Day 1? Starting your weight loss journey on Sunday, 05 July 2020? 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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from loseit - Lose the Fat https://ift.tt/2ZGZ7Bp

[MM, SV] half, there is half of me now 39 M 244/492 6'1"

A few days ago I reached the point where I've lost more than I currently weigh.

At my first appointment with the Dr I weighed in at 492. I had been trying since late September to lose weight. This Dr appointment was late November 2018. There is a chance I was over 500.

She told me about Dr. Fung. I looked him up and started immediately to follow his intermittent fasting regime. I jumped right in at OMAD and multi-day fasting too.

The longest I fasted for is 16 days. I lost 36 in that time. I stopped because the doc asked me to. I change up my fasting times often to not have a set schedule and keep my body wondering. It's gotten strange during pandemic. Based on what was available at the store determined if I fasted longer or shorter.

When I do eat I keep it keto. Big parts of my diet are pecans, cream cheese, eggs, and cheddar cheese. Use popcorn seasoning and other spices to make the pecans more tasty and get some salt in. I make great omelettes now.

It won't happen overnight, but with persistent effort and stubbornness you can do it.

I do believe my success is partially based on being single and pet free. I can determine when to eat without being tempted by others eating.

Other things to help. DON'T BUY IT. Don't buy the bad food in the first place. Worried you'll snack on something? Leave it in the store. I know easier said than done.

For a goal, I don't know how low I can go. When you get that big your bones have to strengthen to handle it. So I'm unsure how much bone growth I have. I found out my chest is 12" thick and I don't have big muscles in my chest and back. So that much thickness is going to probably prevent me from getting into ideal BMI. I do have lose skin. IDC, but knowing it's hanging off me with it's own mass keeping me from ideal BMI too.

I walk 5-7 days a week, 2-6 miles per day. Part of this is boredom. Skipping meals and all that goes with it frees up time and money.

I did talk a break from weight loss from Nov 2019 until May 2020 to eat and try maintenance to see if I could do it. I saw the doc early in Nov 2019 weighing in down 207 in under a year.

Anyway that's about it.

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Plateau or No?

Hey guys!! I started my weight loss journey on May 1, after a week of tracking what I ate and realizing I was eating a 2700 calories a day. I used the TDEE calculator, created a 500cal deficit, and began dropping weight. On May 23rd, I took up the Runner’s World Magazine Run Streak Challenge, and ran a mile every day from May 23 to July 4. I really enjoyed it and felt great! I lost 36 pounds between the two concepts, and am so so proud!

HOWEVER, I haven’t lost any weight for two weeks. Still tracking calories (accurately, cross-checking across platforms and using higher cals when unsure), weighing everything I eat, running a mile a day, getting my 10000 steps in, and reevaluating my TDEE every 10lbs lost. Current calorie target is 1476/day. I have gone over my cals only twice since May 1, and drink at least 150oz of water every day.

I’m getting a little discouraged. Last week I didn’t weigh because I was afraid of what the scale would say, and when I finally forced myself I was still stuck at 196. Is this a plateau, or am I doing something wrong?

Pertinent info: -Female, 5’5”, SW: 234.4, CW: 196 -I did get pretty constipated a week ago (sorry for TMI) as well as having a UTI (super fun!) so maybe this is a cause? -CICO focused, not worried about macros rn -I don’t eat after 8pm and before 9am (kinda IF?) -I don’t typically replace calories burned according to my Garmin (aka if the Garmin says I burned 160 cal on a run I typically just count that as an extra deficit rather than trying to fill it)

Thanks in advance for your help! This community has continuously inspired me and kept me going!! I don’t share my weight loss journey with friends or family so thank you for creating and maintaining this space 😭❤️

Ps: would love any nutrition/weight loss book recs :)

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from loseit - Lose the Fat https://ift.tt/2DaZb4M

For the first time in my life I see the light at the end of the tunnel and it is really weird.

Not sure if I even have a question, just came to a realization today that I have never had before. Wanted to get some of this off my chest. This post really is more of a selfish post for me to be able to process my journey so far. Before today, I looked at my weight loss attempts as an endless list of failures. Now I see the whole process as one very long road to where I am today.

Up until this point in my life, I have always been overweight. Not so much so that it ever stopped me from doing what I loved, but it always made me feel self-conscious. I was bullied quite a bit for my weight growing up. The bullying never truly got to me, but it was always there. Even the comments of family members or others would often show that they knew I was fat. It is just second nature I think, eventually someone is going to make reference to your weight and it usually isn't derogatory at all. It just reminds you over and over that there is something wrong.

Nearing the end of high school I developed tons of confidence which was good in a way. But I also started believing that my weight was just a part of who I am. I believed there was nothing really wrong with it and I blamed it on genetics. I got married and I let my weight slip even more. I did make countless attempts to lose the weight. Keto diet was the largest loss for me, before gaining double what I had lost because it simply isn't sustainable in my opinion (If it is sustainable for you, please ignore this. It's just that I know about 8 people who found the same thing. Huge initial loss, bigger regain). But I always blamed it on genetics and couldn't figure out how my healthy weight friends ate tons more food than I did but didn't gain weight.

