Exercise? No Problem! Limit my food intake? HELP!!!!!

I work out a lot and love it and I can eat great all day long but come night time when I'm alone and bored, I just can't stop myself. :-( I have lost my willpower!

If you can stop eating out and learn to prepare a handful of healthy dishes, I expect you'll find you've barely got room for the calories you *need*.

Seriously, my standard lunch plate is a heaping pile of nothing but lean meat, vegetables, and some sort of greens like spinach. It's a *lot* of food, and it comes in just under 400 calories. My old fast food lunches weren't nearly as filling and they trended closer to 1300 calories.

You got to eat well to lose weight, unfortunately. By 'eating well', I mean stay under a certain amount of calories. Exercising will help you eating more, but you got to maintain your deficit.

Some very healthy do ahead items are baked sweet potatoes, any type of dried bean, barley mixed with veggies or in soups to make them healthier, and always tuna with celery and egg whites. These are super healthy foods...apples and grapes mixed with vanilla Greek yogurt make a healthy snack too.

Thanks everyone! I am glad to see I am not alone. I find by the time I get home I am to tired to cook. I go to school in the morning/afternoon and work from 2-10. On top of all that I take public transit (positive more walking, negative less time). I need to start planning ahead or something because I find I just have everything delivered because I don't have time for much else. Anyone in a similar situation. Any advise.

When I cook, I like to make double batches of things that I can freeze. Use half, put the rest in the freezer for a later date. (You can even freeze them in individual servings for portion control if you like.) Then you can just pop it out and stick it in the fridge a day or two in advance, or defrost in the microwave, and reheat. I also like things that I can just pop on a tray, season, and pop in the oven. This works well with fish or chicken breast which don't actually take that long to cook. I used to come home from work, pop it in the oven, then go change clothing and such. By the time I was done and threw together a quick salad with spring mix, grape tomatoes, and maybe a few cucumber rounds, the fish was done. Very little effort and it takes care of itself while you're taking care of yourself.

Thanks everyone! I am glad to see I am not alone. I find by the time I get home I am to tired to cook. I go to school in the morning/afternoon and work from 2-10. On top of all that I take public transit (positive more walking, negative less time). I need to start planning ahead or something because I find I just have everything delivered because I don't have time for much else. Anyone in a similar situation. Any advise.

Get a crockpot! Or plan out meals several days ahead of time & the night before make the dinner and put it in the fridge to heat up the next day. Also, I like to eat easy things sometimes (oatmeal with blueberries, half turkey and cheese on whole wheat)

I eat like this too... Way past full, no matter what I'm eating. So, I've been looking into Geneen Roth, who advocates looking into the reasons why you're an emotional eater (I definitely am, and you may be too, if you're consistently eating too much), and learning to eat mindfully. I'm not sure what my calories have been doing since then, but I feel like I'm accomplishing something when I can finish a meal without feeling stuffed, or even *gasp*, have food left over. Today I attempted to track my calories, and I was a little over, but I feel ok about it. One day at a time, I guess. lol

Edit: I just saw what you wrote re: ordering in because you're too tired to cook when you get home. Sometimes you just have to do that, so maybe when you order something, before you even start eating, just take half (or even more if it's huge) and put it in the fridge so you can eat it tomorrow. Then, as soon as you're done with the portion you decided on, brush your teeth - RIGHT AWAY.

Anyway, good luck, and feel free to add me if you like.

@Hoosier_Kat I didn't think of that. I was actually always worried about making to big of portions lol thanks for the advise

A trick I've found is to freeze portions in a muffin tin. (I have a silicon one that works really well, but a regular metal one will work as well.) A standard sized muffin tin is a little under half a cup. If you heap it you have about 1/2 cup serving. If you fill just above half you have 1/4 cup serving. Two tins is approximately 1 cup. Just fill the tin and put it in the freezer overnight to freeze completely. Then you can pop out the food once it's frozen and put the individual servings in a Ziploc bag or other container and take out the appropriate amount as needed. I've found this works well for a lot of thing: soup, pork or chicken bbq, taco and enchilada filling, beans and rice, etc. You can even do this with mini lasagna. You can make them in the tin and bake them off. Once they are cool, pop the tin in the freezer like you normally would and once frozen pop in your baggie or storage container. Then all you have to do is pop your serving in the microwave to reheat. Just make a thing or two up when you have a day off, and little by little you'll build up a supply of quick meals in your freezer that are ready to go and pre-portioned when you get home after a long day. I've also found that the good home cooked food with real ingredients tends to be much more filling with fewer calories than the fast food or prepacked dinners. Not to mention they're cheaper and have far less sodium.

I've managed to stop stuffing entirely by convincing myself that my fork is NOT a shovel. Taking big bites was making me bloated and stuffed! I concentrated on eating slowly and now within a week I can stop when I feel full.

@Hoosier_Kat I didn't think of that. I was actually always worried about making to big of portions lol thanks for the advise

A trick I've found is to freeze portions in a muffin tin. (I have a silicon one that works really well, but a regular metal one will work as well.) A standard sized muffin tin is a little under half a cup. If you heap it you have about 1/2 cup serving. If you fill just above half you have 1/4 cup serving. Two tins is approximately 1 cup. Just fill the tin and put it in the freezer overnight to freeze completely. Then you can pop out the food once it's frozen and put the individual servings in a Ziploc bag or other container and take out the appropriate amount as needed. I've found this works well for a lot of thing: soup, pork or chicken bbq, taco and enchilada filling, beans and rice, etc. You can even do this with mini lasagna. You can make them in the tin and bake them off. Once they are cool, pop the tin in the freezer like you normally would and once frozen pop in your baggie or storage container. Then all you have to do is pop your serving in the microwave to reheat. Just make a thing or two up when you have a day off, and little by little you'll build up a supply of quick meals in your freezer that are ready to go and pre-portioned when you get home after a long day. I've also found that the good home cooked food with real ingredients tends to be much more filling with fewer calories than the fast food or prepacked dinners. Not to mention they're cheaper and have far less sodium.

Wait I am confused are you cooking the food then saving it, or are you prepping it freezing it then cooking it?

Depends on what you're making and what you want to do. If you only have time to prep it and freeze it raw to cook later,you can do that (kind of like those ready to cook meals in the freezer section where you just dump the bag in the skillet and heat). Most of the time, I just do it when I'm cooking something I can make in a larger batch. Like If I'm making filling for chicken enchiladas, I'll make a really big batch. After I've finished cooking it, I put what I'm going to serve that meal in a dish and scoop the rest into the muffin tins and stick them in the freezer. Out of sight out of mind kind of thing. I do the same thing when I make soup. I make a huge pot, dish out a couple of bowls, then automatically freeze the rest. Makes it so I can have quick meals ready to nuke (kind of like a prepackaged food), and the leftover food isn't sitting out where I can see it and mindlessly grab it. I can be a mindless eater and just grab whatever I see when I'm hungry. My brain takes a minute to figure out the rest of what I made is in the freezer which gives me time to combat that mindless grab and remind myself that the food is for later and already cold. Then I can go about grabbing something like fruit or yogurt instead. It's a bit like forced mindfulness.