How Easy Was It For You To Lose Weight?

It's been hard sometimes and easy sometimes. I have lost 105 pounds in four years. Navigating life and parties and celebrations and figuring out how to change lifelong habits and behaviors for good. That was the hard part. The scale not cooperating at times is hard. It is worth sticking with it even if you backslide now and then. If you keep trying and work on consistency it works.

kommodevaran wrote: »

It's pretty easy for me to lose weight, a bit more difficult to keep it off, but a lot easier with the right tools and attitudes. I had to rearrange my food environment, my eating habits, cook more, educate myself, learn to handle stress and emotions better, and simply start to think like a normal weight person.

I think you're way ahead of the game because you're honest about what's holding you back from losing more - not eating at a calorie deficit, and not wanting to do that, and acknowledging temptations.

If you want the rest of your weight to go away and stay away (great job on the 30 you've already lost, btw), you have to eat less, there is no way around that. The most effective approach is to want it, but in order to want it, you have to find a way to eat less that you like, because this, you'll be doing for a long, long time (the rest of your life). Exactly what that would be, is up to you to find out, but a suggestion to what you can do, is reframing:

You can still eat good food, and eat what you like, but you have to be more ruthless in your priorities - work smarter, not harder. Plan your meals. Plan for meals you know you enjoy, line up your favorites. Base your intake on rewarding, but not too stimulating, foods. Don't bring home foods you tend to want to overeat, instead eat them at intervals, reserve them for special occasions where servings are controlled because portions are normal, or by social norms. Eating at "all you can eat" buffets are best avoided as much as possible, until you feel more relaxed around food. (Keep in mind that even though you may find eating relaxing, overeating so much that you've gotten overweight, is an indication that the way you are eating, is somehow causing you stress.)

Exercise moderately (whatever that means to you), find an activity you enjoy, keep at it, and change it up when you don't enjoy it anymore.

Get enough sleep and rest, too.

Then accept that no plan is so great and perfect that you'll never feel tempted to overeat, or never find yourself having overeaten. That is perfectly OK! If you make it easier to make better choices, you will make better choices, and if you make good choices more often than bad choices, you will succeed. [/quot

I really really love everything you said.

sofchak wrote: »

A lot of what's been said already... driven by bad bloodwork, I knew I needed to change my diet. I also knew I didn't just want to lose weight; I wanted to be fit. Lost 30 lbs and traded photography for running as a main source of personal entertainment starting early 2016. Maintaining since November. I underestimated how much of a mental game maintenance would be... way harder to maintain than it was to lose.

Curious what you mean by mental game.. ?

It hasn't been easy at all. I don't have much support. Its not easy to get to the gym. Everytime I tell my husband I'm going to try to eat healthy he buys me something sweet knowing I have an insatiable sweet tooth and no will power what so ever.

Maybe it's a subconscious thing. He doesn't want me to lose weight so that others won't look at me. Not that I'm much to look at but he was interested. So.......

Ive lost 35 lbs. Some days were days and weeks were easy and some were really really hard. I hate working out. Seriously. Ive come to a place now where I have 20 more to lose and have upped my calories like you because I feel like if I dont, I will give up. Its still slowly coming off.... veeeeeeery slowly but I will get there. Im only striving for .5 lbs a week now.

Losing it is easy - it's keeping it off that's hard. Throughout the course of the last 30 years I've probably lost and gained 350 lbs - not including the 60 lbs I've lost this year. I'm hoping that plain old CICO and exercise and a slower pace this time is the ticket and I'll finally keep it off.

Still a work in progress.

In general I do pretty well dieting and maintaining when my health is good. I was skinny growing up, despite very bad eating habits, stayed skinny throughout college, then developed lupus and became much more sedentary. About the same time I blew out my knee, and that put me over the line into completely sedentary for several months. Gained a bunch of weight over the next couple of years. Then my lupus gave me a break, and I lost fifty pounds in six months, getting back to my college weight - easy - kept it off for the next couple of years - lupus started acting up again and the pounds started to come back on, bringing friends. Lupus gave me another break eventually and I lost fifty pounds in six months again - only because I had gained more weight this time, that didn't get me back down to my starting weight. Somewhere on the internet still exists the blog post I made about how happy I was to have lost fifty pounds, followed the VERY NEXT DAY by a post about not feeling good, which was the beginning of heart inflammation and vasculitis caused by a lupus flare. Then I abandoned my blog and my diet both, because I was too sick.

This is my third go round. I still have lupus, but now I also have diabetes, and so losing weight and getting my insulin resistance to improve is much more important. I got a jump start on weight loss by losing twenty-five pounds in the single month before I was diagnosed, due to stress caused by pain from an ovarian torsion and benign tumor which was mishandled. I was a pretty sick kitty! I weighed 272 when I went to the ER with abdominal pain in November and 247 when I was finally operated on in December. After six weeks of recovery, I started working out and logging, and I'm now down 61 pounds from 247, with my goal weight still 20 lbs off. So I guess if you count the weight I lost while sick, I'm down 86 lbs.

Undiagnosed diabetes and ovarian tumor is definitely the quickest diet I've ever been on, but I don't recommend it!

When I first started my diet this time, I was eating about 1500 - 1800 gross calories, with about 400 - 600 calories exercise / day, and losing about 3.5 lbs / week. However, that rapid weight loss led to a plateau about three months in. My feet were dragging and I had stopped losing. I upped my calories, added some higher intensity cardio intervals, and the pounds started coming off again. While I was in the obese BMI range, I was able to consistently lose about 10 lbs / month while feeling good. Now that I'm in the overweight category, I've upped my calories again, and I'm aiming for 6 lbs / month. So far so good.

I know it's a truism that weight loss is not linear, but for the most part, mine is very consistent and predictable. I weigh myself every day, but only record the new lows, and the pattern is regular, with two week long exceptions which both represent illnesses. Apparently when I have a minor illness, my metabolism slows down - even when I factor in reduced activity - and weight loss stops temporarily. It's not water weight being retained, since there is never a whoosh later.

I know that eventually my lupus is going to flare again, and that this time I will have the added problems caused by my diabetes. I'm hoping that having constant feedback from my blood sugar testing will help me stick to an appropriate diet even when my health is challenging.

Machka9 wrote: »

JeromeBarry1 wrote: »

I already owned a treadmill. I didn't have to join a gym for that. Once I decided to do it, doing it was easy. Deciding to do it was hard.

Yeah ... kind of the same thing with me and my bicycles.

There I was struggling and wheezing up hills on my bicycle, and having a miserable time. Then one day in early December 2014, I thought ... "I could continue to have a miserable time ... or I could start to do something about it".

I started attacking the local hills and cycling a lot more ... and then in mid-Feb 2015, I joined MFP.

I've had my cheap mountain bike 37 years. Several years ago, long before joining MFP or even intending to lose weight, I decided to start riding it again. I replaced the saddle and took it in to a LBS for equipment updates and tune-up. That all turned into a good spend when I started riding more often in the past year.