Women 200lb+, Let's Be Adaptable This April!!!

Weekly check-in:
Name: Danielle
Height: 5'5''
Age: 44
SW: 264.2
HW: 282.2
GW: 150
3/31: NWI
4/4: 254.8
4/13: 253.6
4/20: 252.6
4/27:
4/30:

1. Get my water back on track. I got too dependent on coffee and sodas.
2. Stay within my calories 6 out of 7 days. I need one day to allow my sister to cook. She doesn't believe in anything "low cal"
3. Hit my step goal every day. Even if my eating is off track, I can at least make sure I get my steps in!!

I'm so glad you found us @finngirl61! I know from experience that the idea of having to lose 100 pounds or more seems insurmountable when you begin. But right now, all you have to do is lose 2 pounds in 10 days. Before long those 2 pound increments will add up. Right now, set your sights on logging and if you can manage it, move just a little more than you did yesterday. That is really enough.

Welcome also @wholebygrace. You are so right about not going into too high a deficit. I often say that my goal of this weight loss journey has been to make it as easy as I can for myself. For me that meant small changes that I could manage. You have to meet yourself where you are at right now. The rest will come in time.

@duebedm - You made good progress!

@_confunded_ good for you for staying within your limits (and you can adjust the MFP settings to give you more calories if that seems like a more sustainable option). I'm interested to find out what your month end weight will be! I don't know how you manage the suspense!

For those of you who've been with me on my journey for a while, you may know that I devised a plan to reward myself for each 25 pound I dropped. And my go to reward has been John Fluevog shoes. They are expensive and frivolous, which makes them perfect for the occassion. So here's my 100 pound loss reward:

I would like to join too! I lost 100lbs 10 years ago, and after a demanding job, wedding and 3 kids (including twins!) my body is heavier than ever. I have that weird fupa that folds over and sometimes, I lift it to remember what is was like before I was heavy, before my back and hips started hurting, before my EVERYTHING jiggled! I don't want to remember the good old days, I want to live them! So, here I am. I'm glad I found you!

Stats
41, 5'5"
Starting weight: 241.9 4/19/20
Current: 239.6
Goal: 1- 215, ultimate goal: 135

Thanks for all of the reply’s about my period. I peed so much last night and this morning. Hoped on the scale this morning and I dropped 7.4lbs!!! I weighed like 10 times because I couldn’t believe it! I was floored. It was some serious water retention. I knew it had to be because I’ve been counting and weighing ALL of my food for a month straight and have cheated once. I’ve worked out every day as well so I knew these hormones had to be playing games with me but I was still very discouraged. So glad I stuck it out! I’ll update my stats below:


Hi! I'm new to the group.

Height: 5' 5"
Age: 25
SW: 234.2 (1 day before delivery - August 2019)
CW: 184.6 *****177.0
GW: 165

Goals:

I only have 19lbs to go so my goal is to stay focused and finish out strong. I am hoping to reach my goal weight by middle of June but I think if I keep on the same trend I'll reach it by the end of May. We will see!

Stay track MFP everyday all day.

Stay consistent with my rule no snacks while quarantined. ZERO. (which is working great).

Continue to do Refit classes everyday but Sundays.


Weigh 175lbs by first week of May💪🏽

@mmdeveau Like most dieters, I tried all different diets ... including Richard's. A work friend and I decided to take a cruise he was offering. It was fabulous! Our days were planned starting with 1st breakfast seating until late evening class. He kept us movin' and groovin'. He was an amazing host as well as exercise guru!! His lectures were fun and extremely informative. At our evening meal he rotated between tables so he sat with every table before the cruise ended. Each day he had an autograph session right after one of his classes. I have a picture of his signing my shoes LOL! and getting a hug from him. We filled out evaluation forms and handed them in during our last workout session. I know he read them because he called me at home a couple of weeks later. We talked weekly for several weeks. I can't imagine any other fitness guru doing that. I do adore him.

New here! But I'm excited to have found this post.
Age:32
Height: 5'9"
SW: 204
CW: 201
April goal weight: Get into the 190s
UGW: 150/160 (but I'm very flexible on this, I want to be realistic)

Non-scale goals:

• Keep up with my yoga practice at least 5 days of the week.
• Do something active (hopefully outside) each day
• Play with my kids every day, keep active with them
• Eat a vegetable at each dinner

Hello everyone! I'm just checking in. It's been a few days of ups and downs. I binge a lot and have had days of depression. I haven't been weighing myself or anything like that, and probably managed to complete my log two days last week. It's kind of a sorry state of affairs- with the lone exception that I've managed to keep up exercising at least 4 days a week. Last week I ran 5 days.

