Trying this again 100 to loose

Hey girly! I think it's great that you're working towards a healthy lifestyle for you and your family. I'm 23 and i have 110 to lose. You're welcome to add me if you'd like. We can encourage each other along the way:)

That's tragic to hear about your mum dying so young. I hope you find the determination and commitment to make sure it doesn't happen to you too.

I've ended up typing out a big lecture. I'm sorry if it annoys you but other people may also get benefit from it so I'm not going to delete it.

Lots of people fail all the time with their weightloss journeys and it frustrates me to read about it so it can't be easy but in fact my experience of it this time round is that it can be easy. If its not easy, you are doing it wrong. And you need more knowledge, more strategy more insight and more determination.

I see many people struggling to lose weight. Giving up and regaining. I have regained too in the past, quite a few times, though usually after reaching goal.

This year i've been more determined than ever to lose weight and not to regain it. I am highly committed and have only gained in strength over the course of this year. That said, before i started this time, i did have a few weak starts which quickly failed so i've reapplied that the time has to be right to start a diet and i think, i'm not sure, but i think that may come down to a hormonal chemical thing that can't really be observed easily. You just know sometimes you are ready! and then when you make your start, you find you really are ready and its not that hard to keep going.

One of my big secrets is understanding the importance of the psychology of weightloss. So i'm going to share some of my psychological tips with you.

1. You must believe you can do it. You must believe its possible and in your ability to make it happen. Having had success in the past, i knew i could do it. If you've never been successful, you will have to make little successes first (so small goals and then your belief in yourself will grow out of that and you can focus more directly on the big goal. I know this to be true because i have done it in other areas of my life where i didn't have success. Success breeds success partly because it builds your confidence. When you've got a history of success, you feel you can push beyond it next time.

2. You must find a deep commitment to the task. When we start out, our commitment can be quite weak and you feel you might be lured off the path so easily, but if we hate being fat so much, this can give us the strength and determination to get us going. We must continue to build on that with the thoughts we have about the project. If you always think in terms of doubts and look for opportunities to cheat or lie to yourself, you are weakening your resolve , not strengthening. If you can avoid doing that, and continuously reconfirm to yourself how important this is and that you really want to do it etc, your commitment will grow and you will continue to grow in confidence and belief that your goal is achievable.

3. You must maintain mental balance and try to build your sense of wellbeing, happiness and optimism. Dieting is so much easier when you are in a good mood. If you find yourself in a bad mood - getting down, feeling depressed, tired, frustrated, stressed particularly for days on end - you better address the cause of the problems seriously because if you don't, you will get more down and depressed and before you know it you will have quit your diet. I have suffered with depression a lot of my life. And i've been working on it solidly since 1997 so i have learnt a lot of things but life hasn't stopped being a challenge. This year, when i started my diet i was not depressed but i was disgusted with appearance. I have been able to maintain a generally optimistic mood all year because i had recognised the need to do it for my diet. And so when ever a problem came up that i wasn't handling well and i started to get stressed, overwhelmed, or even starting to feel a bit bingy, i would go to see a councillor to talk about my problems so that i could resolve them. You can't resolve all problems easily but you can often find a way to get a better perspective on your problems. Say you had a serious illness, you could work on accepting it. Once you accept it, you just stop worrying so much and turn your attention to making the best of things. This is a fairly complex topic but you can work on that sort of thing with a therapist and by reading about the issue and understanding more about it outside of your own experience of it. Anyway for me the big thing was to get counselling whenever i had a problem i couldn't resolve myself. And try to address it BEFORE I was tempted to start eating badly. If i was in the moment and struggling with hunger for bad food, often going to bed was a good solution but also eating something really healthy to fullness helps too.

4. You must understand the reasons why you failed before and decide and determine not to fall for the same mistakes you did last time. Think back to what happened and thing about how you might avoid failing for similar reasons next time. Look back to other times you gave up and ask yourself why? Try to remember your what you did and your thought processes leading up to the end.

The last time i lost all my weight was in about 2011. I had just come home from a cycling journey and was super skinny. But when i got home, i started having fights with my sister and with that i got depressed and lost the plot. It wasn't quite that simple. I also couldn't continue my cycling at home. I stopped regular exercise. Possibly triggered by the relationship with my sister. But anyway from this i realised another thing. Exercise was not the answer. I would no longer rely on exercise to lose weight because i couldn't keep it up indefinitely. IN the past i had always lost weight by doing a lot of exercise and always i stopped for this or that reason and when i stopped exercise, i would regain the weight. So this year i decided, exercise wasn't going to be an essential part of the plan. I would not rely on exercise. I would just do it with my diet. Again, i'm over 8 months down the track and although i've done little bits of exercise, i've got here basically without it. I concede exercise is very beneficial for health and i've just started wearing a pedometer. But not to help me lose weight. I am wearing it for my general health. (I do recommend getting one of these gadgets because they are motivating. Mine is a very simple one. It only counts steps and i don't make any allowance for them in my diet e.g. i don't add more calories to my daily allowance. Counting steps is all thats really needed. )

