This is kind of an introduction post, kind of a SV post.
I started doing CICO about two and a half weeks ago, and started reading this subreddit soon after. For some background, I'm 24f, 5'4", and SW 225lbs CW 215lbs. I've tried CICO briefly in the past but I was living at home and my parents were cooking so I never actually tracked anything properly, I think I was mostly just inputting snacks and stuff. I was a very average weight right up until I got my driver's license and suddenly had access to stores and candy and chips that weren't necessarily on the walk home from or to school. My original DL actually says 130lbs, which really makes me kind of sad now, but it gives me a point to try to return to. (Maybe? That was junior year of high school, and my height hasn't changed so I'm guessing it's a decent goal weight) For the past 7 years or so I've steadily been gaining weight up until where I am at now. Between college stress and general social anxiety that's kept me from really having much social interaction outside of video games, the weight I was gaining bothered me a lot, but never enough to really knuckle down and do something about it. If anything, it's made the social anxiety worse, as I already think I'm useless at interacting with people, then being obese on top of that and that affecting how I think people see me. I never thought I'd use that word to describe myself. My brother told me once he didn't understand how I wasn't morbidly obese with how much candy and soda I ate and drank. (He wasn't being an ass by the way, it was funny at the time, and he's just kind of blunt anyway.) I took way too much pride in that, but martial arts nearly every day (participating and teaching) kept my weight in the 160s for a couple of years until I moved away for university.
That was a lot of background ramble, but fast-forward to December 2021, being very overweight was getting to me more and more, and I started listening to this podcast called Weights and Plates on Spotify. Honestly it's awesome, and I very much recommend it. The two who run it are trainers and do powerlifting, but at least one is a nutritionist I think? Both went to college for something related to that anyway. They were just talking about how it all works, and they broke it down and made it sound so simple. Calories in and calories out. If you count what you eat and eat a deficit, you'll lose weight. You may not look the way you want because it's just not your body type, or you might just not have enough muscle for that, but you'll lose weight doing it regardless.
It made it sound so simple, I downloaded the LoseIt app and started tracking. On the app, I'm tracking just calories and water intake, not macros or anything like that. I have a feeling if I try to do more than I'm doing tracking-wise right now I'll burn out very fast. I have the app set to the maximum loss rate, which is 2lbs/week, though it's going faster than that right now. My calories in for the day are at about 1500. Last week I was letting my Fitbit write bonus calories to the app, but it was looking like it was adding way too many, and after looking it up, I saw that a lot of people say fitness trackers are super inaccurate for calories burned, so I just turned that off. I haven't really felt hungry at all past my allocated calories, sometimes even well before that point. I'm really just eating whatever I want, but in smaller portions. Just the mindfulness of the whole system is very powerful to me.
As soon as I started losing some weight I had more energy, and I wanted to do more stuff to push myself along, so I've been walking more, around 12k to 15k steps a day every day for the past week, though the first 7k of those usually just happen in the morning at work. I've always noticed as soon as I start eating healthier, whether that was healthier foods (in previous very brief weight loss attempts) or just less (now with CICO), I have way more energy to work out or go walk. Though this time I almost have too much energy. I was drinking about half an energy drink (I don't drink coffee, I've never liked the smell honestly) a day to stay awake up until I started CICO, but since then I haven't had a single one, and I'm up all day and having a hard time falling asleep, which is very weird. But if I make sure I have a process to going to sleep (brushing my teeth, eating a melatonin tablet, and reading until I fall asleep), I can fall asleep alright, just not as fast or as easily as I'd like.
That was a lot, all over the place, and a lot of it might have been unnecessary information, but I'm really enjoying this subreddit and seeing everyone's stories and progress and methods, so I wanted to share mine. It's been a great source of motivation for me to keep with it, so thank you for being here =D.
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from loseit - Lose the Fat https://ift.tt/3JScjtg