College only made everything worse. Sitting, studying and eating. No money, no gym, tons of Kraft Dinner and tons of weight gain.

The first summer away from college I had a job in a city where I had access to a gym again. That summer I encountered a crazy reddit post in this sub that basically said,

"your fat because you eat too much, eat less",

and that is where I encountered CICO. At first I didn't believe it, but I started counting. Wow. I ate probably 3x the calories my wife ate. How on earth did I ever think my food intake was normal? I guess I bought into the lie that I am not the one to blame for my health. I always wanted to blame something or someone else. I am not saying that people dont have certain medical issue or history that are a factor, but it is still up to you what you are going to do about those things. They do not control you.

That is where the next 3 years took a turn for the better in changing my lifestyle. I started to see more victories than failures. I soon realized that my ability to eat well and count calories was inextricably linked to going to the gym. Starting my morning at the gym set a standard of health for the day. Waking up was the next battle. I got a sunrise alarm clock and that helped but not enough. I would still stay up too late on my phone and was not able to get out of bed. So I learned to charge my phone on the other side of the room with another alarm. I noticed that my phone no longer became the thing I longed to see every night and morning. Eventually it became completely natural for me to get out of bed and go to the gym.

But then another problem. I was counting but stopped losing weight. Apparently my "eyeballing" of portions needed to be replaced with a food scale, suggested one redditor. Got food scale, "Oh, I'm eating 600 calories of peanut butter not 200..." Queue me losing weight again.

Each summer I got better and better at this rhythm of learning how to be healthy, only to see catastrophic failure as i went back to college and lost access to my gym every year. In my summer before my last year of college I lost over 30 lbs. Over the next college year I gained nearly 10 back. But through all this I had so much peace that it was soon going to be finally over. Covid and 2 months at home added another 10lbs. But it didnt matter because I was ready. This was so different from the norm. Looking back today I realize just how confident I was.

That brings me to now. I'm officially fully moved into a new place, job and lifestyle. I haven't even remotely struggled to dive into it. I realize now that that is because of 24 years of collective experience both of failures and victories. Although my weightloss journey might have started the first moment I realized just how much bigger I was than the other kids at school, that didn't mean I would suddenly do a 180 and lose the weight. It took me another 15 years to learn how to do that. It doesn't mean I didn't want it before, it just means I had a lot more to learn.

The biggest lesson of all, was that it truly was my fault. It wasn't the bullies, it wasn't genetics and it wasn't my family, it was me. I made decisions with food everyday that damaged my health. It doesn't mean that certain people aren't accountable for what they have done or how they have treated me, it means that I am accountable for how I react. That realization was the turning point.

​

TLDR: Just read this part

As I was thinking about this big crazy journey this morning, the weirdest feeling came over me. I realized that I have never in my life really felt like I could do it. I never felt like I was going to do anything more than lose weight for a period of time. I never thought of weight loss as related to a life change, but only a body change. I would tell myself, "this is it, this is the last straw, I am never going back", but I always had this gnawing feeling that it wasn't going to happen.

But here I am today, and that feeling is nowhere in sight. I think it disappeared sometime last august. I am looking forward to hitting my goal sometime next spring and it doesn't even matter to me. I used to be obsessed with goal dates and now I couldn't care less (Im still pumped to get to my goal weight though!). Because now my life has changed, the benefits of which I have already experienced in droves. I have seen radical growth in my marriage, my spirituality, my faith, my health, my patience, my compassion, my productivity, my energy and countless other things.

Not only am I already healthier today, but I am going to be healthy. One day I am going to weigh a normal weight for the first time in my entire life. I don't even think about the question of if, its only when. I never thought I'd see the day that I felt this way.

I finally see the light at the end of the tunnel and it is so much closer than I ever realized. I don't think there is a crash course that could have gotten me to this point. It took time and drive. Although I am positive there will be more battles down the road, a war has been won in my life. I know that I am going to have to stay alert to keep this "post-war peace". But I am so thankful that I can finally enjoy that peace. Healthy food tastes amazing, cooking is fun, going to the gym is exciting, CICO counting is becoming second nature and being healthy is what I want to do and no longer what I force myself to do.

​

I guess I just want to encourage everyone here who is struggling not to judge your progress too harshly just on the fluctuations of the scale. Judge your progress by what you've learned and how your failures and victories have made you more prepared to be a healthier person today than you were a year ago.

​

...that was about 2 hours longer than the 5 minute post I had in mind haha...Also, re-reading it, I realize it might come across as a bit snobbish and that was not my intention sorry.

