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Don't Set Yourself Up To Fail

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Replies

  • Posts: 25,902 Member
    lemurcat12 wrote: »
    I get 1200 with 1 lb too. Even when I started and had lots to lose it told me I'd lose 1.8 lb/week at 1200. (It was wrong, though -- I lost 2 lb/week at net 1250 for quite a while.)

    What's helpful is to remember that that's pre exercise.

    Yes!

  • Posts: 52 Member
    Hi I have used MFP for a couple of years just as a tracker, I have always been able to eat what I want as I do a lot of exercise. I was recently on medication which basically wrecked my metabolism that and the fact that i am now 46 has meant that i am really struggling to lose weight (despite exercising 5 times a week, sometimes twice a day). I recently went to a Fitness assessment at my gym and i was advised that my calorie intake should be 1267 to re-adjust my metabollic rate. (I'm 5ft 3" & 133lbs). I manage quite well on 1267 until I hit the wknd! But like someone posted earlier, I still log the 'bad' stuff even though I don't want to!
    I am starting to see a shift in the right direction weight wise which is encouraging and reading all your posts (and laughing cos i do a lot of them myself ie moving the scales onto a different bit of floor lol) has also been encouraging! My advice would be eat what you like, have that cake but log it all and try and get a bit of exercise into the mix :):)
  • Posts: 2,187 Member
    Machka9 wrote: »

    No ... I increased my strength while losing 2 lbs per week. While losing 2 lbs per week, every single day I exercised ... walking, climbing stairs, cycling, lifting light weights, hiking, etc.

    I started the 2 lb/week loss toward the end of February 2015 ... 16 weeks later I flew to Canada and about a week later my husband and I cycled a comfortable century (100 miles). It was comfortable because I had built up the strength and endurance to do it over the previous 16-ish weeks. :)

    About a week later, my husband, cousin and I did a several-hour hike to the top of a mountain. It was work, but I felt really good.

    19431528885_72c21cee26.jpg


    If I had lost a whole bunch of muscle mass ... I doubt I would have had the strength to do those things (plus a whole lot of other cycling and walking).

    That said, if I were bodybuilding again (as I did many years ago) I wouldn't want to be in a big deficit.


    First off, congratulations on such an amazing accomplishment! That's so awesome, and what an experience, too!

    When I started my weight loss plan several years ago, I was class II obese. At that time I was losing 2 lbs/wk, though I've since switched to the 1 lb/wk setting. Most of my exercise routine looked pretty similar to yours (walking, cycling, light weights, etc..) I've even started jogging here lately, which as a former obese girl, is something I never dreamed was possible. I do 25 mile cycling events regularly. My endurance is better than ever.
    Having said that, now that I'm closer to my goal (I'm barely in the Overweight category for my height now) it's very obvious to me that by doing mostly all cardio, while my endurance is good, I'm not particularly muscular. I used to have a lot more. I know it because I see it every time I look in the mirror now...where I used to have some muscle just looks like flab now. It makes me sad because I know I should have been doing strength training all along to preserve it, but I didn't.
    I guess that's why I like to encourage strength training...it's something I wish I had done/ listened to. It's a thing, unfortunately. :(
  • Posts: 442 Member
    I'm only 5'1" and over 11 stone. My husband is taller and twice my weight - he looses weight much more quickly than I ever could so we prefer to look at the percentage of overall weight as a more realistic marker of how we're doing. A stone off me makes a dress size of difference but on him it's barely noticeable.
  • Posts: 442 Member
    NadiaMayl wrote: »
    Like most of us, I've done the roller coaster weight loss a few times. The basic rule is always the one which has worked for me, burn more calories than you consume, log everything and log it honestly. In my many attempts, I've quit early, I've injured myself, I've driven myself nuts with silly fads, I've made myself depressed and it has not worked... But in this recent round of weight loss I'm in, I've come to -very consciously and shockingly- discovered that some of us -ME- sometimes fall into a bizarre mental game/block/pathology/lie/self-sabotage (don't know exactly how to classify it). And it's the dumbest, simplest, probably most pathetic, but it happens. At least to me, am I the only one? After a few weeks of logging accurately (weighing most foods and complimenting with cups and spoon measuring tools), I start looking for the foods listed which contain the least calories. Example, if I eat a beef Pho at a Vietnamese restaurant, and I really have no clue how it was made, I look for it on MFP and find the one which lists least calories, so I cheat. Because I will log the 400 calorie bowl of soup, while it could very easily be 600 calories.

