TRYING TO LOSE 30-40 POUNDS

Are you exercising? Just walking around the block can help greatly. Just don't eat calories that you burn exercising. With my exercise calories the program says I can eat 2000 cal a day, but I stay around 1400 to 1500 and have been losing a pound a week. Your daily calories will be different. Also, if you don't eat enough the program will tell you "Your not eating enough" for me if I go below 1200 cal it will give me that warning.
Also I eat allot of homemade food, so it is difficult for me to accurately track calories. If you buy cheese at the store, you can scan in the calories with your phone. I make my own homemade cheese and many other foods, so there is no upc label to scan. I do the best I can using the database and so far it is working for me.
If you feel you can track your calories accurately you should probably stick with what the program says and see what happens. If it's not working than lower your calorie intake more, and do more exercising. Remember weight lose takes time so be patient, and sometimes you get stuck so you have to experiment and see what works best for you.

I would recommend starting with a food journal. Track what you eat a day for a week. Count everything, drinks, snacks etc. You could do this through MFP or just write it down.

After that week you should look at the foods you eat. Look for the empty calories, foods that are high sugar and highly processed are always suspect. Then you should make a plan about cutting the calories, set a goal, I prefer a time frame over a weight goal, and then determine what threshold you can stand. 1 pound a week is a pretty achievable goal without feeling like you are starving.

For me finding a meal that hits a the perfect amount of calories, satisfaction and satiation is super helpful. When I exercise for breakfast I have 2 whole wheat tortillas, each with a TBSP of natural peanut butter and a half banana. On days when I don't I have 1. I predominately eat a ham sandwich on whole wheat bread with greens and a little bit of cheese for lunch and it leaves me a good amount of calories for dinner. I found for myself that cutting out sugar made a huge difference. I avoid jellies, sweetened drinks, almost anything with sugar, excluding apples and pears for my afternoon snack.

If you are exercising, I recommend that you eat those calories while staying within the calorie limit set by MFP, this will let you splurge at dinner or with a glass of wine or whatever after dinner and not bust your calorie limit or deprive your body of the calories it needs to function. Considering that you are suffering from sleeping issues I would say you should definitely feed your body the nutrition it needs to stay functional. Pushing weight loss with excessive calorie restriction will just make you ever more tired as well it can trigger the starvation effect on your body which will make you plateau on weight loss and can be very detrimental to your health.

As a final idea I say throw away the scale, judge your weight control by feel and by how your clothes fit. If you are constantly weighing yourself a bad week can make you depressed, especially if you see no change on the scale or worse weight gain on the scale and considering that people can fluctuate by a couple of pounds depending on the time of day and other factors it is easy to see this and it is depressing which can cause you to lose hope.

I have been using MFP for about 68 days and have yet to get on the scale but I feel great, my clothes fit way looser now, I have had to add holes to my belts so they hold up my pants. I set a goal of 90 continuous days on MFP and the little tracker in the corner showing how many days is way better than tracking my actual weight. I love to see it slowly ticking up. When the 90 days are over I might jump on a scale but I also might not, I can tell I am in much better shape by the loose clothes and the comments from co-workers. The number on the scale is just telling me a metric that I am recording through how I feel and how people see me and it is much more rewarding than that.

Don't get lost in numbers of pounds get lost in lifestyle changes that you can make and how eating and excluding certain foods makes you feel. Once you find your way to better food choices and set a livable daily caloric limit your pounds will drop off.

And remember: You didn't gain that weight in a day so you won't lose it in a day. If you figure that it took you 2 years to gain that weight I would give yourself 2 years to lose that weight and do it in a way that you won't gain it back.

IsaackGMOON wrote: »

460mustang wrote: »

Are you exercising? Just walking around the block can help greatly. Just don't eat calories that you burn exercising.

It's advised to eat calories back when you exercise if you follow the MFP calorie method.

460mustang wrote: »

1400 to 1500 and have been losing a pound a week.

You're really eating 1400-1500 calories? Minimum for a male is 1500, 1400 is not good.

OP create a caloric deficit and you'll lose weight. Read the stickies.

This is what the my MFP program says:

"For safe weight loss, the National Institutes of Health recommends no less than 1000-1200 calories for women and 1200-1500 calories for men."