I need encourgament, desperately.

What I told myself: either accept yourself as you are, or change.

What you are dealing with is really difficult, I don't envy you. But you will find tons of support on MFP.

Here are my tips:

1. Find a counsellor. Plenty of free options out there. Ask for a mental health plan.
2. Clean out your fridge and cupboards. Throw away anything that is junk food or expired.
3. Write down a meal plan based on things you like, things that can fit into the daily calorie limit and entire recipes. The majority of your food should be fresh, preferably locally sourced food. Go shopping!
4. Cook in bulk and freeze. Makes everything really easy! Plus your cooking day can be fun if you put on your fave music or TV shows. Freeze portions that are reasonable.
5. Identify risk factors and deal with/avoid them. What are your 'trigger' foods? Avoid them! Partner overeating? Try to get them on board! Friends who encourage over-eating? Try to get them to do it with you, or spend time with them where food is not involved. I used to show up to dinner after people were finished eating citing being 'busy'. It saved money and my tummy!
6. Get a food scale and weigh your portions. Scales are widely available and can be quite cheap.
7. Eat a lot of the same meals. Makes it easy to log and your body gets used to it.
8. Each time you lose a certain amount of weight, adjust your daily calorie limit to be slightly less. I'm not sure what the best practice is for this so do a little research.
9. Only drink water. No soda. Coffee is ok in moderation. Tea is your new best friend. Unsweetened, herbal tea. Beware of sports drinks and juice - super high in sugar!
10. Keep working on switching your mindset from feeling punished when you don't eat poorly, to feeling rewarded when you eat well. This takes time.
11. YOU WILL BE VERY HUNGRY. Especially at first, and for the first few days after each time you adjust your calorie limit. Drink heaps of herbal tea, you'll be ok.
12. You've had a LIFETIME of YOLO food. Stop it. You can have special things in moderation. You literally do not have to cut much out AT ALL. You can have fun finding replacements that are better for you, or just eat small amounts.
13. Work towards mini-goals and use non-food rewards as encouragement.
14. ROUTINE. ROUTINE. ROUTINE. Once you lock in a food prep, eating, logging and exercise routine, you can switch off and it becomes as easy as pie.

This whole journey will take patience, practice, and discipline. Every day might be a struggle. But you are not alone. And you are worth saving your own life. I promise you the feeling you get at the end of a good day will FAR EXCEED the temporary feeling of eating mountains of food. I recommend reading and participating in the discussion 'What's your most recent NSV?'. NSV stand for non-scale victory. This forum helps me keep going when I start to feel helpless. http://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/1275030/whats-your-most-recent-nsv/p341

The #1 biggest rule to remember is: YOU ARE IN CONTROL.

Hi Nikki, congratulations on taking the first step. I've been working at this weightloss thing for a long time. I've lost and gained the same 30 pounds more than once. I still have about 60 pounds to go. I've decided to approach this process a little differently this time and it's working for me, perhaps some of it will work for you too.

