Hey!!!

herreralee275

Hey ppl! I'm new on here and starting a calorie diet for health reasons! Would love to hear feedback from anyone who has been able to stick through a watching your calorie intake diet! Or anyone who has good tips on how to be able to stick to losing weight!

AnnPT77

There are a bunch of people here who have lost quite a bit of weight, and maintained most or all of the loss for multiple years. (I'm one: Around 50 pounds lost in just under a year, class 1 obese to healthy weight, been at a healthy weight for 7+ years since . . . after around 30 previous years of overweight/obesity.)

What I'd suggest is that if you'd like to use calorie counting as a method, just set up your MFP profile, and start logging what you eat now. If you're anything like me, you'll quickly see things in your eating patterns that you can change to reduce calories without creating huge suffering or difficulties for yourself.

Just keep logging your food, tweak your routine eating patterns (habits) in ways that reduce your calories while keeping you mostly full and reasonably satisfied. Once you get to a sensibly moderate calorie deficit and weight loss is happening keep going.

Most of us also want to be healthy, not just thin. If that's true for you, nutrition is also important. After you have calories and satiation pretty dialed in, turn attention to tweaking your eating patterns further to get reasonable overall nutrition, on average over a day or few. Exactly what you need can vary based on circumstances, but the MFP default goals aren't a bad place to start.

High on my advice list would be not trying to lose weight fast. A good goal would be 0.5%-1% of current weight per week lost, as a maximum, with a bias toward the lower end of that unless severely obese and under close medical supervision for complications or deficiencies.

Even if losing weight relatively fast - faster than I just recommended - losing any meaningful total amount of weight is going to take weeks to months, maybe even a small number of years. That puts a premium on finding sustainable tactics (relatively easy, practical habits) one can stick with for that long. Losing weight at a sensible pace can actually get a person to goal weight in less calendar time than some extreme approach that involves bouts of deprivation-triggered overeating, breaks in the action, or even giving up altogether.

After that comes staying at that healthy weight long term, ideally a forever endeavor. If a person figures out during weight loss what some sustainable habits are, maintaining weight mostly just involves eating a few more calories once at goal weight, in order to stop losing. That's pretty easy.

Which habits will work for you depending on your individual preferences, strengths, limitations, and lifestyle. You can experiment and figure that out along the way, if you stick with it. Any experiment that doesn't work out is a learning experience, not a failure, as long as you learn from it and go on.

Best wishes!

MacLowCarbing

Hi & Welcome!

When it comes to losing weight I think it's best to personalize your approach; best to find what works best for you. When it comes down to it, it has to be something sustainable that you can live with so you don't go back to old bad habits.

For me, high fat/low carb way of eating works. For some, low fat/plant based diets work. Some people like to cook more; some prefer take-out and convenient meals. Some get up and run to the gym at the crack of dawn every day; some people can only exercise sparsely and a little at a time, preferring to do it at home in the evening. Either which way, people can make it work if they keep their calories down and stick to it.

It all comes down to trying to work in healthier habits into your lifestyle that you can keep up with, without disrupting everything so it doesn't get to be a burden to stay healthy.