Weightloss. Im so over myself. Everything i have tried has failed.

twistedingenue wrote: »

Start small. Change one habit at a time. From what you've written, it seems like you struggle with meal planning and not knowing how to cook.

Meal Prepping may be for you. They are often "big pot" meals, divided into daily amounts. I make one big meal each for breakfast and lunch, myself. This week, I have a sweet potato and ground chicken hash with onion/apples for breakfast and steak bites and roasted sweet potatoes and carrots for lunch.

A quick way to meal prep for a work week might be baked and seasoned chicken, and roasting a sheet pan of your favorite veggies that have been tossed with olive oil and salt and pepper. Add a reasonable amount of rice. BAM, done with your lunches and it's taken about an hour to put it all together. It's also great for the budget too!


You can also look into a meal delivery service, like HelloFresh, particularly if you have more calories allotted than me. For a single person, each meal kit is two meals AND has the benefit of teaching you how to cook.

I would suggest that the easiest habit to change first is logging.

Seeing it written down helps make it real, and gives you a solid baseline to make changes against.

What it really comes down to if you don't know what you're doing today, you don't know if you've made a change tomorrow.

happysherri wrote: »

Go travel - Go to school. You should love yourself at any weight and any stage of your life. People tend to think 'if I lose this weight I will automatically be happy', not necessarily. Be happy, do things for you, try new things, travel, make friends, etc. Find your happy.

Well said! Incidentally, I was overweight when I went to college as an adult and it helped a lot with my depression. Previously I'd been stuck in a low-paying, very stressful job. I would have been miserable there regardless of how much I weighed. And I felt liberated in college, regardless of being overweight, because I was improving my future and enjoy learning. In the long run it put me in a better place mentally, which made it easier to lose weight. (Not that that is the reason I went to college, lol.)

In my post-college years, I was overweight but was also so much happier than the last time I'd been a healthy weight (high school). I wasn't happy BECAUSE I was overweight obviously, lol; what I'm saying is that my happiness was more a product of my overall mental state rather than "fat / not fat", and that happiness doesn't automatically "happen" when you hit a certain number on the scale.

First off you have to start small. When I "dieted" in the past it was always way to much change. I had a lot of emotional issues with food, and self image. I've always been heavy, and school and home life were ruff. What has helped me this time (I started and failed a lot before) was something clicking mentally. I learned not to "hate myself" and realize that I need to change myself because I want to, there is things that I want to do. I've also started "rewarding" myself for doing a good job (I'm planning a few day hike to a mountain lake), but I don't belittle or berate myself for "failing" by going over my calorie limit for the day I log it and move on, knowing that tomorrow is a new start.

You need to work on you, and what I mean by that is stop and try to figure out why your not happy with yourself( and it sounds like its not just the weight that's causing you problems, I had "friends that would belittle me" and my dad would put me down). Nobody deserves to feel like they shouldn't be happy. You don't deserve to be unhappy because you're overweight. Do you have a close friend that you can talk this over with, that would tell you like it is? Maybe bring it up again to your counselor.

I had some trouble about a couple of weeks ago with being just extremely hungry. There are people on here that will help if you ask. The good people on MFP suggested I switch up my macros and I haven't been left hungry since(still tweaking them to find out what works best for me). There is no "bad" food its about moderation, I work it in to my macros and calories so I can have bacon and eggs for breakfast. I find it really fills me up and satisfies me. I chop up some broccoli and mushrooms and cook them before adding eggs for my scrambled eggs in the morning. For lunch today I am going to have a wrap(low carb tortilla with roast beef and black forest ham, and pepper jack cheese) with cottage cheese. A lot of people on here say not to restrict your foods because of your diet will suffer, and it makes the cravings way worse. Is there an adult learning center there that you could take a class on for cooking? Talk to the Human Resource Council in your area and they should be able to point you in the direction of some one that could help locate a class.

I dont want to sound harsh, but sometimes, reality is just that.

You either do it or you dont. No one can motivate you. You have to want to lose weight more than anything else in your life - seriously. Because to be successful requires motivation, willpower, commitment, consistency, dedication, and focus. If you dont have those things, you will continue to let food rot in your fridge.

MFP makes the actual process a lot easier, but it sounds like you havent even gotten to the commitment stage. You will continue to smash your head against a wall in frustration until you do.

You dont have to be perfect, you just have to be sincere in your efforts.

I hope you find your AHA! moment soon - good luck!

You should go see a dietician.

