Really need some advice and support

advklsmdc5355

I have been trying to lose weight for so long.. I always start making better choices then I fall off for months. I know I really need and want to live a better and healthy life but I am constantly coming up with excuses as to way I don’t stick to it. I know there is no perfect way. I need to find a way to hold myself accountable. I live in a house full of junk food eaters and I find it so hard to keep the stuff away from myself.

Cat0703a

Would writing out why you want to lose the weight help? Be specific, not just “I want to look good” or “for my health”? But “I want to hike Mt. X with BFF’s name in July 2022” or “I want to wear a LBD on NYE 2021 and proudly have my photo taken”?

That way you can compare your excuse to your specific goal with timeline attached and decide which is more important at that time. Overtime, it may just be the goal that wins more time than not.

AllanMisner

Yes to piggyback on what @Cat0703a said, you have to have an emotional and deep why. Only then can you truly commit to change.

Host of the 40+ Fitness Podcast
NASM Certified Personal Trainer (Corrective Exercise, Behavior Change, Fitness Nutrition)
FAI Certified Functional Aging Specialist
OTA Level 2 Online Coach

littlegreenparrot1

OK - I find this quite difficult to articulate so bear with me.

I always do better when I do not focus on my weight, but on other habits. I find it much easier to work on positives than negatives.
eg. I run because I like to, it makes me feel great when I achieve things. It is not punishment for the size of my backside.
I am cooking this lovely veg based thing for dinner because it is delicious and I like it. It happens to be less calories.
I am going to yoga because it makes me chill out and I feel better for it. You get the idea.

These habits are things that make me feel better in myself, that indirectly lead to a reduction in my weight. It is a slow reduction, but one I can maintain. My weight is only one way of several that I measure my success.

It doesn't have to be all or nothing. Try picking one thing to change - that you think will make your life better in some way. And do it, every day. Hopefully you see the benefit, that just becomes something you do, and you move onto the next thing.

goal06082021

Make it as easy as possible for yourself.

For weight loss, the only thing you need is to eat fewer calories than you burn in the course of a given span of time, to force your body to start dipping into its energy reserves (excess body fat). You can't burn through your savings too fast, though, or your body will start cutting corners in other ways to bring the "charges" down before "paying the bills," so to speak. You'll probably need to do some experiments and make adjustments along the way to figure out the best way to do this for your specific body, but MFP is a good tool to use to help you do that and the guided setup is a good starting point.

Go through the setup, set it to lose 1lb per week (sustainable for most people). Your activity level is basically how much time you spend on your feet in the course of a normal day outside of purposeful exercise - if you have a desk job, you're Not Very Active/Sedentary; but if your job has you up and walking and carrying stuff all day long, you're Very Active. MFP wants you to log your purposeful exercises and eat back the calories you burned doing them - you don't HAVE to work out in order to lose weight, but if you do, you can eat a little more.

Start by just building the habit of logging what you eat in the app. Don't worry about your calorie budget, ignore that for now. Just get used to opening the app and logging your food, get familiar with the database, build up a Recents list of common foods you eat. Make sure the entries you're picking are accurate, compare it to the label in your hand or the SR Legacy database on the USDA website. Enter your prepared foods ingredient-by-ingredient, or use the Recipe Builder to add up the calories in all your ingredients and divide that up by the number of servings if you're making a batch of several; don't use database entries for prepared foods like "spaghetti bolognese" or "ham sandwich." Log 56g pasta and 113g bolognese sauce, or 2 slices white bread + 6 slices ham + 2 slices cheese + 1 tsp mustard + 1 tbsp mayonnaise, or whatever. I recommend using a food scale to be the most precise, but you may choose not to do that starting out, which is valid; you'll probably want to, though, especially as you get closer to goal since you'll have less room for error. At the very least, measure your servings in cups and spoons, especially for liquids.

After a couple of weeks of logging, once you've gotten used to doing it, look back over your diary entries. Look at how many calories you ate each day, and see if you can see one small, easy change you could make to bring that number down. Less cream in your coffee? Less spaghetti? One slice of cheese on your sandwich, instead of two? Could you replace a higher-calorie item with a lower-calorie version (low-fat/fat-free dairy, baked chips instead of fried ones, sugar-free drinks or sweeteners)? Pick one thing, do that for a week or two until it's easy/second nature, then look again and find another small, easy change you can make. Keep doing that, making one little change at a time, until eventually you are the person you are trying to become.