My Deep Fear of Working Hard, and Failure...

You have to do it and commit to it

dreaming about it
wishing it
hoping it
praying for it

It does not work.

2000 calories a day is a good start. Do not tell anyone what you are trying to do....for now, fear of failure is hard to get over until you start seeing results.....then it should be easier to believe you can do it.

Take pictures......nobody has to see those, they are for you. Many months, I could not see any improvement until I put monthly picture side by side.

Take measurements.......when the scale do not move, you can still drop inches.

Plan, plan plan, you need to pre plan your day and leave nothing to chance. It suck at first but it is a key to long term success.

Move. It is not important if you go for a walk, play basketball or lift weights.........just move.

Last......believe in yourself. you ask why would it work for you?.....well why not? Stop dreaming and wishing and start doing.

I will be absolutely horrified and discouraged if, for example, I work my butt off for a month, and then weigh myself to see no difference.

While there's no question that losing weight and getting fit require effort, commitment, and willpower, I think it's a mistake to think of it as "working your butt off". My experience has been that the key to losing weight and keeping it off is finding sustainable changes to make to your lifestyle, habits, and routines that you can make, enjoy (or at least not hate), and which then become second nature. Otherwise the danger is that even if you have the self discipline to get to where you want to be, you'll end up gradually sliding back to where you are now.

I'd suggest logging your calories, looking at what you eat, and then looking for fairly painless improvements. There will be foods that you eat that score high in calories, but score low in being filling, or being delicious. There will also be foods which turn out to be lower in calories than you thought, and score high for filling/delicious. These small changes make a difference, and they don't require massive sacrifices. Once you've made some changes, seen some results, you get faith in the process and (more importantly) yourself. And that gives its own motivation.

Similar with exercise. You need to find exercises that you enjoy, or at least don't hate. Sure, you can rely on willpower and self discipline to keep you going, but it's much easier to work with your inclinations than against them. Whether its going for walks, going to the gym, working out at home in front of the television, playing sports, whatever. Something you don't hate. If you don't do much exercise and are fortunate enough to live somewhere where it's not raining constantly, going for brisk walks is a great place to start, and they're surprisingly effective at burning calories.

Finally.... as you'll see from these forums and how important NSVS (non-scale victories) are to people, the scales are only one measure. Often people who are getting fit and losing weight will gain muscle weight and lose fat, with the net weight loss telling far from the full story.