Your best advice given to help you lose weight

Change lifestyle - Don't diet!

This saved my life!

Do it for yourself! Don't try to lose weight for an event, or a person. Make sure you are doing it because YOU want to.

Track everything that goes into your mouth.

Check out this cool app, myfitnesspal.

Plan your work and work your plan.

Take it one day, one hour, one minute, one second at a time.

The choice is yours.

Make it so.

Don't focus on everyone else but focus on yourself

Drink lots of water!

Eat less, move more. Win.

break up with your significant other you will lose 120 to 220 lbs almost overnight!

and the water thing, I never found it made me feel full to avoid food but being properly hydrated makes your body function and feel so much better, drink up, cheers!:drinker:

This may be a little long, so I apologize in advance.

I wasn't really given any advice for losing weight. I had always struggled with my weight to some degree, all the way back to high school, however I was never really obese, I just needed to lose a few pounds. Finally, one day I got myself in gear and got into the best shape I had ever been in. No fat, muscular but not overly big. I felt great. I stayed that way for a few years too, but then I got married and things started to slow down for both my wife and myself.

For years I've said that I was going to get myself back into shape, and I would always try crash diets, but I'd give up on them after about 3 weeks and fall back in to the way I had been eating. 4 years ago, I weight around 230 and I had maintained that weight until a couple of months ago when I really got serious. I went to the doctor around that time and they did some blood work on me. My triglycerides were so high that they wanted to put me on medication for it. They were somewhere around the 1100 range. That scared me to the point that when I would go to the doctor, I didn't want them to do any more blood work on me, but I was still too lazy to make any kind of change. I was eating fast food for 3 meals a day and when I didn't feel like going anywhere, I'd just order pizza a few times a week.

Finally, a couple of friends of ours announced that they were getting married and that I was going to be in the wedding. My friend is a baseball player and most of his friends are jocks. I'm his computer geek friend, and at the time I definitely looked the part. I had been telling my wife for a long time that I wanted us to get serious about losing weight, but the wedding was the first real motivation for me. I told her that I might not play sports, but if I were going to be in the wedding, I at least wanted to look like I did. That was motivating factor number one.

Once I lost a few pounds, I started thinking about how good I used to look when I was in shape, and I wanted to get back to that, so there was motivator number two. Motivator number three is the last one and it's really the only one really matters and should have been my primary motivator from the start. I don't want to die young. I love my wife and kids more than anything in the world and I don't want to do anything that would take me away from the prematurely.

Now instead of looking at my loosing weight as something that I want to do, it has become an actual lifestyle change, and that's what I was hoping for more than anything. I'm at a point now where I don't think I will ever fall back into the way that we used to be. For the first time in a long time, I understand moderation. I can still have the things that I like, but I don't need to have them every single day. It's alright for me to take her out to eat when the mood strikes, just as long as I'm not doing it for every meal. That's the mindset that I was looking for from the start, I just didn't know it until I got started doing things the right way.

For the first time in years, I actually feel good, and it's not just because I lost weight. It's because I've changed everything about the way that I eat. I haven't had fast food now in months, I've lowered my fat, trans-fat, and saturated fat levels to an almost non-existent level compared to what they used to be. I have so much energy it's crazy, and it's like I don't run out of it. There are still some other things that I need to change, the biggest being smoking. My birthday is this month, and I fully plan on quitting the day after. If I can kick that, then I've done everything on my end to make myself as healthy as possible. Once that's done, I plan on walking into the doctor when I hit my goal weight, and having them do a new blood panel on me. If something is wrong, then it can be addressed and I will follow every bit of advice will give me, but I don't want to go until I know that I've done everything I can on my end to ensure that I'm living a new life. Honestly though, I can't wait to walk in and see the look on their face when they realize that I've dropped 70 pounds and quit smoking.

My motivating factor is life, and my family. I want to be here and healthy for them as long as God sees fit for me to be. The days of pretending that the way I eat doesn't matter are over for me. After almost 35 years, I'm finally becoming the person that I've always wanted to be both spiritually and physically.

I wish anyone who reads this, or anyone here that has struggled the absolute best. If you're having trouble, find something inside of you that makes what you're putting yourself through worth it. Remember, it's your life and it's up to you to live it. Always want the best for yourself and your family and you can't go wrong.

Don't expect immediate, drastic results.