Need help and advice please?

1. Program yourself for success: Set a very specific goal
2. Get a plan
3. Identify small measurable steps
4. Create a healthy, realistic timeline
5. Create meaningful monitoring and accountability

amusedmonkey wrote: »

When I first started, I was even heavier than you, and I still have a good bit to lose. What people in our boat need to realize is that it's a multiple year process, preferably followed by a lifetime of maintenance. Drastic changes tend to be too extreme and too hard to follow for a long time. You're basically trying to overhaul your whole life. Don't. Just look at your current diet and tweak it instead of completely changing it.

Log your food for a week without changing anything and look at your intake. Where do most of your calories come from? Is there anything you can do to make your current foods less calorie-dense? Do you find yourself eating a lot of pasta, for example? Replace about 1/4 or 1/3 of your current pasta volume with vegetables by adding them to your pasta dish. Plenty of pasta vegetable recipes on the internet. If you don't like cooked vegetables, you can simply add a big raw salad to your meal, eat it before your pasta, and as a result you end up full sooner with less pasta consumed.

That was just one example. You can do that with any food. Instead of "eyeballing" your cooking oil measure out a reasonable amount. You will be amazed how much less oil you can use without significantly changing the taste and texture of dishes. Using leaner cuts of meat will also reduce the calories of your usual dishes. If there are dishes you absolutely can't change, start by cutting the amount by just a bit. 2-3 tablespoons less will likely not stress you out but would make enough of a change until you are ready to reduce the amount by a bit more.

Exercise, don't feel you need to force yourself to do a full hour. Start with a 10 minute walk. Heck, I started with a 5 minute walk. Something that is easy enough to do consistently but has growth potential. Gradually, my 5 minute walk turned into 8, then 10, then all the way up to 45 continuous minutes, with a few multi-hour hikes thrown in every summer. All you need to do is plant the seed of a habit and watch it grow. I now actually run!

Basically these are the principles I live by:
1. Add instead of removing (I didn't cut out anything, but by adding more low calorie foods the amount of higher calorie foods gradually and naturally went down on its own)
2. Reduce instead of removing (instead of 5 cans of pop a day, start by drinking 4 for example)
3. Plant habits as a seed, but be consistent enough to watch them grow.
4. Don't eat foods you don't like just because they are lower in calories, instead try to find low calorie foods that you like and lower the calories of your typical foods by tweaking the cooking and combining process.
5. One "bad" day isn't the end of the world. Happens to the best of us. I always use this example: no use crying over spilled milk, but when you do spill some of your milk you don't go and deliberately pour out the rest of it into the sink because you consider the whole thing ruined. Same with diet. Not being perfect is okay, but to deliberately continue overeating because you made a mistake and "it's all ruined" is silly.
6. Building habits and consistency is a thousand times better than relying on motivation, which waxes and wanes uncontrollably and makes for a very unstable base for a diet.