I just had my first normal period in almost 2 years

Last week I crossed the border from obese to overweight. Since January 9 kg have freed themselves from my body. While it feels amazing to pull my clothes in all directions possible to see where my body has shrunk, there is a weird serene and good feeling to notice a distinct "health change".

My periods have been irregular and often so ungenerous I've barely noticed them. But this particular week I've yet again been blessed with Satan's stomach cramps, back ache, and such a steady flow that I feel like Moses parting the Red Sea whenever I flush the toilet.

Although I despise everything about my monthly cycle, especially since I'm never going to have children, it feels amazing that my body is working as it should. It's such a distinct change and it's all because of the weight loss. It's proof and further motivation of the health benefits that my weight loss journey will have.

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Intuitive Eating is largely misunderstood by this community

I've read a lot of posts about IE in this community, and the vast majority were highly critical while also completely misunderstanding what it is about. IE has helped me, someone who has been obese since 14 (now 30) and struggled with overeating all my life. I wanted to talk a bit about it in case this can help someone else out. I highly recommend Abbey Sharp on YouTube who is a registered dietician with a philosophy rooted in IE. This video in particular really goes over the whole philosophy and the science behind it. I found it totally eye-opening when I started this process.

1. Intuitive Eating is not a weight loss tool.

IE is a way to fix your relationship with food. It is about learning how to eat in a way that creates fullness and satiety while also practicing moderation. This is not just feel good "trust your instincts" rhetoric, it is rooted in the science of cravings, satiety hormones, and the brain-gut connection. Weight loss may or may not result from IE, but it is a separate thing. If weight loss is your ultimate goal, fixing your relationship with food first can help you to lose weight and maintain it for life.

2. Intuitive Eating is not about eating whatever you want, whenever you want to.

Most dieticians that put people on an IE-based plan do not jump straight to having the person trust their hunger/fullness cues. If you have a bad relationship with food, these cues will not be functioning correctly. This process usually begins with focusing on structuring your eating, practicing mindful eating, and focusing on balancing your meals to promote fullness and satiety. Moderation is always necessary when choosing foods, however moderation does not need to be the same as restriction. More on this later.

When people talk about IE in conjunction with "eating whatever you want," they are referring to the fact that IE promotes the idea of not restricting the types of foods you eat, but rather focusing on high fiber, high protein, high healthy-fat balanced meals and snacks which will fill you up and satisfy you. There is also an emphasis on eating what you like to eat, not just always eating low calorie versions of food that are emotionally (and physically) unsatisfying, or forcing yourself to eat salads when you don't want to.

3. Sometimes eating more means eating less.

This is what really sold me on intuitive eating. I was suuper skeptical going in. I thought exactly what everyone on this sub thinks - "if I eat what I want without thinking about calories, I'll overeat!" One of the key elements of IE is eating fullness/satiety promoting meals. This means having protein, healthy fats, and fiber in everything you eat, even snacks.

This is what happened for me. My first breakfast I toasted a whole english muffin (far more bread than I would normally eat), and put mashed avocado on it, which was the equivalent to half an entire avocado (wayyyy too many calories), then a fried egg on top of each (cooked in real butter, omg). I also put a handful of raspberries on the plate for added fiber. I looked at this breakfast and thought, "this is a crazy amount of calories and it won't even be enough food." Guess what? I barely finished one half of the English muffin. The meal was so filling I couldn't eat it all. This experience would be repeated at every meal I made for the next few weeks, until I just started naturally making smaller portions because I knew I wouldn't finish them. Furthermore, I stay full when eating this way. I don't find myself wandering for a snack because I am still completely full from my last meal.

4. Intuitive Eating can make you crave unhealthy foods less.

Cravings come from the brain. Why does the brain crave things we shouldn't eat? I think the generally accepted reason on this sub is because "that's just what our monkey brains evolved to do." Except there are plenty of people that don't crave junk food. What gives? IE examines the fact that the brain sends us cravings because our eating patterns are causing it to. Abbey says in her video, "psychological scarcity mindset can often have the same outcome as physical scarcity." If your brain believes there's not enough food (because you're restricting), it's going to send you all the signals to eat whatever you can especially the high-calorie foods so that you don't starve.