5. Worrying, over thinking and just going about your diet in a dumb way. I get frustrated when i read over and over again about people who stress when the scale goes up and down all the time. I don't know. I wonder how it is i can work out how to live with the daily scale and yet most other people can't seem to figure it out. HOw is that people freak out when the scale doesn't move for two weeks and i can cope with it and adjust my diet and keep going?

When you allow yourself to worry about stupid things like this, - why worry yourself sick if you know you are eating healthy food and less calories than you are burning - you cause yourself stress and this can lead to poor food choices. Try to keep a calm head when you don't understand why you are not losing weight any fast. And if nothing else, if you make your diet about learning how to eat better quality, more healthy food all the time for the rest of your life and leaving out the junk, then you will always know you are on the right track.

Yes it might take quite some time before your diet is really optimal but if you are moving in that direction, then you should be happy. In my case it was about two months before i realised i should eat more protein. And it took me quite a while to work out the best way for me to get enough protein - harder because i try to avoid eating meat. It also took me some time before i was eating the recommended 5 serves of vegetables every day. And ages before i started eating seeds. But 9 months down the track, my diet is so fabulous, i wouldn't want to eat as i did before. I love my diet. But then i would say from the start i have enjoyed my diet. I do not like steamed vegies. I rarely eat them. Variety is the spice of life. Make your food delicious but not full of crap stuff and it will sustain you and keep you on the downward weight trend.

if you are not enjoying the foods on your diet, then you need to learn how to make them more enjoyable without compromising their healthiness. And that will take some experiment and keeping engaged on forums and such. Forums are a great place to get new ideas. I just got a nice one the other day - ricotta cheese and strawberries. Somebody recommended them for breakfast but i like them as a dessert. For me these were the antidote to marscapone cheese and strawberries which although delicious, has far too many calories to eat regularly.

So what do i mean by going about dieting in a dumb way - i mean rigidly following a diet in a book. Most diets are not meant to be followed strictly to the letter. The best ones are trying to teach you how to eat better. You have to learn how to make diets work for you by recognising what is useful and what is not and its a personal thing. Anyway that's only one way to do it in a dumb way.

Another way is to restrict calories so that you are hungry. I have done my best to minimise hunger on this journey right from the outset and i started by only making minimal reductions in calories so even now, only 4 pounds away from goal, i am eating 1400 calories a day. You just can't live with hunger day in and day out. With 100pounds to lose you can afford to lose 2 a week for quite a while by cutting calories down more drastically but if it makes you hungry cutting that much you will need to change something. And then its a good idea to keep the big picture uppermost in your mind. The thing is so long as you are losing you should feel good about what your are doing. And so long as you weigh less than you did when you began, you've got another reason to feel good. But there are healthy ways to avoid hunger without having to resort to eating more food. These ways are meal timing and food choices. There is also avoidance of boredom, getting enough sleep and avoiding fatigue, stress and unhappiness. All those latter things make you want to eat and in particular the worst sorts of foods.

And remember its got to be a change of lifestyle for life. There's never going to be a time when you can go back to eating day in and day out how you did before you started. You've have to retrain yourself and learn to love a different way of eating.

My last notion: weightless/dieting is and should be seen as a reward, not a punishment.

Good luck.

Oh i am 50, female and have lost 40 pounds this year. I could have done it faster without too much drama so it needn't be quite this slow for you. But not going too fast is good. Lately i've taken up 5:2 fasting. Which is fasting for 2 days a week on 500 calories per day. There's a book about it. And a forum called the fast diet.

Yikes huge post! well done. so great that people have the time to help total strangers!

Plenty of supporting and motivating people here. I have just under 100 pounds to lose now. I also had concerns with my health, and I already know I'm at a disadvantage due to family history and whatnot, and turned out my health and happiness (and maybe my boyfriend a little bit :P) was the last little push I needed to start losing weight and keep at it. Lost 43 pounds since June 9, 62 total since my highest the beginning of 2013. You can do it, just have to have your head and your heart in the right place.

Feel free to add me if you need a little extra motivation on your list

I also decided to live healthier after seeing a parent with multiple medical issues because of his excessive weight. I do not want to be in the same position as he was when I turn 70. I may end up with medical problems too but i don't want it to be because I didn't take care of myself.