Wedding crunch time!

Use MyFitnessPal to log your food.
Eat at a calorie deficit.
Win!

mahagonymoose wrote: »

Fair enough. Im setting my sights too high for October but it's weight I still wish to get off. I have been sized and picked out my dress, but you make a good point about altering cost Jorocka.


Planning meals ahead is the best feedback I'm pulling from most people.

rabbitjb wrote: »

Your biggest struggle will be stopping making excuses cos seriously it's not finding time to eat that's making you not lose weight ... because you're clearly eating enough to make your objective 30-40lbs weight loss

Batch prepare food at the weekend - pre-plan / pre-log .. have your lunch and snacks ready to take with you each morning .. or if you prefer not to eat during the day - pre-prepare for the evening time

I'm not new to weight loss, as stated before I have been heavy since a child. I have been able to lose 100 pounds during my weight loss journey though I have admittedly gained 20 back in the past two years because I switched from an active job where I was on my feet eight hours a day five days a week to a stressful desk job. The 40 pounds I still need to lose aren't from continuing to shovel rubbish in my face.
It's baggage I've never lost, but fully intend to.

Maybe I should have based this around getting back into the swing of weight loss, and how to adapt to the job change since I now spend eight hours on my rump secluded in a cubicle.

The answer is still pretty much "diet". Exercise is great for body composition, overall health, and burning a few extra calories every day, but it's not great for weight loss on its own.

If you no longer have an active job, you'll need a lower intake than you did before to maintain your weight, but that's the only real effect on you from a purely weight loss perspective.

The only way you can lose weight is to create a calorie deficit. Every diet that works, works because of this. If you're not counting but switch to low-carb or paleo or "clean eating" or whatever and lose weight, the reason that works is because your changes have resulted in you now burning more calories than you're taking in. Exercise burns additional calories, which can create or increase a daily calorie deficit, but it's a lot harder to create a big enough deficit through exercise alone than through diet alone or a combination. For example, at my size a 5K run only burns about 200 calories, so if I ate enough to keep my weight steady and then added a 5K run every day, I'd lose less than half a pound a week. It's a lot more efficient to add those runs but also cut some calories from my diet - dropping 500 a day will give me about a pound of weight loss a week, and cutting 1000 per day would give me about 2 pounds. For me, that's not realistic as I maintain my weight on about 1600 calories/day and cutting my calories to 600/day isn't healthy, but cutting them to 1200 and adding in moderate exercise is, so it's very simple and straightforward for me to lose about a pound per week. Your numbers will vary from mine but that's the idea.

If you count your calories as accurately as possible (weighing all solid food on a food scale and measuring all liquids, including stuff like coffee cream, cooking oil, and sauces), weight loss becomes pretty much as easy as subtraction. I mean, all the numbers are estimates and everyone is different and some bodies might burn a little more or less than expected and you can't count everything perfectly, but still, if you just find your estimated maintenance calories and subtract a few hundred a day from that, you'll lose weight fairly predictably. It honestly is as easy as that for most people.