Where do I start?

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I'm trying to figure out where I should start with changing my eating habbits? If anyone has any advice I'd love to hear it!

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  • ncboiler89
    ncboiler89 Posts: 2,408 Member
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    I'm trying to figure out where I should start with changing my eating habbits? If anyone has any advice I'd love to hear it!

    Eat fewer calories than you burn. You probably don't even need to change your habits outside of just doing a better job of moderation. Easy game.
  • Shadowsan
    Shadowsan Posts: 365 Member
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    Log meticulously. It's the only way to be sure.

    Buy personal digital scales with a tare function

    Consistency is key!
  • debubbie
    debubbie Posts: 767 Member
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    Take a couple of weeks to log everything you eat and not worry about your calories to get an idea of how much you are eating. From there you can work on finding better substitutions that are lower calorie and better for you. For example, thin crust veggie pizza versus a deep dish meat lovers pizza.

    Buy a food scale to weigh out all of your food, you will be surprised by how small a serving size is! Especially cereal and peanut butter. Make a few small sustainable changes instead of several large changes all at once. As you develop consistent habits start working on developing new healthy habits. Take it slow, this is not a race to see if you can lose weight faster than any one else. This is commitment to losing weight in a safe and manageable way in which you can keep it off forever.

    When you set your goal to lose weight, choose a .5 pound a week until you are consistently logging everything and seeing the scales move. This will help you to get used to eating at a lower calorie limit than you have been in the past. Then you can adjust your weight loss higher if you can afford to lose two pounds a week ( this is recommended for people with 75 pounds or more to lose, those with 10 pounds to lose should stick with .5 pounds to lose).

    Hope this helps. Friend me if you would like. :)
  • debubbie
    debubbie Posts: 767 Member
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    Take a couple of weeks to log everything you eat and not worry about your calories to get an idea of how much you are eating. From there you can work on finding better substitutions that are lower calorie and better for you. For example, thin crust veggie pizza versus a deep dish meat lovers pizza.

    Buy a food scale to weigh out all of your food, you will be surprised by how small a serving size is! Especially cereal and peanut butter. Make a few small sustainable changes instead of several large changes all at once. As you develop consistent habits start working on developing new healthy habits. Take it slow, this is not a race to see if you can lose weight faster than any one else. This is commitment to losing weight in a safe and manageable way in which you can keep it off forever.

    When you set your goal to lose weight, choose a .5 pound a week until you are consistently logging everything and seeing the scales move. This will help you to get used to eating at a lower calorie limit than you have been in the past. Then you can adjust your weight loss higher if you can afford to lose two pounds a week ( this is recommended for people with 75 pounds or more to lose, those with 10 pounds to lose should stick with .5 pounds to lose).

    Hope this helps. Friend me if you would like. :)
  • SLLRunner
    SLLRunner Posts: 12,943 Member
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    I'm trying to figure out where I should start with changing my eating habbits? If anyone has any advice I'd love to hear it!

    I started my weight loss journey by eating how I'd been eating but logging everything I ate so I could see how much I was eating. From there, I started cutting back on portions, weighing food, and trying to be conscious of what I was putting in my mouth. Soon, I was into the habit of weighing and logging all my meals ahead of time, logging exercise calories and eating a portion back, and making sure my diet included all the foods I love in moderation. I also learned to stay within my calorie goals through calorie restriction, which I will be doing forever because even maintenance is calorie restriction. One thing I learned is that I can never go back to my old way of eating.

  • SLLRunner
    SLLRunner Posts: 12,943 Member
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    ncboiler89 wrote: »
    I'm trying to figure out where I should start with changing my eating habbits? If anyone has any advice I'd love to hear it!

    Eat fewer calories than you burn. You probably don't even need to change your habits outside of just doing a better job of moderation. Easy game.
    Shadowsan wrote: »
    Log meticulously. It's the only way to be sure.

    Buy personal digital scales with a tare function

    Consistency is key!

    Also, what these two said. :)
  • macgurlnet
    macgurlnet Posts: 1,946 Member
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    I'm trying to figure out where I should start with changing my eating habbits? If anyone has any advice I'd love to hear it!

    Whether you have to change habits or not is a personal thing - no one here can really say for sure.

    Things to consider though:

    1) Do you have any medical conditions that would require you to limit/watch your intake of certain kinds of food?
    2) Do certain foods leave you feeling hungrier sooner than others?

    To expand on #2 -

    If I have a breakfast of granola + milk (so mostly carbs and a teeny bit of protein and fat), I'll be hungry within an hour or so. Swap that breakfast for an english muffin, scrambled eggs, cheese and turkey sausage, and I'll be good for 2-3 hours. Each breakfast is 200-300 calories, but the second one leaves me feeling more full :)

    Do you drink things like juice, soda or milk? If so, you may want to cut back on those or cut them out, depending on how hungry you are and if you're staying within your calories. A non-diet soda is often somewhere between 150-170 calories, and that can add up fast if you're drinking multiple throughout the day. Juice and milk can be around 100 calories per glass, and that adds up (though they are yummy!).

    This doesn't mean soda and such is bad for you, but if you're using up 450 calories on soda and you're hungry at the end of the day, maybe go for 2 sodas and have another snack.

    The above are things that I did for myself because I wanted to lose weight and not be hungry all the time so I would be able to get to my goal - and it's worked so far. I'm a little bit of a thing so I don't have many calories to play with so I've tried to make the most of what I get. I am now trying to make sure I'm very active throughout the day so I can eat more and still lose weight!

    ~Lyssa
  • PopeyeCT
    PopeyeCT Posts: 249 Member
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    I started with the twinky diet. You can google it. The basic idea is that you can eat anything you want, as long as it comes in some sort of package with nutritional information and you track every single thing you eat.

    It's just really hard to weigh everything for proper serving sizes, or to figure out how much calories are in the ingredients of a recipe. Things that have a barcode you can just scan and be done with it.

    After a while I missed some of my old favorite foods, so I took the time to work out the exact calories and in some cases to find some lower calorie alternatives. Such as using ground turkey instead of hamburger.
  • Liftng4Lis
    Liftng4Lis Posts: 15,150 Member
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    Start with a caloric deficit and moving more.
  • PopeyeCT
    PopeyeCT Posts: 249 Member
    edited May 2015
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    To be totally honest though, I had tried it before and couldn't keep up. Then I got an iPhone and downloaded the app, so now I always have it with me. If you don't have or can't afford an iPhone, you can get an iPod Touch and run the app on that. Used ones are Craigslist are cheap.
  • angelexperiment
    angelexperiment Posts: 1,917 Member
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    Cut out small things first like soda and fast foodand chips cookies brownies etc. Later you can add back in
  • angelexperiment
    angelexperiment Posts: 1,917 Member
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    With moderation