I shrank my goal

I think that's fine depending on how careful your logging is. If you have a small deficit, then it's much easier to accidentally wipe it out with logging errors. It's a good idea to get into the habit of weighing all your food so that there is a lower chance of overestimating your calories. Keep in mind that you'll also need to recalculate your calorie goal every 10-15 pounds or so, since it will go down as you lose weight.

mtdb8 wrote: »

hroderick wrote: »

if you need to go from 250 to 150, why drag it out for more than 2 years? You will be healthier and feel better and may live longer and have more confidence and have better kitten more often after you reach 75% of your goal.

At 250 it should be easy to lose 1.5 per week without being hungry or adding exercise. You are smart to plan to make long term changes, but maybe fear of failure is keeping you from getting aggressive.

You could be right. But I'm not looking for a diet, I'm looking for a real lifestyle change. Loosing 100lb in 2 years sounds like something I cant possibly stick with for the rest of my life. I'd rather learn how to eat for health than weight loss and that takes time.

I agree that it does sound intimidating, but one thing to keep in mind is that the pace of weight loss tends to slow down as you progress. Part of this is that initial weight loss is usually rapid because it's mostly water weight, but the bigger part is what I mentioned above--as you lose weight, your body's calorie needs change and your room to create a deficit becomes smaller. You'll still need to gradually decrease calories as you lose, but since you aren't creating a very large deficit, you may have a higher likelihood of stalling out earlier due to logging errors. This is why it's so important to use a food scale.

It's also hard to see small amounts of weight loss on the scale because natural daily weight fluctuations can mask it, so use a trend app like Happy Scale to help you see the downward trend and prevent getting discouraged.

When you get to maintenance, you are still not going to be able to eat as many calories as you do now, and you will have to stick with that lower calorie goal for the rest of your life if you don't want to regain the weight.

Additionally, 100 pounds in 2 years isn't especially rapid. That's an average of slightly less than a pound per week, which is a pretty moderate pace of weight loss. It took me around 2.5 years to lose 100 pounds. The last few pounds came off MUCH more slowly than the first ones.

None of this is to say that your plan is bad, just that you should be aware of what the later stages of the weight loss process are like.