Really needing accountability and encouragement

Just starting back up as well. Feel free to add me!
I have been good about exercise since about November when I got a gym membership, but bad bad eating habits. Using exercise as an excuse to pig out. I want to be accountable for my eating habits and finally see some results, not just have my eating cancel out my workout!

Welcome back to the journey!

For accountability and encouragement, I will offer you a link to the Fat2Fit group here on MFP. The group offers lots of conversation and support, optional challenges (do the ones that support you right now), weekly weigh-ins (on the day of your choosing; the number goes into a tally for your team, to see which team lost the most this week), optional (but for me very helpful) daily check-ins (how are you doing as regards your plan for food, exercise, water, etc.).

https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10750239/july-2019-fat2fit-weight-loss-challenge-support-group-registration-page#latest

ekboh wrote: »

Just starting back up as well. Feel free to add me!
I have been good about exercise since about November when I got a gym membership, but bad bad eating habits. Using exercise as an excuse to pig out. I want to be accountable for my eating habits and finally see some results, not just have my eating cancel out my workout!

This is probably not the advice you'll be expecting to hear but... Stop working out.

Weight loss happens in the kitchen, fitness happens in the gym and there's relatively little cross over between the to.

Weight loss comes from creating a calorie deficit and that is most effectively achieved by monitoring and controlling your calorie intake. 80% of weight management happens in the kitchen not the gym. I and many many others here lost significant amounts of weight without any working out at all. In fact I didn't start losing weight until I did stop exercising.

Not exercising, at least to begin with, had two benefits for me.
1. I could focus 100% on getting my calorie intake under control. Learn what I needed to learn about how I can best eat in a way that allowed me to be happy and content without over-consuming.
2. Working out was making it harder to stay in the required calorie deficit. I'd hit the gym and burn 300 calories but would end up so ravenous that I'd end up smashing through 500 calories afterwards or would use my workouts during the week as an excuse to go crazy on the weekends.

So I stopped. Got my eating under control and lost about 30kg (66lbs) just eating in a calorie deficit. zero working out. Then I was able to begin working on improving my fitness with exercise. Having already lost a fair amount of weight my workouts were way more effective and having my eating comfortably under control meant I was able to manage my appetite.

Working out had an fantastic impact on my fitness but did not in any way increase the rate at which I was losing weight. While I was making great improvements to my fitness by working out, those workouts needed to be fuelled with extra food. So extra calories burned fuelled by extra calories from food meant that the overall calorie deficit remained unchanged and therefore rate of loss continued at the same pace.

There's no doubt that exercise is good for you and will make you fitter but it can also be counterproductive to losing weight. It was in my case and it definitely sounds like this is the case with you as well.