My Success story, and advice for weight loss

My biggest piece of advice, take it or leave it. Is this. Diets don't work! You have to make a change for life. You will have to eat this way for the rest of your life, and until you come to terms with that you won't succeed. You have to change your mind set from "I can't have that" to "I can have that but I don't want it"

Stop being obsessed with restricting calories.

The biggest lie you can tell you self is this : Everything in moderation is fine.
NO!

Junk food is junk food and should be avoided. Junk food is high in calories and has little to no nutritional value, and leaves your body starving for nutrition.

Eat Whole Real Natural food. Grow up put your big girl/boy pants on. Eat vegetables. You may hate it at first. But your tastes WILL change. You have to heal your unhealthy relationship with food.

Stop saying eating healthy is to expensive, have you priced having cancer lately?
If you can't afford Organic, do your best buy it when you can. Buy local, go to farmers markets. Do a little research.
OR better yet grow your own. It's amazing what you can grow even in a little bit of dirt on a patio, or in pots!

You will lose weight, and experience an overall improvement of health issues you may have. When your body heals it heals completely!

Get away from Sugar! Artificial sugar, real sugar any kind of sugar. It's killing you. We consume way to much sugar. 2-3x as much as we consumed 100 years ago. (in some people even more than that)

Fat does not make you fat! - Sugar does! We live in a fat phobic society. Do some research and find out what's really making you fat. Carbohydrates from processed crap, and sugar.

You can't out exercise a bad diet, and until you get your eating under control you will never be successful!! Processed foods are full of chemicals, like MSG. These foods are designed to make you crave them! They create these foods in labs, to make people want them, so they will continue to buy them. They don't care about your health.

I have lost over 140lbs, and kept it off for 4 years. I may not be a doctor or a nutritionist, but I have read and read and read and trial and error of my own journey. and these are the basics of what I feel will help anyone be successful at losing weight. I won't reply back to arguments. This is just my own thoughts on weight loss.

Congrats OP, really great work. And, thank you for saying these sometimes unpopular truths.:flowerforyou: I get frustrated on the forum here. People say it's only calories in vs out, doesn't matter what they are. Which may even be true for them, but is definitely not true for me. We are not all the same: and contrary to current mythos, we are not machines. Some people can handle a little sugar, some of us like myself cannot handle, sugar, gluten, HFCS, vitamins, antidepressants, cruciferous vegetables, chicken (seriously, too much sulfur) and the toxins in non-organic foods will actually put one of my kids in anaphylaxis. So to those people who can exercise off cheeseburgers, chips, and soda- you should appreciate your body. For the rest of us, organic food, stable nutrition and avoiding frankenfoods and the medical industry is necessary. I don't find you tinfoil hattish, on the contrary, you are observant, insightful, and brave.

So in before this goes bad.....lol!!

I heart Junk food ( I learned moderation so haven't eliminated anything from my diet ;-)

Well done you seem to have a firm grasp on the concept of fitness, and I nearly completely agree!

Junk calories are empty calories. They provide no nutritional value and should be avoided. Although an indulgence every blue moon is perfectly fine. And not eating junk doesn't mean not eating (4example) pizza. Pizza can be healthy, if made right. There's almost always a healthy alternative to the junk we love.

That and diets don't exists in the way people use the term. A diet is simply what you eat, healthy or not. The trick to losing weight is to change your diet to a healthier one, that includes less calories than what you burn. No matter age nor height, eating 3,000 cal is a diet, eating 500 cal is a diet. What you eat, no matter what, is your diet. That's where the "lifestyle" word comes into play.

As far as the organic thing goes, it's opinion. I would rather eat organic. But I have no proof or argument against non-organic foods.

Hi OP - great post and well done! I am doing similar. I have cut out all junk and lost 17lb, but more importantly, my awful arthritis is all but gone, no heartburn, bouncing with energy now whereas before my husband had to help me up the stairs every night.

I eat a lot of sugar and still lose weight.

Science says organic food has no additional nutritive benefits.

http://annals.org/article.aspx?articleid=1355685

I agree. But they aren't sprayed with crap.

Fields are where they grow veggies though.