    Ha! I've caught myself doing this. And I know it's only cheating myself, but it becomes a psychological game.
    So besides all the fear people have with losing weight, some ignorance, some stubbornness, some societal (magazines, tv, fads) retraining, some of us also end up falling into a psychological trap!!

    Go read this. I talk about my mind-games and everything--

    http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10373426/how-making-choices-has-helped-me-lose-over-80-pounds#latest
  • Posts: 179 Member
    edited May 2016
    Honestly for me I'm struggling to hit normal calories atm because i'm so busy revising and just not hungry. However I'm not that sorry because i know some people here are really looking for a life change but that wasnt what i wanted or needed i just wanted to ditch a few lb in the weeks before my holiday. Decided to use mfp because it makes logging and counting easy not so much for the calorie guidance etc. That said I'm at stupidly low calories but for now i feel great so can't complain yet.
  • Posts: 25 Member
    It is true that the setup is not perfect, but from the posts I read, so many people are on 1,200 calories a day and they say that THEY set them that way. There is no way that a 250 lb woman would be set at 1,200 a day. Obviously people are either fooling with the numbers, or they are setting a ridiculous deficient on custom goals.

    And yes, MFP should suggest that people just log their calories for a week so they can see just how much they are eating, but I doubt that would work very well. But I was very honest and soon realized that it was no big thing for me to eat over 2,000 in one sitting. I did this by logging a huge meal that I ate while on MFP--I was honest and logged everything event though I didn't want to. Perhaps people cheat more on logging than they can admit to themselves. I've read so much about weight loss and people have some really wacky ideas about food.

    I started at 244 5'5'' and sedentary and it gave me 1200/day for a 2lb a week goal. Since then I started waiting tables (I walk 22-25k steps per shift). I changed my activity level and MFP went up to 1450/day. As I've lost weight (down 40lb!!) it's reduced my calories for an active life style at 204 to 1280/day. I've lost on average 2.lb per week...

    I didn't find 1200 unreasonable and now at 1280 I don't find that unreasonable either. My first step was adding more vegetables and more exercise. I eat a HUGE salad after a work out and drink about 4 glasses of water. That fills me up! I haven't cut any macros from my diet...mostly just changed portions.
  • Posts: 13,342 Member
    edited May 2016
    Good post OP. Totally agree, my plan was always to lose weight eating as much as possible :smiley:

    For me at 5ft 2 I lost 1/2lb per week eating 1600-1800 calories. Took me a year to get to goal in 2012-13 but never at any stage felt I was on a *shock horror* diet! We all know they don't work as they are inclined to have an end date. (And for me 20 yrs of yoyo dieting!)

    Been maintaining my goal range since 2013 :smiley:

    I'm a daily weigher here, my weigh in day used to be a Monday well whaddya know, Fri and sat are actually my lightest days each week. On a Monday I'm usually up 2lbs of water weight each week - that still happens even at maintenance but it's only noise not real gain - knowledge is power :smiley:
  • Posts: 1,701 Member
    I love this post! At 5'5 and 26 years old and at the top of my healthy BMI range I lose 1/2lb a week at 2000 calories a day (I'm also pretty active). I drove myself crazy my first attempts to lose weight because I was trying to eat 1400 calories a day and was starvingly hungry all the time. With the lower deficit it's so livable I don't have to feel restricted or unreasonably hungry. I wish more people realized that they don't have to torture themselves to lose weight.
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