren't leaning out like I want to. My knees are still fatty :(

I try to stick to 1200 calories, but I average probably 1400 calories. Every time I actually stick to 1200 calories for more than a few days, I get weak in the gym and I really hate that. I know fat loss is all about calories in and out, but how do I eat at a deficit without feeling extremely tired and unmotivated at the gym, because I still want to gain muscle as well?

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Stuck in a rut. Need some encouragement.

So I'm coming off of about 6 months of really successful weight loss. I'm down about 30 pounds so far and have about 20 more to go till I reach my goal. Tracking my calories using the Lose It! app has been a life saver, and staying within the calorie goal it gives me has yielded some really good results.

​

The problem is that my progress has slowed way down the past two or three weeks. I gained about two pounds in that time too and am trying to get them off so I can get back on track. But something about trying to break out of the 160s is really messing with me. I've been floating between 160 and 162 for what feels like weeks.

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I seem to be caving to cravings more often and just overall not adhering to my calorie intake goal as much since its much smaller now vs when I started. I just need something to keep me from saying "oh a little bit over my calorie goal is fine." That "little bit" often turns into two or three hundred over my goal.

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I know what I need to do, but I guess I was just hoping for some encouragement to get me back on track.

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