Please help by sharing what you do to keep yourself on track

ALG775 · May 2021

Thanks for your thoughts @swim777 and @fitstrongfitlove . I love the reminder to take care of ourselves first. So important. And I agree that love and compassion is key- and takes time to develop.

ALG775 · May 2021

I was given an exercise that helpede strengthen my self compassion- I found a picture of myself as a child- and loved that child- and the transfered that love to myself. It's so easy to love a child!

One other thing that helps me is to see my struggle with weight as a disease. I see my Dad struggling, but not my mom (much). Same with me and my brother- he has never been overweight. And I see the same thing with my two daughters- one has my struggles, the other not so much. There is a genetic component- and this means I have to deal with it differently....

ElioraFR · May 2021

I have to echo the knee pain relief. I also used to suffer a lot of hip pain in the nights. There are still a few days every few months my right knee acts up. My hip joints seem fine now. I sometimes wonder if these improvements are because of a better all around healthy diet or the weight loss, whatever, pain freeness is a bonus on my list of ‘why I want to keep my smaller size’.
Another thing I have changed is that I weigh every day now, it keeps me honest.

xblosh · June 2021

I personally use my social media to always find a positive content. This is really help me to stay on track and get motivated.

koalathebear · June 2021

I have fallen off the wagon and am trying to get back on again.

I lost 32 kg in 2019 going from 86kg down to 54kg. Alas, I've put 8kg back on as I'm currently 62kg. This is frustrating to me because I know precisely why it's happening as I still diligently log all my calories in and out on MPF.

I've been able to maintain the discipline of moving / exercising every day - which is lucky because otherwise I'd weigh a lot more.

My main issue is that I'm just eating too much for my body type because I love high calorie food (cheese, pasta, rice, cake, bread, chocolate, biscuits) too much. I cut fast foods, deep fried things and as much processed food as possible out of my diet ages ago and I do as much of my own baking/cooking as possible, but I just eat too much of it.

I'm a five foot tall female and my maintenance calorie budget for the day without exercise is around 1300. I typically do around 600 - 900 calories of exercise a day through cardio and walking my dogs but it's mental weakness on my part.
- exercising gives me a false sense of budget so I feel like I can eat more and do. I find that no matter how much I exercise, if I eat more than eg 1600 calories a day, I will put on weight. There seems to come a point beyond which I can't really offset food with exercise
- I KNOW that eg if I stuck religiously to eating only 1,200 to 1300 calories a day for several weeks, I would lose the weight
- I am very good earlier in the day and manage to maintain a good nutritional calorie intake with a healthy deficit.
- post dinner though is when I lose self control and get the munchies. I buy / make the food and munchies in the house so I have only myself to blame
- I find it hard to have just one biscuit. One homemade biscuit only 100 - 120 calories a biscuit (or less if I make them smaller) easily leads to 5 or 6.

I'm very frustrated with myself because rationally I know what to do. I'm an adult and I've done this before - but my self control can be so crap and I really love food. At present I'm trying to fill myself up on soda water and snack on apples and low calorie raspberry jelly so that I'm less inclined to snack on biscuits and other junk food in between meals... I saw a photo of myself pre-weight loss and I know I never want to go back to that again given how uncomfortable I felt and how unhealthy I was but clearly food is my Achilles heel :P

ExpressoLove11 · June 2021

koalathebear wrote: »

I have fallen off the wagon and am trying to get back on again.

I lost 32 kg in 2019 going from 86kg down to 54kg. Alas, I've put 8kg back on as I'm currently 62kg. This is frustrating to me because I know precisely why it's happening as I still diligently log all my calories in and out on MPF.

I've been able to maintain the discipline of moving / exercising every day - which is lucky because otherwise I'd weigh a lot more.

My main issue is that I'm just eating too much for my body type because I love high calorie food (cheese, pasta, rice, cake, bread, chocolate, biscuits) too much. I cut fast foods, deep fried things and as much processed food as possible out of my diet ages ago and I do as much of my own baking/cooking as possible, but I just eat too much of it.

I'm a five foot tall female and my maintenance calorie budget for the day without exercise is around 1300. I typically do around 600 - 900 calories of exercise a day through cardio and walking my dogs but it's mental weakness on my part.
- exercising gives me a false sense of budget so I feel like I can eat more and do. I find that no matter how much I exercise, if I eat more than eg 1600 calories a day, I will put on weight. There seems to come a point beyond which I can't really offset food with exercise
- I KNOW that eg if I stuck religiously to eating only 1,200 to 1300 calories a day for several weeks, I would lose the weight
- I am very good earlier in the day and manage to maintain a good nutritional calorie intake with a healthy deficit.
- post dinner though is when I lose self control and get the munchies. I buy / make the food and munchies in the house so I have only myself to blame
- I find it hard to have just one biscuit. One homemade biscuit only 100 - 120 calories a biscuit (or less if I make them smaller) easily leads to 5 or 6.

I'm very frustrated with myself because rationally I know what to do. I'm an adult and I've done this before - but my self control can be so crap and I really love food. At present I'm trying to fill myself up on soda water and snack on apples and low calorie raspberry jelly so that I'm less inclined to snack on biscuits and other junk food in between meals... I saw a photo of myself pre-weight loss and I know I never want to go back to that again given how uncomfortable I felt and how unhealthy I was but clearly food is my Achilles heel :P

I resonate with your post and can certainly empathise with the feeling of frustration you mention. I just wanted to recommend to you a book called The Binge Code by Alison C Kerr which I have found immensely useful from a strategic point of view. I am not suggesting in any sense that you have an ED by the way, it is just a book I came across and found really useful in overcoming certain behaviour patterns around food.

Fatgonegirl · June 2021

Hi, I empathise with you. I am the same, I can not have just a single biscuit or chocolate no matter how much I consciously want to stop at one. The result is that I don't buy this type of food. I think my willpower will never be higher than when I am in the shop or working past the bakery. My willpower will only be lower on an evening so I don't put it to the test.

ufindjewels · June 2021

I'm in the same boat.. What's helping me is healthier eating habits (some foods make me feel like crap after eating them), focusing on prayer and asking God for help in this difficult area of my life, moving my body more, drinking more water, and asking myself what am I hungry for? (Am I lonely, tired, anxious, depressed, is there a spirtual need I've neglected?) and then looking for ways to soothe those needs without food.

koalathebear · June 2021

Thanks for all your support everyone. To be honest, even just writing it down and articulating the problem helped - yesterday I was able to ignore the munchies and even though I started to say: "I've done 1000 calories of exercise today, surely one more oatmeal biscuit can't hurt" ... :P I ignored the urge and confined myself to the three biscuits that I had allocated to myself within the daily budget. What does help is that I know that I have done it before so it's possible. The first time I lost all the weight in 2019, I didn't even know it was possible - I just that that was me ...

I am very conscious that I don't want to do the self denial thing (because that's more likely to result in me falling off the wagon) which is why I actually make a conscious effort to still let myself have biscuits /cake / chocolate / sweets. For me, it's how to try to eat a bit more mindfully / in moderation and say - 1-3 biscuits today is fine / enough and I don't need more than that. Eating the biscuits while drinking lightly flavoured carbonated water helps because it makes me feel fully while I'm eating my allocated snacks

Thanks again all

Please help by sharing what you do to keep yourself on track

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