Here’s my take on starting your weight loss journey

After yo-yo-ing back and fourth between a very restrictive diet and just binging, I realized that weight loss should be a lifestyle.

I’m pretty sure some people already know this, but I just wanted to share just in case.

Instead of going on a diet, it’s better to change your current diet and maintain it rather than doing big changes for short term results. If you want to stay at your GW, you can’t go back to your original lifestyle.

My advice: Start by changing one of two things. 1) limiting portion size. This way you can still eat the foods you love, but are also taking steps towards weight loss. Nothing drastic.

2) Swapping out unhealthy foods for healthier alternatives. Don’t go cold turkey, slowly swap out certain foods starting small.

3) exercise. However you choose to do it, just be active.

And that’s it! Pretty simple, but it took me a while to figure out that small long term changes were the way to go.

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30 Day Accountability Challenge - August Sign Ups!

A new month & new Daily Accountability Challenge!

For the newbies to the sub reddit, please start here, so much good info!

https://www.reddit.com/r/loseit/wiki/quick_start_guide https://www.reddit.com/r/loseit/wiki/faq

And hey, maybe it’s not a bad idea to review them anyway to you returning conquerors. I do occasionally to remind myself of the basics.

Here’s what we do in the DAC my friends!

This is the sign up post to outline your goals, weight loss, self care, creative, whatever keeps your motor going.

There will be a daily update post for you to chime in about how day whatever is going!

At the end of the month, there is a wrap up post to reflect on the progress you made or didn’t make & what you learned. Learning is progress my friends!

We try to foster a supportive, caring place to discuss the actual day to day of deficits & counting & caring so much about how we fuel our bodies & lives. So be kind, interact if you like & hopefully you feel supported by the internet version of a push up bra!

Leading by example, here I go!

Weight by end of month (199 lbs, preferably trend weight): No weigh in this morning. 201.5 lbs trend weight.

Stay within calorie range (1500 weekdays, maintenance weekends):

Exercise 5 days a week: Habitual, as always I want more intensity & strength. X/X days.

Self-care journaling (once a week, 60 minutes): Need this for sanity.

Self-care time (working on love journals, beauty treatments, drawing X/X days): I’ve been neglecting this. Bad loser.

Try a new recipe once a week: X/5 weeks.

50 pages of The Body Keeps the Score: Tough gig. X/50 pages.

No fast food or candy from the work dish: Streak day 6.

Be present in my body & accept the sensory feedback:

Be more mindful & express gratitude, avoid the hedonic treadmill:

Your turn!

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Is it possible to lose 50lbs + through diet and walking alone?

I am a 5’7 23 yr old female, and I currently weigh 203lbs. My starting weight was 245 lbs.

I just had a conversation with the person who encouraged me to go on a fitness journey, and she congratulated me on my 42lbs lost so far. I told her I wanted to lose about 45 more pounds and she said that if I continue only walking as my exercise, I won’t lose any more weight. That large amounts of weight loss only happen when you do more hardcore exercising.

I’m kind of shocked. Walking is my utmost favorite form of exercise and it’s the only one I look forward to. Is it impossible to lose 85lbs through walking and a calorie deficit alone? Has anyone done this?

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Lessons learned after 4 months, and 60lbs lost

Finishing my 4th month on 1500 cal/day, 60lbs lost, averaging about 0.45lbs/day. Male/50+

Lessons learned ..

1. 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.
2. 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.
3. 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.
4. 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.
5. 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.
6. 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.
7. 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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Reassessing your goal?

23F, 5’10 SW: 165.5lbs, GW: 143lbs, CW: 147lbs

Hi! So, I’ve lost a fair bit of weight over the last few months, and I’m just a couple of lbs away from my goal weight now (I usually use KG which is why it seems like a weird number).

However, I don’t feel that a look quite as slim as I thought I would at this weight. I weigh slightly less than I did before starting university, but definitely don’t look like I did then. I know some of this is due to being older and body composition changing.

I’ve only used diet for my weight loss, but have joined the gym now they’re open (and am in fact very sore rn from my first class yesterday!!), so I’m hoping some muscle gain might help with my appearance, but I was wondering if people have shifted their goals before meeting them?

I want to be able to celebrate when I get down to 143, but I just don’t think I’ll be quite happy with my body. Does anyone have any recommendations about what my goal could be - 130lbs would put me at an underweight BMI so I don’t want to go too close to that. I’m also aware muscle weighs more than fat so the gym may help me look better without losing weight (but this will be a very slow process I think).

Thanks!

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All of a sudden I'm hungry all the time

As the title says, anyone else experienced this? I've lost about 64lbs and for about 1 month I'm just trying to maintain my body weight without CICO and been losing about 2lbs since then. But for the last few days, I've been constantly hungry. The last time I ate was 4 hours ago and it was a normal-sized meal and I'm currently so hungry my stomach hurts.

I started my weight loss journey by only eating 1500-1800 calories a day (I burnt about twice that amount) and sure I was hungry all the time but my stomach never hurt like this and I'm currently estimating that I eat about 2300 calories per day.

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I give myself leeway when I get compliments about my weight lost.

Hello guys!

Has anyone had this problem when someone compliments you on your weight loss, you give yourself kind of an excuse or leeway to eat unhealthy. It keeps happening and I am going back to my old habit and I really don't want to go back. The more compliments I get the more I know I will give myself more leeway and eventually go back to my old ways.

To counter this, I told my friends that I meet on a regular basis not to compliment me and I don't weigh myself, only after every 3/4 weeks and it's been working, but meeting friends that I haven't seen in a couple of months they bring up my weight loss. Why is it discouraging me from my diet instead of encouraging me? Is it because I look for gratification rather than doing it for myself? but I feel like I am doing it for myself I feel so much better! I don't know please help me

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