Women 200lb+, Let's Be Magnificent This March!!!

@VickyEltonGreen - at some point I came to understand that it's okay if it takes forever to lose the weight, because we need to keep this up forever. If you can, try to stop thinking of weight loss as a narrative, with a beginning middle and end. It has a beginning, yes, but it has no end. If you want to sustain your weight loss you will never go back to eating as you did before. You will eat exactly as you are eating today, give or take a couple hundred calories, depending on your level of activity. That might seem discouraging. It's not meant to be. Instead, it's an invitation to think about structuring your eating in such a way that lets you live your life to the fullest right now. That doesn't deprive you. That takes into account that things like parties, celebrations, special occasions, dinners out, happy hour, dessert are going to happen (well, some of those things aren't happening right now, but they will return). The longer it takes, the longer you have to practice and get things right.

@alymc2 - Good insight about being "good" vs. being "bad". Take away those value/judgement words and replace them with "on track" or "off track". If you are on track - yay - you are on your way to getting to goal. If you are off track, ask why and then develop a plan for how to get back on track. Think of yourself as a project manager. Your project is to lose weight. You set some milestones along the way - 25 pounds, for example. You break the milestones into smaller tasks that you can measure. You report back to yourself on how you are meeting those tasks. When you get off track, as the project manager, you don't beat yourself up, you find a way to get to green. You remove obstacles that might be preventing the project team ( which is you) from hitting their targets and you regroup later to make sure the plan you put in place is working. No judgement, just results.

Friday weigh in!

Age: 30 (for two more days!)
Height: 5’6”
SW 222.1 (Feb 21)
March SW 212
March GW 201
UGW 170

Mar 5: 210
Mar 12: 207.9
Mar 19: 205.7
Mar 27:

Steady progress in the downward direction! The fact that I’m staying consistent at about 2lbs a week for the last 6 weeks or so is making me hopeful that I’m actually losing fat, not something else. I exercise 6 days a week, doing either HIIT, strength training or a long walk. As far as NSVs go, 2 weekends ago I went out to the park for a walk on my day off and walked 5 miles before getting tired. Last weekend, I went to the same park and had enough energy to walk 7 miles before I was tired! I’m hopeful that progress really means I’m building stamina and endurance. I know consistent exercise is going to be the only way for me to maintain for the long haul.

This weekend is my birthday so I’ll be having my first experimentation with “cheating”. I’m having dinner with friends one night and my family the next night - I plan to stick to my eating plan generally but add a small piece of cake both days. I definitely have the calories leftover from the week (because as a general rule, I stay under 1200/day and don’t eat back my exercise calories yet) so my goal is not to be discouraged next week if I make less progress because it’s worth it to celebrate! Once I get closer to GW, I’ll start eating more calories and more varieties of food (right now I’m pretty much no sugar, low carb - less than 25g/day) but I have both low thyroid and PCOS so it can be really hard to lose weight (but I’m actually ok at maintaining), so I wanted to try and jumpstart things a bit for the first 30-40lbs.

Love you beautiful ladies! Keep up the great work!

It's weigh-in day!

Age: 29
Height: 5'3"
Original SW: 252.8 lb as of 11/13/2020
Month SW: 239.8 lb as of 2/26/2021
Weigh-in Progress:
3/5: 239.2
3/12: 237.0
3/19: 237.8
3/26:
GW for March: 235 lb
GW for 2021: 196 lb

Womp womp. I'm pretty confident most of that is water, though, so there's that.

I see we've got some more new faces around, welcome!

@alymc2 Logging and keeping myself accountable that way is the most helpful weight-loss tool I've ever used, honestly. I've always been fat, and during the times in my life when I was less fat, I was consistently and honestly logging what I ate and staying below a given number of calories per day. I 100% get the shame-avoidance and not logging and skipping days - I have been exactly there. I think it was this thread I mentioned that around mid-late March is when I've historically fallen off the wagon and stopped logging consistently or honestly; I'm not doing that again this year. At least for me, in the past I didn't have a ton of control over what I ate - I wasn't in control of the grocery list or the daily menu due to my living situation. Now, that's no longer the case. I am solely responsible for what gets bought at the grocery store and what gets cooked in the kitchen, which is its own source of stress and mental load, but at least I know exactly what I'm eating for +/-95% of my meals.

Using my bullet-journal-style planner to, uh, plan my lunches and dinners in advance has also been a huge help this year, I think. I love data, IMO you can never have too much, so being able to see what I've been doing, what I'm planning to do, what tweaks I've made to the plan and how that has gone has been really helpful. I need to go in and tweak the lunch rotation sometime this weekend; I did DIY Lunchables for lunch this week and hubs hasn't been impressed, tbh I haven't either. I'm going to take that out of the rotation going forward, thinking about replacing it with DIY Chipotle bowls because he definitely needs something heartier at midday than cold cuts and cheese cubes, and my snacking this week suggests I do, too. See? Data!