Giving yourself balanced, satisfying meals every day actually gets your brain to calm down and stop (to some degree) craving food you don't need. This is probably the thing I was most skeptical about going in, but I can honestly say within a week, IE reduced my craving for sweets by about 75%, and I am a lifelong sugar addict. I still have emotional cravings at times, but I find them a lot easier to manage.

5. Part of Intuitive Eating is dealing with emotional eating problems first.

People rarely talk about this on this sub, which is a shame because I think it's a huge problem for our society right now. There are psychological/emotional reasons people overeat, and if you don't fix those problems, you will have difficulty fixing your relationship to food.

6. Intuitive Eating takes real effort, and it is easy to fall of the wagon.

Fixing your relationship with food is not easy. It takes actual effort to prepare balanced meals, to structure your eating, and to be mindful while eating. It is super easy to just tune out while eating and then overeat because you're not paying attention. Similarly, it's easy to get tired and just say "fuck it I'll have a bowl of plain pasta" and then find yourself hungry an hour later and eating something else. IE is sometimes treated like the easy way out, but it requires just as much effort and concentration as calorie logging or other methods.

7. There's nothing wrong with calorie-counting, and it can be used in conjunction with Intuitive Eating.

I would suggest everyone try without calorie counting first, but once you've started to fix your relationship with food, you can use calorie counting as a tool for moderation. It's when calorie counting becomes a tool for restricting that you may have problems. Moderation means eating what you like, but in appropriate amounts. Restricting means altogether avoiding or micromanaging food intake from an anxiety-based mindset.

8. Intuitive is not for everyone, but it may be for you if...

• You are someone who constantly tries to eat healthy, and manages to for days or weeks, only to "fall of the wagon" and eat the junk food you've been craving.
• If you are a yo-yo or fad dieter.
• You have foods that you restrict/disallow for fear they are too many calories or "too unhealthy." Any food can be eaten in moderation and within a balanced diet. Craving Captain Crunch? Have a bowl with protein heavy milk, protein powder, high fiber fruits, and some nuts for healthy fats. Boom. Balanced meal.
• You think about food constantly. After practicing IE for a while, I ate breakfast, sat down to work and didn't think about food once for 6 hours, and only thought of it then because I felt physical hunger. I ate lunch, went back to work and again didn't think about food until the dinner hunger pangs hit. I went a whole day without really thinking about food. That's the first time that has happened in 15 years.
• Thinking about food and weight loss causes you a lot of stress, anxiety, and guilt/shame. This is a sign of a broken relationship with food, which IE can help with.

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need some help understanding calories

hello everyone, i have been on a 1400 calorie diet for a few weeks now and haven’t seen much progress though i know it’s really too early anyways. i’m more wondering if this is a good way to lose weight?

i’m 23 y/o, female, currently 154 lbs, 5’3. i spent the first 22 years of my life eating whatever and never gaining a lot of weight. for most of my adult life, i weighed between 120-130 lbs. last year, i got really sick and was on a feeding tube for a month. once they took it out, i couldn’t eat and threw up anytime i ate anything. i lost about 30 lbs, my lowest was 94 lbs. they put me on steroids and i got up to 166 lbs in just a few months due to eating like i used to and not working. i seem to have stopped gaining weight around december and then i had a surgery done around christmas and lost about 7 lbs right after that due to nausea.

anyways, what i’m getting at is should i be eating less than 1400 calories to see more weight loss? it’s been hard since i’ve never really had to worry about this before. i’m pretty used to counting calories now and could take it lower if i need to. my work is kinda active, i usually hit my 10000 step mark at least. my heart rate is above average when resting (100-130 bpm), if that matters.

i just can’t be overweight anymore and it’s making me miserable and i want to make sure i’m not wasting anymore time. any advice is welcome

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Summarizing "Burn" by Herman Pontzer

I just finished this book and it contains a lot of insights that are highly relevant to /r/loseit, so I thought it'd be nice to share what I learned. Some of this is widsom commonly shared on this sub along the lines of "you can't outrun your fork", but a lot of it is new information to me. To keep this post brief, I'm going to focus purely on the takeaways for those of us trying to lose weight. Read the book to learn the "why" and evolutionary theory, discussion of how the body compensates for exercise in various subsystems, the studies that were done, etc.

