I need your advice
pattyjo89
Posts: 2 Member
I started my journey in January and as to date April 1st I’ve only lost 12 pounds. I work a desk job and am thinking about using a food delivery service to help me along more. I’m 5’5 220lbs and have 60 more to go. I also have a friends wedding coming up so I’m trying lose the weight fast. Any advice would be great!
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Replies
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Have you entered any of your info into the MFP calculator? Do you have any idea how many calories you need in a day or how many you actually eat? I started by just tracking without trying to reach any goals for the bff it’s few weeks. It was very educational about what I need, what a portion size is, how many calories are in things etc4
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Also, you are losing a pound a week! That’s awesome! If you take the slow and steady approach, you will be more likely to maintain.8
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While friend's weddings are excellent and will give you a nice opportunity to party i would start thinking about your own health reasons to lose,
The friends's wedding is irrelevant to the rest of your (hopefully healthy) life
Concentrate on maximizing your chance of achieving and maintaining your weight loss.
That *is* truly relevant19 -
Yep. A pound a week is really good! Best advice as always is to dive deep into tracking what you eat and log your exercise too. There's plenty of helpful people here so just take it steady and read as much as you can about food logging and ask when you have any questions. Grab yourself some food scales if you haven't already and join in the fun.4
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thts a fantastic rate of loss!
no matter how much you lose, you will still be going to the wedding smaller than you WOULD have, had you done nothing.
And... losing slower, and KEEPING IT OFF is better than losing faster and gaining it all back.10 -
What PAV8888 said..
People generally do great when they come in wanting to lose weight..but it's the "fast" part or having their goal driven by an upcoming event that usually either trips them up or discourages them. After all, what happens after the friend's wedding? Hopefully the finsh line doesn't just stop there. I have a feeling no matter how much more you lose or don't lose, your friends will still be happy to see you at their wedding!
Also, have you picked up a 12 lb weight lately? You have lost that much weight off your body...that's an awesome thing!11 -
I have a 230 day long in streak with MFP. In that time I've lost 36lbs. That right at a pound a week. That's success. Celebrate it.12
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What everyone else has said, 1lb a week is fantastic congratulations!
Also echo what @PAV8888 said. Losing for your friends wedding is an understandable goal, losing for life is a better one. Knowing you have probably dropped a clothing size and will be smaller St your friends wedding is fantastic. Enjoy that vistory and don't destroy it by wishing for more.
The reality is weight loss is slow and frustrating. Take all the wins you have!6 -
Well done! 1lb per week is great! Agree with what the other’s have said ....let the wedding spur you on, but you’re the ultimate goal ❤️4
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Your friend will not care about your weight at their wedding. You will not remember your weight at the wedding. You will remember the fun you had celebrating your friend’s big day, and so will they.
12lbs in 3 months is awesome. You’re perfectly on track. If you feel like 12lbs isn’t enough, go to a grocery store and check what 12lbs of fat looks like and weighs. My personal recommendation is the butter aisle but oil, fatty meat or whatever would also work just fine.8 -
If you feel like 12lbs isn’t enough, go to a grocery store and check what 12lbs of fat looks like and weighs. My personal recommendation is the butter aisle but oil, fatty meat or whatever would also work just fine.
I always envision it in bags of potatoes 😆. That’s 1 1/4 bags of potatoes you are not carrying around anymore OP!
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I will say the meal delivery services are generally high in calories. I've used them and use on average about 550 cals in just added oils. And the portions aren't very big so it might be better to just figure out some easy low cal meals instead.6
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Thanks everyone! The wedding is just a good motivation push but I definitely want to get back to my old self for me. I’m thinking to much and worried it’s water weight and not real weight loss but others have said they see a difference so I know it’s working. I just can’t see it yet9
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Thanks everyone! The wedding is just a good motivation push but I definitely want to get back to my old self for me. I’m thinking to much and worried it’s water weight and not real weight loss but others have said they see a difference so I know it’s working. I just can’t see it yet
You can totally do this. Losing 1lb/week for three months straight is not water weight. You would likely have already died, or gotten severe health problems, from dehydration if you kept losing liquids at that rate for a long period of time.