1. I've found that the more sweets I eat, the more I crave them. If I cut them out for a week or two I almost never crave them anymore. I still have them on occasion, but I don't want 2 candy bars and a couple of cookies in the evening, for example.
2. In regards to giving myself sweets, I find that if I keep a bar of good chocolate (not Hershey's, but Lidnt or Ghiradelli or something) in the freezer and plan for maybe a 1/2 serving (usually 4 or 5 squares) in the evening, I'm less likely to eat it all. Most of the time though I don't keep a lot of sweet stuff around so I'm not tempted.
3. You have a good amount of weight to lose, so you can easily set your goal to 2 lbs/week and still have a pretty good number of calories per day. That being said, don't be afraid to set your calories to 1 lb or even a .5 lb if you are having a rough week.
4. Don't restrict yourself too much. Follow the goals MyFitnessPal sets for you, don't fiddle with them. Eat that much. Treat yourself and eat the foods you love. You have to make changes that are sustainable for you, so if you aren't going to be able to eat non-fat, low carb, gluten free, or frozen meals for the rest of your life, why start now?
5. I try to make the conscious decision to go over my calories, rather than mindlessly consuming them, or thinking I'm going to be good and then feeling guilty because I wasn't. Like today, it was Mother's Day, I was going to a diner for breakfast. I could have gotten some egg whites and toast, but I didn't want to. I wanted French Toast. So I decided before hand that today was not going to be a good day, but it's not everyday. I'm not going to live in a world where I will never eat French Toast or Eggs Benedict again.
6. If you use the mobile app, take a look at the nutrition report under more. Set it to week view. I've found that by looking at this, I can see that even if I have a day where I go 2000 calories over my goal, my whole week isn't shot. It takes roughly 7000 calories to lose 2 pounds. So even if I go 2000 calories over my goal on one day and try to stay in my calories the rest of the week, I'm still slated to lose weight. My whole week isn't shot.
7. Most people on here will say that you need to weigh every bite of food that you eat on a food scale. While that works, and gives you the most accurate picture, for me it makes me completely obsessive and unhappy. And frankly, I'm not going to carry a food scale around everywhere I go. I do still use a food scale, particularly for high caloric things like cheese and butter, but not for everything. This depends on being as honest as possible about serving sizes and also understanding as I get closer to goal I'm going to have to be a lot stricter because my deficit will be smaller and 100 calories here or there could make or break my weight loss for that week, so a food scale will become more necessary. For right now what is important is sticking with it without getting burned out.
8. Learn to love to cook. Make your meals colorful and use quality and real ingredients. I stopped using light butter and margarine because real butter tastes so good. I just use less. Skinnytaste.com has many very good recipes, and there are several others.
9. I weigh myself nearly everyday. This does not work for everyone. But I use Happy Scale to track my weight and I like seeing the trends. It also takes away the bias of small sample size. When you only weigh once a week, you may see yourself gain or stay the same more often since you don't see all the daily fluctuations that happen.
10. Get involved in some of the challenge groups on here. Stick with it. There are some great communities.
11. Don't give up. Take breaks if you need to, but don't ever tell yourself that it won't happen for you. I took a month and a half off recently when I got a nasty long lasting cold and just didn't feel like it. I gained a little weight. But I made myself get back to it before it got out of control and now I'm rapidly approaching Onederland where I haven't been in almost 10 years.
12. Most of all, I've stopped stressing about it. Life happens. Food happens. I just do my best and try to be honest, because it's true, just because you don't write it down doesn't mean you didn't eat it.

Good luck. Feel free to friend me, I have an open diary and I'm forcing myself to be as honest as I can, so you'll see that I am over my calories more often than not, but I'm still losing weight. Sorry this was so long.

Hi Nikki!

There is a lot of great advice that's here, so I will not give you too much to confuse you on top of everything else. I will just mention two specific things that helped me tremendously with two problems that I also share: late night eating and sweets.

My family is from the islands, and sugar is in EVERYTHING, so I have real difficulty staying away from the stuff. That said, I realized that I could get my "sweet" from other sources. I switched to natural sweeteners for my foods and drinks--stevia, erythritol, and xylitol, and stayed away from Splenda, Equal, regular sugar and other artificial sweeteners, which impact your blood sugar and insulin levels negatively. It does take adjustment, but it was really helpful for me to know that I could substitute instead of having to give up having sweet things at all. You MUST look at labels and stay away from the processed sweets because they have loads of sugar (you want 5 grams or less per serving). But I simply bake my own cupcakes, make my own tea, and make my desserts at home so that I know they are sweet, but sugar-free. It serves a dual purpose: not only does the food taste good and meet my requirements, it prevents me from going and buying sugary foods while I'm out. There are a lot of other things that you can and should do, but just an immediate fix to the sugar (which will help the prediabetes) is this one tip.

In terms of late night eating, I now have a lean protein or protein shake before I go to bed. If I want something rich and sweet, I'll use UMP vanilla to make a decadent shake, pudding, smoothie or ice cream. It tastes so much like ice cream, it blows my mind every time. Choose a protein powder that tastes GOOD, so that it's like having a dessert every time you taste it. You can also bake with UMP, so I make protein pancakes, muffins, cupcakes, mug cakes, and other desserts out of it that taste absolutely AMAZING. Check out some of the recipes at theproteinchef.com or beverlyinternational.com. They list some pretty good recipes. Other times, if you want something savory, have a little tuna or chicken over spinach or salad with a dressing from Bolthouse Farms. Their dressings taste unbelievable and have only half the calories or less than other brands. The protein will keep you full and the dressing will make everything taste yummy (just stick to the serving size of 2 tablespoons, which is plenty)! One last tip--get boneless, skinless chicken thighs instead of chicken breast. It's a little juicier and tastes great on salads, or just by itself.

Weight loss is about incremental change. It's an evolution, not a revolution, so try these little things first. Yes, you need to get into the proper mindset to make a change, and yes you have to build better habits. So why don't you start by just substituting slightly healthier things for the foods you eat now? Don't try to fix ALL of your bad habits in one fell swoop. Get a little better every day, and before you know it, you'll be on a completely different path than you are now. Commit to one little change each day and see how far you can go!

With love and light,

Kay