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It's ok to spend a day on the couch. (A, hopefully, helpful perspective on just being worn out)

I think a lot of us know that this is a marathon and not a sprint but I think sometimes the number of "I lost 149lbs" posts can maybe obscure some of the day to day realities of the majority of us who are on our weight loss path. i.e we read posts about huge weight losses and, not infrequently, some very regimented approaches that work for that person but which, imho, are likely not going to be the norm for most of us.

So I thought I would share my workout tale for today and hope somebody finds it useful.

I've been working out 7-8 times a week for the last 9 weeks. I live alone, the pandemic has left me with huge swaths of time and it's really hard to kill massive amounts of time by yourself day after day. Luckily I bought a flat bench and some dumbbells pre pandemic (I was planning on going to Japan -I canceled- and was hyper focused on that area of the world and so was very virus aware in Feb and was worried I'd lose progress if the virus came here and so bought them...excellent call by me) so I can do a basic workout at home and I do 25 flight stair climbs (now with 24lbs on my back) for cardio (the bike I ordered is hopefully arriving this month so I can add that to the routine) and to train for my, I hope, Everest Base Camp hike in November of next year.

In short, I am crazy motivated.

Today was shoulders/bicep/tricep/squats and abs. My first shoulder set was good, 2nd was good, 3rd the wheels came off. My 2nd shoulder exercise was terrible. Three more crappy sets. I got ready to do biceps and stood there and thought "I don't want to do this". Like my brain just completely shut off.

I sat on the bench and thought about fighting through it. Do the volume, weigh in tomorrow, start a fresh week with a stair climb and go from there. And I just couldn't do it. So I called it a day, had a shower, and decided that tomorrow is going to be a couch day. No walks, no exercise, no stair climbs, just a glorious day of resting my aching body. Monday, which normally is chest/back, is going to be a stair climb instead to give my muscles 2 full days off.

My point is this. The body needs days off. If you exercise daily then fabulous. If you never go above your calorie goal then fabulous. I am 1000% not saying that tomorrow I am eating Doritos and lord knows what else. I may have a 2000 calorie day (my normal goal is 1700) and I am not going to move more than 10 feet all day.

And that's ok. Being in "neutral" for a day isn't the same as being in reverse. And, being stronger through rest on Tuesday means a better perfomance when I do chest/back.

Don't feel guilty if you need a day in neutral. Listen to your body. Mine was telling me it needs to veg. If it tells me it needs to veg on Tuesday though, that's when I slap some sense into it and lift some weights :)

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Reached goal - 50lbs in 10 months

I started September 1st 2019 and today July 4th 2020 I have reached my goal. From 200 to 150. I am proud of myself but a little sad that I’m not done. My stomach still sticks out a lot (this is not body dysmorphia as it was confirmed by doctor). Having a baby really stretched me out and now I need to try for 10 to 15 more pounds to see if that helps and If not - surgical intervention. That freaks me out. Future me can deal with it I suppose. Anyhow, I did it! I ate 1200 calories daily (I messed up a few days, longest no weight loss was 4 weeks were I stayed steady, and I didn’t work out once.). I am going to start doing light exercise now and go from there. Maybe muscles will strengthen my core and get that pregnant belly back where it should be. For all those thinking about starting, close to finishing, and everything in between you can do it just take it slow and the time will get you there. What helped we was having a motivator so every time I thought about eating more I would remind myself why I was doing this. That really helped. Hopefully in another 10 to 15 weeks I will be satisfied with where I’m at and have a full celebration (sans surgery). Thanks everyone and keep on counting!!

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Loseit On the Couch (help needed)

I’m looking for a little help/advice. I apologize for the length of this.

I am a 5’3” female who has been working on losing baby weight for an embarrassingly long time. In early fall I finally seemed to have hit a groove. I work an office job and due to my petite size was doing great on 1200 calories/day. Around Christmas I finally got active again (pre baby I was very active) and was losing while eating around 1500 calories/day. I was thrilled to see the puzzle pieces coming together in what was shaping up to be not just weight loss, but a sustainable lifestyle change. I was running and riding my mountain bike. And very close to my goal weight. Then COVID hit. I slid backwards a little, but not too bad. Once I found my new normal I lost the COVID weight in just a few weeks.

The weekend after I saw the pre covid weight on the scale I wrecked my mountain bike and had a pretty severe ankle break. For 6 weeks I was essentially on bed rest. I slipped into a mild depression that I treated with food. That paired with the fact that I literally am sedentary in every sense of the word I can tell that I have gained back every single pound that I lost.

I have no clue what to do to start trying to lose weight again. It could be another 4-6 weeks before I can walk. Before I did lose weight on 1200 calories/day but I still wasn’t truly sedentary (I would walk around my work, to and from my car, play with my son outside, etc.). I also have this fear of my diet somehow causing my ankle to not heal fast enough. Am I just stuck at probably maintaining by eating 1200 calories/day at this point? Is it possible for me to start losing again? What do you guys think?

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