Apart from the grocery store trick, here’s some other things you can do to help visualize your progress:
- try on some non-stretchy clothing that either was too small when you started and see how it feels now, or something that fit you when you started and see how loose it’s starting to feel
- Put your belt on the notch you used before you started, and see how much space there is between the belt and your stomach
- Put your belt on as tight as you possibly can, then repeat in a few months with the same notch and see how much more comfortable it has become
- Get some non-stretchy ribbon/yarn and use it to measure yourself at various points around your body. Cut it so the length equals your measurement, and keep the pieces. In a few months or even just a few weeks, you have a nice tool to see how much you’ve lost by how much extra ribbon you have hanging from the end, or how much space there is between you and the ribbon. Just use the same measuring point consistently - I measure over my belly button, hip bones and a scar I happen to have that’s pretty close to the widest point of my butt.5 -
Thanks everyone! The wedding is just a good motivation push but I definitely want to get back to my old self for me. I’m thinking to much and worried it’s water weight and not real weight loss but others have said they see a difference so I know it’s working. I just can’t see it yet
I had that same kind of worry when I first started losing weight years ago. Just like my mind seemed to be in denial of the fact I'd gained a bunch of weight (" the dryer is shrinking my clothes!"), I also didn't believe at first that the weight coming off the scale was actually real until I started dropping sizes and people started commenting on my changes..(when my dad looked at me in astonishment the first time, then I was convinvced..lol). I think our minds like to mess with us sometimes.
With that in mind, couple of things I would recommend doing now - if you didn't get a Day 1 photo, go ahead and do it today. Then take photos every 20 lbs or so and compare. That should help you start to see the difference.
Another thing to do is check your measurements periodically. You aren't just going to be losing lbs on the scale, but inches as well! You might already even be noticing your clothes fitting a tiny bit more loosely than they used to.
Good luck to you! You got this!1 -
Just pointing out that while exercise is a wonderful thing for health and it helps with making a bigger calorie deficit, it is not required for weight loss. You can literally do 0 minutes of purposeful exercise and still lose weight. (See also: folks that are wheelchair bound or in hospital beds, or other injuries/ailments..not to mention some people are so heavy that exercise is difficult for them.) It really is primarily about diet.18
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No, you don’t. Diet-based calorie deficit is perfectly sufficient as a weight loss tool. Exercise is for health and fitness benefits. And even then, ”train like you really want it” is really unnecessary and will more likely cause pain and unnecessary injury than positive physical and mental results.12 -
I trained like I really wanted it, for around a dozen years, even got some hardware to show for that training (age group medals, not open). Still stayed obese, the whole time. Turns out it was easy to eat that few hundred calories extra, that I burned up "training like I really wanted it" daily, especially with a bit of extra appetite from the training.
Exercise, even actual structured training, is Really Good Stuff for a lot of reasons. I'm glad I did it, because it made me a healthier obese person than I would've been without it. Still not healthy enough, though: For that, I needed to get to a healthy weight (. . . a decade plus later 😆). How? Eat less. (I still do about the same active stuff, BTW, because it's fun, and makes me feel good.)
For some people, can exercise be the thing that drives calorie balance to weight loss levels? Sure. Can the training provide motivation to lose down to a healthy weight? Sure. Does training assure weight loss? Nope.
Really, it's the calories: Balancing the intake with the output, to accomplish one's weight management goals. Exercise is good . . . but optional, strictly speaking; and insufficient on its own to get everyone there.
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Echoing above posters. I've 'trained like I want it' for quite a while. While obese. Got pretty good at my sports of choice.
Weight loss happened only with diet.
Is my performance better now? You bet your butt.
But training hard wasn't what made weight loss happen. It just made me hungry and... so I ate more.
Separate issues.8
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