There are are some easy ways to feed yourself a lower calorie diet with minimal effort: schmear almond butter on a flat out wrap, banana and protein shake for breakfast. :30 seconds all in. Lean Cuisine over a bag of frozen broccoli, 3 mins for lunch. Frozen salmon, black beans and asparagus, 5 mins for dinner. Effort is minimal, but planning is crucial.

Please don't put off goals because of your weight. You deserve to have a good life, and that includes going after your dreams in whatever body you're in now, even as you work on changing it.

Very best of luck to you. ❤️

Life was hard being morbidly obese. When I weighed 278 lbs, EVERYTHING just surviving was a struggle within my self-imposed prison. My weight impacted every facet of my existence negatively and that just gets worse as you get older. I hope you can believe me when I say that how well someone copes with the stress of extra weight at 20/30 years of age is a totally different story by mid 40 to 50 years and beyond.

You have written a very insightful piece about your reasons why losing weight has always ended in failure. Why not use this insight to find the answers to your roadblocks.

Truly the ball is in your court. Each excuse you have does have an answer but that really has to come from you.

On MFP I have seen the sentiment of "Losing weight is hard" "Being obese is hard", pick your hard.

I hope you have peace around whatever choices you make and I agree with another poster here, don't wait for some magical outside transformation to occur before you tick off the things you wish to do, go for it now as there is no guarantee of tomorrow.

And My Fitbit has helped me tons!

If you're interested in listening to motivational podcasts, I recommend Half Size Me. I started listening to it while lifting weights and find it a great way to reaffirm that I'm doing my best for *me.* The very first one I listened to was about how Plan A can work great for Jane Doe, but that doesn't mean it works great for you. E.G. You mentioned feeling averse to/not having much time for cooking often. Me too! I gravitate toward things that are easy to whip up or microwave -- Lean Cuisine meals, veggies that can be cut up at the beginning of the work week, cottage cheese, almonds, eggs cooked over medium or "eggs in a basket" style, etc. Frozen meals tend to have a lot of sodium in them and they're "processed" food. But it's also a baby step to portion control and eating something healthier.

Which leads me to another philosophy that's helped me, personally: Baby steps. I started out drinking light vanilla almond milk, which packs 30ish grams of sugar in a 16 ounce drink. And then I slowly weened myself down to unsweetened (I mix protein powders in these drinks, so they do still get some sweetness). I first focused on eating healthy for a few days with no working out. Then I started working out. Then I added 15 minutes of cardio before my weights and leg weights after my 30-minute cardio sessions. I lost 65ish pounds when I moved from the Midwest to East Coast. Gained 40ish of it when I moved back to the Midwest. I kept falling off the bandwagon because I thought I had to be at the same exercise momentum of my 65ish-pounds-lost self. It may suck psyche-wise, but starting back at the start line is easier (I'm 51 days back in at the moment).

I've also realized I can capitalize on my laziness. Haha. Pre-packaged things -- or things you can portion off yourself if you're wanting to be more environmentally friendly ... baby steps -- are my BFFs. I'm less likely to binge eat something if it's not in front of my face.

And whipping back to Half Size Me. A great quote was mentioned in one I listened to last week that really stuck with me and I had to write down: "Imagine a pre-framework for a house, like this pre-constructed, perfectly beautiful picture. And we force that framework into our lives. We make room for it. We move around and say, 'This is what I'm going to do. I'm going to force this into my life.' The reality is your life is already a pre-structured framework. So now we've shoved two completely different things in the same space. You will stop doing some of the things you do now or you will alter them to make room for this new thing. But eventually the holidays are going to happen. Vacations are going to happen. Kids will be off from school. Whatever. Something will happen to what is already in existence. And it's going to cause you to have to stop what you're doing over here with the program. What I make the argument is why don't we look at what already exists. Instead of bringing in another framework, another infrastructure, why don't we learn about your infrastructure? Why don't we pay attention to what you currently do? And start to modify that. Start to rebuild the foundation. Start to restructure the walls. Start to put in new windows. Start to remove and change things. It's kind of like buying a fixer upper and knowing what you're getting and seeing it has good bones and being willing to put the work in to change it versus looking for this brand-spanking-new house ... That's already completely created and feeling like that's the one you've got to have only to find out later that it wasn't really the one you wanted. Or it wasn't sustainable. Or it wasn't the one that met all of your needs."

Yeah, my Lean Cuisines are pre-processed and have sodium in them. And my roasted cauliflower is from a frozen steamer bag. But it's sustainable for *me.* That's important for keeping up good work in my book. We're human and not perfect. ^_^

I feel your pain. I can say that I was in this starve/binge, lose/gain cycle for years and years until I was finally truly ready to change and then I just did. I wish I had a better answer. The answer is to track your food and eat fewer calories than you burn, but you know that. The emotional answer is harder. You have to want it more than you're afraid of it, that's really what it is.

