Can't stick to my plan

herein lies the issue "I need to lose about 40 pounds to be happy with my body, feeling good."

you are waiting to be happy. don't let your weight hold you hostage. you deserve to feel good about yourself today. once you treat yourself with kindness and understanding i think you will be surprised how taking care of yourself i.e. making good food choices and exercising, becomes very easy.

be easier on yourself. start there and the rest will fall into place i promise..

My method of making logging easy is to pre-log each day the previous night. Makes it easy to hit my calorie goals and I like getting home and knowing exactly what I should be cooking and how much.

Its easy to start a diet but its hard to actually stick to one. At some point in your life you're going to have that moment where you say, "enough is enough" and then it will be easy. I've started and stopped so many diets in the past I can't even remember why I stopped them. I always lost weight when I was dieting but then I just got bored with it or whatever and just stopped doing it. I honestly can't even remember stopping them. But the thing is I always saw them as diets....but not anymore. Now I just eat less of whatever I was eating before. I no longer see this as a tempory "thing" I'm doing. I've simply just changed the quantity of my food intake. I make sure of that quantity by counting the calories. So just get into the habit of logging everything you eat just like brushing your teeth. It needs to become a routine. Weigh yourself on a regular basis and log your food. Do that everyday and you will see just how easy it can be. You won't stay within your calorie goal everyday...but you will most days. Just keep doing it.

rankinsect wrote: »

My method of making logging easy is to pre-log each day the previous night. Makes it easy to hit my calorie goals and I like getting home and knowing exactly what I should be cooking and how much.

Yep! It's easy to say what foods you're NOT going to eat, but unless you know what you ARE going to eat, you could struggle at meal times or end up blowing through your calories early in the day and end up going over because you're winging it.

I would suggest calorie-free or healthy snacking. I know I couldn't stick to dieting without snacking on broccoli, etc... Lots of volume for low calories. I think all I need is the feeling of "I can eat" in the moment, soooo these kinds of foods are perfect for that. No deprivation!

I've been there & can totally relate. Waking up in the morning feeling bloated, heavy and guilty after eating way too much of everything I'd just the morning before told myself I'd avoid. Dreading getting dressed, nothing fit right but I was too ashamed & disappointed in myself to actually buy a bigger wardrobe. Waiting for that spark of inspiration to hit to begin again, to be "ready" to loose. We'll this time I started when I was not "ready" or "inspired" I just started. Full of self doubt I Weighed myself every morning and entered it, weighing & logging every meal. It became fun as I gained confidence, I like all the information, the challenge of hitting my macros, seeing the fluctuations in my weight slowly in a downward trend. I got a fitbit and being competitive by nature, almost always do my 10,000 steps, just too see all the lines turn green. I'm enjoying the journey this time. I like waking up feeling good and happy. I like getting dressed again. Being a little hungry sometimes is worth it, not eating my weight in potato chips every evening is worth it. One of my fav inspirational quotes "being fat is hard, loosing weight is hard, maintaining is hard, choose your hard." I wake up and choose again, every morning. Good luck on your journey, you've got this!

Hi! It seems we both had the same idea today! Well we are both on the right start! We logged back in. I need someone to hold me accountable. Maybe you need the same? A goal? A lot of people here care, so I know you can do it!!!!!!!!!!!

I came back when I wasn't ready. I set my calorie goal to maintenance and logged. Just that act helped me make more nutritious choices. I felt better. Then I switched my goal to .5lb/week and have left it there ever since. When I can, I add exercise in. Barely a diet. But over the course of the last three months I've lost more than 10 lbs, and I'm in no danger of "falling off the wagon". My wagon is only an inch off the ground and moving at a snail's pace.

ETA: actually I haven't left my goal at .5lb/week ever since. I move it to maintenance whenever I'm stressed, sick, or just want a break from my practically no deficit diet

I think what keeps me going day to day is knowing that I can eat whatever I want, as long as I plan for it and it fits within my calorie goals. It kinda takes the pressure off, and now my eating plan doesn't feel like a "diet" I need to get motivated for. I just do it. Every day. It took me many starts, stops, and failures to figure that out.

eliaus3640 wrote: »

Try to make your goal to consistently log your food, regardless of if you are too much or not. It took me a couple months myself to become consistent with it. Start there then you could work on the rest.

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^^This. You say you hadn't logged for three months, and today you had healthy breakfast and logged. If your approach to losing weight is logging and calorie counting (which imply it is), you need to log all the time, not just when you eat "healthy." If you ate "healthy" all the time (I'm guessing "healthy" to you includes being within your calorie goals), you wouldn't even need to log, because you'd be hitting your goals all the time without logging. It's probably even more important to log when you stray outside your goals than when you stay within them.

(OK, I'm a little obsessed on the logging. On the rare occasions I venture into the discussions of "cheat meals" and "cheating," it's usually to say that my only rule is that I have to log everything I eat. I don't have to stay within the MFP calorie goal every day. I don't have to stay under maintenance every day. I just have to log everything. So the only way way I can "cheat" is not to log. (Well, that was my rule when I started 2+ plus years and 30+ lbs ago. Now the rule is I have to log unless I have planned not to -- after logging everything for nearly two years, I finally in the past six months had a couple of vacations that involved limited Internet access and heavily scheduled activities with family, so I decided beforehand I just wasn't going to log.)

I'm not saying it's impossible to lose without logging. I'm saying if that's the tool you've chosen to use to help you lose, it makes no sense not log consistently on a regular basis.