I've got to make changes about my food, though. I've been eating a lot of junk, especially the days stretch on from my grocery order pickups and I don't have a lot of fresh food available. I did get a nice garden planted last weekend, I have an entire raised bed of different salad greens so that will help once I can harvest. I also planted strawberries, kale, cucumbers, squash, broccoli, cabbage, and cauliflower. And an entire raised bed of different tomato varieties.

We just picked up groceries yesterday so I am well stocked. My goal for today is to eat healthy- lots of fresh fruits and veggies. I'm having a salad for lunch, and making a roasted tomato/white bean stew for dinner. I am so grateful for NYT Cooking for making cooking exciting for me again!

Today is the first day in a while that I am feeling a little bit positive again.

Hope you are all doing well, too. I've read through posts and as always you all impress me! We got this.

@rheinn1979 We are glad you found us too.

@rpbarkernc The most I have ever lost in a weigh in was 4 lbs. Wow that is great. You are getting close to your goal. What are refit classes?

@wholebygrace I did C25K and learned to love running. Then I threw out my knee doing Zumba and they said it was arthritis and to stop running. However I have been reading that running can help arthritis so I am running in my back yard on the soft grass. I can’t get up much speed but I was always a slow smooth runner.

@cesse47 I loved your story about the RS cruise. It brought back wonderful memories. When my son graduated from law school he asked me what I always wanted to do. I told him. I wanted to go on a cruise. My son had a summer associate position before graduating and they had asked him to work for them after he graduated so he know he would be able to do something nice. Well he went on a cruise a few years after starting to work and that year texted me and said he wanted to send his parents on a cruise. We went a year and a half ago in the early fall. We loved it. We walked around the boat every morning and every night and we spent the afternoon in the pool. Everyone else was laying around the pool with drinks and my husband and I were doing aquafit when we were not in a port. In fact I invented couples aquafit on that cruise. We slept in (etc. ) then we went and had a full breakfast usually buffet before our walk. We had a full dinner (early seating) too but we didn’t have lunch. Once we went to tea in the afternoon. Or we had a small snack if we were hungry. In port we went to a beach and walked. We had one lunch (jerk chicken) in one port we went on a tour of Mayan ruins with some walking and had a Margaritas and quacamole and chips before boarding our ship in another. I didn’t lose a ton but I lost weight on that cruise. So glad I got to do that before this pandemic came along.

@noiseydonut glad to see you again. Never giving up is the key. Nice progress this week!

@AlexandraFindsHerself Yes please I am sure I could improve my current baby food planning attempts. I was telling my family about you last night as we ate BBQ ribs (my BBQ sauce) and potato salad. That is what I ate the night before losing a pound. This is the rest of our lives we need to make this sustainable and I am going to have to know how to be thin and still eat ribs every month or two. I think I want a baby ewok plushie instead .

@shorepine I have been thinking about vegetable gardens. I have not had time for them lately, until now, but I keep thinking about not having fresh produce. Mondays seem to be my hard day.

Some more thoughts on the milestone of eating at a deficit for a year:

My main reason for starting my weight loss journey was to improve my physical fitness. I am retired and was almost totally sedentary. Even before I retired, the only "exercise" I got for the last few years of my career was walking from the parking lot to my work building and back each day, walking to all the meetings I had each day, and grocery shopping on weekends. I now had all this time on my hands (I regularly worked 50+ hours a week before I retired) and I couldn't truly enjoy it because I could barely walk from one end of my condo to the other without feeling short of breath. I wanted to travel, hike, bike, visit museums & botanical gardens, volunteer, and more, none of which I could do. Even helping my parents was difficult. I could drive them easily enough but accompanying them to various appointments left me exhausted. I was so ashamed at how I had let myself decline physically.

Well, I started by eating at a deficit. I just focused on that and logging my food. After 3 months, I decided it was time to add some exercise. This wasn't for weight loss. It was to try to improve my physical fitness. I wanted to improve my core strength (so important for so many things) and posture. I wanted to be able to do simple things like climbing stairs, getting out of a chair or off the couch without using my hands to push myself up, and walking without a cane. I have several problems with my right knee and the cane seems to help with them but I was hoping things would improve with weight loss and improved fitness and I could eventually get rid of it.

Anyway, when I decided to add exercise, I started with an easy free weight program from an old book called "Strong Women Stay Young". Instead of doing all the exercises in one session, I split the program into upper body and lower body and did each group of exercises twice a week for a total of 4 sessions per week.