​

• The "shocking" research: Hunter/Gatherer populations alive today like the Hadza do enormous amounts of physical activity per day (5+ hours) but have similar TDEE to sedentary Americans (2500-3000) cals. This is the shocking research mentioned on the cover and challenges the long held "factorial model" that active calories can be added to resting+digestion calories to compute TDEE. Instead Pontzer presents the "constrained energy model", in which active calories are compensated for by reductions in other expenditure, keeping TDEE in a fairly narrow range. As exercise is added, energy expenditure does not increase at anywhere near the same rate.
• TDEE variability: individuals vary greatly from the standard TDEE. Deltas of 200-300 calories are not abnormal, so don't trust the calculators too much.
• Exercise does increase expenditure, but by much less than you'd think. He cites a study where doing 3000 extra calories of activity per week only resulted in a ~220 boost to TDEE, around half of what you'd expect from the factorial model. Another study of women training for a marathon is referenced where their exercise calories were up by at least 360 per day but their TDEE only went up by 120. The author sort of dismisses these increases as trivial and writes as though they're basically 0 throughout the book, but IMO saying that you get 1/3rd-1/2 of your exercise as TDEE increase is nothing to ignore.
• Diets: Keto, low carb, low fat, "mono-food" etc. diets all work equally well as simple calorie restriction. The best diet is the one you can adhere to that puts you in a calorie deficit, and it's not necessary to avoid entire food groups. He recommends focusing on a diet that keeps you satisfied in a calorie deficit, and prioritizing protein, fiber, and limiting processed foods helps with that.
• Rapid weight loss significantly reduces BMR and this effect can last for multiple years! Study of "Biggest Loser" contestants showed much lower than expected BMRs for body composition, and the effect was still observed 6 years later. This effect isn't observed with more gradual weight loss.
• Exercise is still important: He spends an entire chapter on why exercise is still very much worth doing and critically important for humans to survive and prevent all forms of cardiometabolic diseases, reduce inflammation, etc. A modest amount of exercise dramatically reduces risks of dying from many different causes.
• Maintenance: Even though exercise isn't a primary driver of *achieving* weight loss, it does seem to be a primary driver of *maintaining* weight loss. It seems that the hypothalamus-induced energy intake targets (which regulate hunger and satiety) were based on the pre-diet BMR, when people were heavier. To keep the weight off they had to exercise to keep their energy intake in line with expenditure and avoid weight regain.
• Extreme endurance athletes: He talks about the effects of overtraining and the limits pushed by extreme endurance athletes. Tour de France, ultra marathoners, ironman triathlon, etc. In the short to medium term we can consume enormous amounts of energy per day, way above the 2500-3000 kcal norm. But as these activities go on for weeks or months, our bodies begin to shut down other functions and can't possibly compensate enough (i.e. we stop producing estrogen/testosterone, women stop menstruating, immune health is reduced, etc.), A group of runners who ran a race across the US, running a marathon every single day for 140 days, were studied. Their expenditure started at 6200 kcal per day early on and dropped to 4900 kcal by the end as the body began to shut down other functions to compensate. The author plotted all these extreme endurance sports on a curve for the activity level and duration and found it actually fit the sustained expenditure associated with human pregnancy, suggesting that pregnancy represents the upper limit of how much a human body can increase expenditure over time.

