Wedding

ckb37

Hi My Fitness Pal Community! My name is Cara and I am trying to lose about 10 lbs for my wedding a little less than 1 year from now. I am giving myself this much time because I have a tough work schedule as a resident doctor where I work one to two 24 hr shifts a week. I often have to eat 4-5 meals to stay awake and think straight on these shifts and then the next day have 1-2 meals. My circadian rhythm is altered 2x per week and this makes me crave sweets. I am 33 years old and cannot lose weight or stay fit like I used to and working out is just very hard these days. I fell out of my previous daily gym habit that I had for most of my 20s. Any advice or not to crazy expensive dietician recs? Or free hacks to do this? Thank you!

sollyn23l2

ckb37 wrote: »

Hi My Fitness Pal Community! My name is Cara and I am trying to lose about 10 lbs for my wedding a little less than 1 year from now. I am giving myself this much time because I have a tough work schedule as a resident doctor where I work one to two 24 hr shifts a week. I often have to eat 4-5 meals to stay awake and think straight on these shifts and then the next day have 1-2 meals. My circadian rhythm is altered 2x per week and this makes me crave sweets. I am 33 years old and cannot lose weight or stay fit like I used to and working out is just very hard these days. I fell out of my previous daily gym habit that I had for most of my 20s. Any advice or not to crazy expensive dietician recs? Or free hacks to do this? Thank you!

In your situation, you may want to track your overall weekly caloric intake vs. daily.

xbowhunter

10lbs in that amount of time. Hell, ya you can do it if you eat in a deficit.

Retroguy2000

Congrats on the upcoming wedding. You have plenty of time. You don't need to be working out to lose weight. It will help a little with weight loss, and it will mainly help with your overall mental and physical health, and your body composition. If your schedule doesn't allow for it, it's not that big a deal, you can still lose the weight.

Do you count your steps? I assume you're getting plenty of daily steps? If not, work on boosting that to 10K, with easy ways like parking farther from your work entrance or the grocery store, taking intentional walks when you can, etc.

The biggest question is what are those 4-5 meals consisting of? And could one or two be replaced with coffee and/or protein bar, for example. Are the foods you're getting on those days satiating, for instance higher in fiber and protein, or are they, for want of a better word, trash? Switching to more filling options will leave you feeling fuller and probably be lower calorie too.

AnnPT77

Losing 10 pounds in a year would theoretically require eating about 100 calories daily under your maintenance calorie level, on average. Since you say it's a bit less than a year, it would require slightly more than 100. That's not a lot of calories.

Have you been gaining over the past year or two, or holding roughly steady? If gaining, you'd need to cut a bit more in order to lose. I still suspect we're not talking big numbers of calories to cut, but your post sounds like you're anticipating something really difficult or extreme, which I have to admit I find a little confusing.

If you're here because you want to count calories (log your food), then even doing that temporarily will give you solid info about where you can cut 250 or so calories daily on average. It may be replacing some sweet baked goods or candy with fruit, cutting back on some starchy sides, maybe skipping a rich app or dessert most of the time if those are currently in the picture for you, cutting sugar-sweetened beverages, eating fried food less frequently - I don't know. But I think that if you log for a while, some relatively easy cuts will become obvious.

If you don't want to calorie count even temporarily, cut back some of those kinds of calorie-dense things and see if you can get the scale moving gradually downward.

You have time to use a slow weight loss rate, if you start now. Slow loss can be practically painless, IME. (I did it to re-lose 10-15ish pounds that had crept back on after my initial loss back in 2015.)

A thing to know, though, is that it can take time for that loss to start showing up clearly on the bodyweight scale. (Think 4-6 weeks, maybe a bit more, or a couple of menstrual cycles.) Water retention and digestive contents on the way to the exit fluctuate by multiple pounds (up and down) from one day to the next, and that meaningless stuff can play peek-a-boo on the scale for a long time with gradual fat loss. A weight trending app may help visualize what's happening, but even my app thought I was maintaining or even gaining weight for 4-6 weeks when I was pretty confident I was in a small calorie deficit. Sure enough, eventually the expected scale drop showed up at about the 6-week mark (and I don't even have menstrual cycles!).

Keep in mind that in the sections above, I'm talking about average daily calorie intake. You have a variable schedule with bigger eating challenges on some days vs. others. If it helps you, you could consider a small (or no) calorie reduction on busy days, and a bigger cut on less-frantic days. I'm not saying this would be a precise fit for you, but just as an example, there's a thing some here have used successfully called 5:2 intermittent fasting (IF) where they eat maintenance calories 5 days a week, and very low calories 2 (ideally non-consecutive) days a week. As long as the average deficit over the whole week is reasonable, they lose weight. If you want to vary calories depending on your schedule, anything that gives you the right average over a week or two should work.

If I can make an editorial comment: You say you're a resident doctor. I'm not sure what your long-run specialty will be, but in many fields of medicine, your patients would benefit from your developing a clear-eyed, concrete view of how weight management works. Your post here seems to imply to me - maybe incorrectly on my part - that you're implicitly believing some of the popular-culture nonsense about how weight loss works, what kinds of measures are essential to lose weight, and that sort of thing.

I think you don't actually need crazy expensive dietician recs, free hacks, or some kind of extreme exercise increase. Cutting back on some calorie-dense foods you're now eating routinely should work fine, given the small amount you need to lose, and the time you have available to lose it. I lost from class 1 obese to a healthy weight at age 59-60 in about the time-span you're talking about, while severely hypothyroid if that matters (I think it doesn't). Even that wasn't a suffer-fest, though it did require some changes in my eating habits. (I didn't materially increase exercise, but was already active.)

Best wishes!

tomcustombuilder

Wow amazing someone not asking how to lose 25 lbs in 2 weeks for their wedding.