After 4 weeks of doing the weights, I added riding a recumbent exercise bike to my routine. The manual with the bike recommended riding it 3 times a week when starting out so that was my goal. The first day I only did 4 min. at level 2 resistance. I added a minute a session for the first 4 weeks, then 2 minutes a session for the next 2 weeks. Then the next week I started doing the exercise bike 5 times a week and increasing the time by 3 minutes a session until I was at 55 min. 5 times a week. I was able to get to resistance level 13 for part of my sessions. As you can see, I was definitely taking baby steps in increasing my exercise. This seemed to help make it seem not so overwhelming instead of thinking I had to start at an hour a day 5 or 6 times a week (not to mention that would have been physically impossible for me. ).

Week 15 of exercising, I started doing a Leslie Sansone walking video twice a day 5 times a week. I cut the exercise bike back to 40 min. because it seemed more sustainable for now and I wanted to try to increase the walking time. I started with an short 5 min. video but even that was too long for me. I was only able to last 1.5 min. (Did I mention that I was horribly out of shape?) I added just a quarter of a minute each day for the first couple weeks. Then I slowed down that rate of increase, staying at the same time for 2 or 3 days, before again increasing 15 seconds. Some weeks I stayed at the same time for all 5 days in the week before increasing the time again. It probably took me 15 weeks before I could make it through the whole video. Then I found one of the 15 minute videos and started following that. I can make it only about 8 minutes in but I guess that's better than 1.5 min. As I mentioned in an earlier post, I currently have my daughter's treadmill. I occasionally do that now instead of the video. I can make it maybe 10 minutes a session on that, depending on how fast I'm going. (I should really say how slow I'm going because I'm a very slow walker.) I feel like the treadmill mimics walking in everyday life more than the videos and one of my main goals is to increase my everyday fitness. However, I continue doing the videos part of the time because I enjoy them and like being able to mix things up a bit.

Week 25 of exercising, I started doing some chair yoga 3 times a week. I heard about chair yoga on some forum here on MFP and thought I would give that a try since I couldn't (& still can't) get up from the floor very easily. My weight and extreme lack of fitness plus some nerve damage in both my knees from a fall makes kneeling and getting up from the floor difficult as well as painful.

So those are the baby steps I took to getting to my current goal of doing the exercise bike 5 times a week, doing the walking videos/treadmill twice a day 5 times a week, strength training 2 times a week, and chair yoga 3 times a week. Some weeks I will add in "bonus" exercise of a longer session on the exercise bike but at a lower resistance, a low impact aerobic routine, or walks/easy hikes outdoors.

In Dec., my son offered to occasionally walk with me outdoors (provided it wasn't bitterly cold out). He lives in the same town as I do. The first time we walked, I only made it 7 min. before I had to take a break. A few weeks ago we met at a state park (before the state parks in my area were closed) and I was able to walk an easy trail for 41 min. without a break. A definite improvement. I still use the cane when walking out of my house but no longer need to use it at home. I probably could do without it entirely but in the past my right knee has given out on me and, while that hasn't happened for a while, I still feel more comfortable using it when not at home.

Another of my goals was to get back on a bicycle. I finally did it! After I reached a weight where I wouldn't need a heavy-duty bike, I ordered one just before our state's stay at home order went into effect. Luckily (?), bike shops here are open as essential businesses and my local bike shop took delivery of it and assembled it for me. They even loaded it into my vehicle without me having to get out of the car. Now, it's been about 38 years since I've been on a bike and I was a little leery of trying it again so I tried it out in a parking lot. The first time I was a little shaky. I've gone a few more times, still just in parking lots. I got used to shifting again. I think maybe one more time in the parking lot and I'll feel comfortable enough to try an easy bike path. I'm sure I'll feel more comfortable on the bike as I lose more weight but I'm excited to take up something I used to love years ago.

Out of the past 9 months, I missed an occasional day here and there because of helping my parents and things like that. I also had 2 weeks where I didn't exercise at all because of depression. The last time it felt like depression was coming back (in mid-Feb.), I continued to do the chair yoga. It felt like something I could muster the energy for and didn't totally stop my exercise routine.

You all who do long walks and runs are my inspiration. I can't imagine being able to walk for more than an hour straight but I hope it's possible one day. Also, any suggestions to improve core strength or posture would be greatly appreciated. Before COVID-19, I had hoped to find a physical therapist or trainer to help me but that's on hold for now. I currently am looking for things I can do without getting down on the floor. (I know, I'm not asking for a lot! ). I did find a few exercises online that I plan to try but I know not being on the floor will limit my options.

For those of you just starting out, I'm guessing you aren't as in bad of shape as I was. Baby steps are what really worked for me. Sometimes I feel like I should be pushing harder but adding new exercises gradually and increasing time, resistance, or weight gradually, made adding exercise to my day easier and more sustainable.

Again, my long ramble is finally done. Hope you all are well!