But the 100% real answer is that you track everything you eat and you eat less than you burn. That's really, truly how it works long term. You won't always see the results on a day-to-day basis or a week-to-week basis, but it catches up overtime as long as you're eating at a deficit and tracking honestly.

Two tips that helped me a LOT when I started and may help you:

1. In the beginning, I didn't change WHAT I ate, I only changed how MUCH. So for the first few months, I was eating a lot of fast food, a lot of frozen dinners. To go from eating 100% crap to making gourmet meals from scratch was too much to ask of myself. In the beginning, I just ate below the number of calories I needed to maintain my weight (it was a LOT more than 1,200 calories/day!) but I ate easy crap. This worked just fine. Eventually I started wanting to make healthier choices but it was a gradual change.

2. Simple, simple, simple. Buy chicken sausages (80-100 cals/each and VERY filling) and just fry them in a pan, no oil, no bread. Buy chicken breast and cook it or buy it pre-cooked. Low cal string cheese or those light babybel cheeses. Tuna. Olives. Pickles. Simple, low calorie, low carb, high protein is how you'll stay full, lose the cravings, and not drive yourself nuts in the kitchen. I'm not saying you have to eat this way forever but it's a tool to get through a tough day or week. Simple foods.

You've done it before, you can do it again. I agree with others that so much of it is mental. Pretty much all of it is mental.

I also try to capitalize on my being a visual person. I take photos of myself at various stages, in various outfits. And I use Instagram's Layout app to pair "then" and "now" photos side-by-side. Even at five pounds difference, you might be able to see changes here and there. I'm so tickled at seeing my back fat rolls shrink in them. Or how my baggy shirts are actually baggy again like they were when I bought them in a previous yo-yo journey.

The Half Size Me podcast recommended some extra tidbits for this practice: Cut your face out of it. It can help you feel more impartial and removed from analyzing the photo. You could also do this for a favorite outfit/clothing item that you hope to get into or back into; have some fun seeing visuals of how better fitting it can be on you during your weight loss journey. Granted, I haven't done that last tidbit. It sounds great visually, but putting on said tight clothing makes me feel annoyed with myself even if it is brief before I take it off.

Aaaaand lastly, if statistics on yourself can boost your motivation, I recommend trying out a Fitbit. I have the Charge 2 and had the Charge HR before it (band warped on that one, hence the replacement). I like analyzing my workout momentum -- seeing my pace get better, my moments in peak heart rate lessen, my resting heart rate lower, etc. Just 51 days in and working out 4 days a week, my average weekly resting heart rate dropped 10 bpm.

If you only want to cook big meals, Tupperware and measuring cups are your friend. Pack it all away before you start eating. Label each container certain days, meals, and don't touch them until then. Otherwise, try cooking singular meals. My go to lunch is chicken and broccoli on rice. I have a rice cooker, but the chicken and broccoli takes like 6 minutes in a frying pan with half a tablespoon of olive oil. I struggle to want to cook sometimes, too. But logging everything before you eat and redefining what hunger is to your body really helps! I hardly ever feel "full" anymore, which is what I used to associate with hunger and take three bowls of chili to get there. Now, one bowl of chili gets me satisfied, and that's good enough for me.

But seriously if you cook in big pots, put it all away! There is psychological research behind the idea that you are less likely to get more food when it is not in front of you. *pre* log your stuff and measure it out! Best of luck you can do this

HermosaKas wrote: »

I go to the grocery store with a grocery list full of things that are healthy with no ideo how to implement them in a meal. I spend $50 or so of money i dont have. I come home, put it in the fridge and leave it for 3weeks or i try to cook it, and then leave that in the fridge for 3 weeks. I have no idea how to fix this. I dont even effing know how to feed myself. Im 21 and this has been going on and off for 3 years. I can never get it right. It sounds so stupid typing it out, but i. Have. Tried. And this is how it always happens.

Actually, it doesn't sound stupid at all, and you're not the only one who does this.

Making large changes to your life is overwhelming to start with, and there is such an abundance of "information" around healthy eating, because it's all got caught up in aspirational lifestyle blogging. It can all become horribly intimidating, and then the panic about how to tell if the food has already gone off starts, the decision paralysis kicks in, and before you know it, it has rotted.

So. Stop it. Pick a maximum of ONE food that you don't currently eat each week. Look up recipes for how to use it, and then plan how you're going to cook it and when before you go and buy it.

If you want, I am sure people on this forum will be happy to walk you through how to easily incorporate particular new ingredients into your current meals.