New to the app

St701964

Please share with me how this app has helped you or if you found it to be unhelpful. I’m new to using it, 3 days in, and so far I love it! Share any good tips too!

AnnPT77

How has it helped me? I was overweight to obese for around 30 years. In less than a year, MFP helped me lose to a healthy weight, while keeping overall nutrition good, something that while not directly about weight loss is important to me for health. It has helped me stay at a healthy weight for about 9 years since, and has helped me sustain athletic performance through good nutrition and fueling as well.

During all of that, I get to eat all the delicious, nutritious, filling food that adds up to the calories I burn. The hedonist in me loves eating all the way up to my goal, and my future self will be happier and healthier because I manage my weight.

It took some time to learn, and maybe a very few minutes daily to do even now, but I can't think of anything else in my daily routine that delivers so much for so little time investment.

Good tips? If the goal is weight loss, my first tip will always be to choose a relatively easy, practical plan that a person can sustain long enough to lose a meaningful total amount of weight, and ideally learn along the way how they want to eat long term at a healthy weight, practicing those new routine happy habits so they're nearly on autopilot.

Too many people arrive here with a "lose weight fast" mentality, adopt strict and restrictive new eating rules, then maybe stack punitively intense unpleasant daily exercise on top of that. That isn't going to end well, but it's likely to end quickly.

Thinking "new, happy long term routine eating and activity habits" is a very different mindset than "lose weight fast and go back to normal". Sometimes a slower loss rate with practical tactics will get a person to goal weight in less calendar time than an aggressive plan that causes deprivation-triggered over-eating, breaks in the action, or even giving up altogether. On top of that, the aggressive method tends not to foster habits that help achieve long-term maintenance.

To me, weight management is a fun, productive science fair experiment for grown-ups. We do a series of experiments with eating and activity, see what works best for us. Something that doesn't work, even something that causes a big-ish oopsie moment, isn't a personal failure or character fault. Instead, it's an opportunity to learn what doesn't work for us, cross it off the list, and tweak the plan to work better. No drama, shame, self-recrimination! Keep going doggedly like that, success will follow, I predict.

Best wishes for success: IME the quality of life improvement is worth the effort.

yirara

Well, I am someone who needs to be held accountable. Regardless of it being work, finances, utility costs or weight. I'm a professional procrastinator and 'look, a squirrel' kind of person and have several spreadsheets and notepad++ notes that keep me accountable for this and that, and the app for keeping me accountable for eating not too much but getting in enough protein. And that works well. My current finances spreadsheet on my phone covers about 3 years now. Need to tidy it up a bit and separate into years, because too many tabs

springlering62

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