Ready but nervous

Bertisokay

Hi, I’m Bert. I started my journey of taking my health seriously at the beginning of this year. I weighed approximately 350 lbs on January 1, and as of me typing this I’m at 210. I took up running and ran my first 5K this year, and more recently I’ve started working out 3 times a week. I was on weight watchers for the year but I’m starting to get frustrated with that system and am wanting a no BS way to track my progress. My weight goal is around 170 but I just want to continue making progress and am excited to continue to see results

AnnPT77

Wow, you look great! I'm betting you feel lots better, too, with your good fitness routine and less weight to carry around with you all day every day.

You've been losing fast so far, which is great with a starting point of 350, but I assume you're balancing weight loss rate more with fitness performance and health goals now that you're so much leaner. My details are different, but I found I needed to do that as I got closer to goal weight.

Personally, I like the flexibility of calorie counting. Some people - bizarrely - think that calorie counters ignore nutrition, but nutrition is also important to me for those performance and health reasons. I can understand that systems like WW points or other food-grading systems may help people reshape their eating in a generally more nutrient-dense direction, but I feel like at a certain point personalization of tactics becomes important. A person who chooses food logging and calorie counting can figure out their own personalized balance of food choices to achieve good overall nutrition, rather than using those generic food-value classifications.

One reason I joined MFP was to make my weight loss, which had already been going OK, more predictable. After the first couple of months, I did find that I needed to adjust the calorie goal MFP gave me based on my own real-life experience, but after that weight loss rate became quite predictable, when looked at as a multi-week average trend.

If calorie counting suits you, I think you can find this approach very successful, with the commitment you've already demonstrated so well.

Wishing you continuing success!