TL;DR don't do what I first did and take your sedentary TDEE and then add your exercise calories and assume that's your expenditure. You'll almost certainly drastically overestimate your TDEE that way. This is exactly what MyFitnessPal does by default! Also don't trust TDEE calculators as there's too much individual variance, use your actual calories and weight data to compute your true TDEE (or use an app that does it for you, like MacroFactor). Diet is going to be the primary driver of weight loss, but exercise is vitally important to overall health as well as maintenance of weight loss.

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Has anyone experienced burning sensations in their legs/feet during a period of weight loss?

Went from 230-190 by a strict regimented plan over 4 months, 16/8 IF, very low carb/hybrid keto diet with exercise. But in the past 4-5 weeks, some rather unusual burning/hot feeling started at the bottom of my feet and seems to be randomly in my legs/butt area. Never felt anything like this. no pain at all. Recently had bloodwork done, and pretty much everything was normal. I had a lower ranged pre-albunim, and RDW% was lower than the normal range. Doctor told me to eat more, workout less - and that has seemed to help with energy levels - was more than likely too restrictive with calories - but all vitamin levels/etc all checked out to be normal (altho my HDL is too low as well). This also seems to be much worse while I'm at work, oddly enough.

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first 30 days done!

Today is my 30th consecutive day of calorie counting! In those 30 days I went from just "doing my best" with logging to probably 95% accuracy by measuring everything out. And I lost about five pounds! I say about because my scale was v shittaytay and I just got a good new one two days ago. I'm doing 1460 cal a day and while there are days when I'm just starving (hello ovulation) most days its just the right amount.

My birthday is in early April so I told myself if I continue to be good with tracking and working out I will reward myself with a sports bra from Lululemon and some cute matching bottoms so I can have a cute work out set! And of course I am hoping I will be another 5 pounds lighter by then but I can already tell my weight loss is slowing down so I'm trying to not be attached to the idea.

Any ways I don't have a lot of folks to share my progress with so I thought I would post. Hope everyone is having an awesome and productive day today!

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My BMI is normal

I (21F) started this journey in July after a doctor's appointment where I weighed in at 175lbs at 5'2.5". I was obese and I had maintained that weight for a year. I don't know what caused the switch to flip but I decided to lose weight in earnest. I lost 5 pounds in July by eating a lot of fruit and decreasing portion sizes. I started learning to accept the feeling of being hungry and not just eating from boredom.

I got my digital scale and food scale in the beginning of August and started counting every calorie using Lose It. The first week I kept changing my calorie goal trying to figure out what would work best for me, I ended up going with a 500 calorie deficit (1275ish calories). The first two weeks I struggled and went over on most days but I reminded myself that even if I was above my goal, I was still in a deficit and I would lose weight. I realized that I felt hungriest at night and the earlier I ate breakfast, the hungrier I felt so I started eating a small breakfast (150-300 calories) and a snack (200 cal) at work (I am a pharmacy tech and we were quite busy at the time so it was easy to go an eight hour shift without having time to think about food). I would then eat most of my calories for dinner (500-700 cal).

What helped me stick with it was this sub and some others r/weightlossadvice, r/progresspics, r/1200isplenty, etc. This sub helped me to understand weight loss doesn't happen overnight, that it is normal for scale not to move, that it was normal to feel hungrier during my period, that it is hard to see weight loss on yourself (the paper towel analogy), etc. A lot of what goes into weight loss is mental so this sub was really reassuring when I would be doubtful that I was making progress and helped me realize that I owed it to myself to live a healthier life.

This morning I weighed in at 137.9 lbs (BMI 24.8), I haven't weighed this much since I was 13. I've began lifting with StrongLifts last week and I'm hoping to reach my goal weight of 118-120 lbs by July. Thank you so much to all the frequent users here, I don't think I could have made it this far without y'all.

Edit: I've been vegan for over 6 years so just started eating more whole foods. I didn't count macros, but I eat high carb most of the time and if I really do want to eat junk food, I will make room for it within my budget. If I want to go to a restaurant, I just either eat less during the day or fast.

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