I can't ever seem to lose weight

shadowfax_c11

I was at the same weight in 2009. It wasn't until a year ago was really ready to work on my weight. Now I am at 249 and dropping. Once I got started with MFP I found that it really doesn't have to be that hard and you really don't have to give up any of the kinds of food you enjoy. All you have to do is the following:

Buy yourself a food scale and get comfortable with using it.
Set up your My Fitness Pal account and enter all of your stats.
Weigh all of your food and log it into your diary before you eat it.
Try to eat only as many calories as MFP says you should.
Don't get worked up over holidays and eating out. You will learn how to work with those things in time. You do not have to give up birthday cake and Christmas dinner. You don't have to give up McDonalds, Starbucks, candy bars, potato chips, bread or anything else. You just have to learn to keep them in their place. And in time you might realise you don't want them as often or as much because you have started to retrain yourself on how you think about food.

At first MFP may give you what seems like a lot of calories. Trust me you were eating a LOT more than that before you started and the deficit will be big enough for you to lose weight.

Don't give up, label and bad or otherwise demonize any foods you like. Just eat less of the calorie dense stuff and more of the low calories things. Be balanced. There is nothing wrong with a little "junk food" every day as long as you stick to your goals.

Yes you will mess up. In order to actually really ruin a week of eating well you would have to eat 10,000 calories. You aren't too likely to do that in a day. Yes it will slow down your weight loss. No that isn't the end of the world. Start again tomorrow. You are allowed to not be perfect.

If you are going over your calories log it anyway. Be honest with yourself. Plus when you see the numbers you might realise that what felt like a horrible binge might just have been a maintenance day or even still in a small deficit.

Start reading labels at the store. Really. I often find that something I think I want becomes a lot less attractive if I read the label. Or maybe I will decide I can make it fit and want it enough to do so.

Be patient. Sometimes your weight will go up instead of down, even though you know you did it all right. Lots of things can cause false readings on the scale. TOM, Excess sodium, water retention due to new or heavy exercise....

My diary is public. I eat around 2200 calories a day. (5'5" Highly active daily life) I also eat back all or most of my exercise calories. I determine those by what my Fitbit Charge HR picks up as a workout and log the time and calorie burn it reports. I do not allow steps to be counted as exercise. (Fitbit does not adjust my daily calorie goal) You can see that I eat a huge variety of things. It might give you some ideas on what to eat.

You can do this,

Are you ready?