I Almost Didn't Fit...

There’s a place in my heart for people who are here because they are parents. The moment I changed went like this- I felt lousy. I felt bad almost all the time in those days. I weighed 285 lbs. I had HBP, sleep apnea complete with CPAP, debilitating back pain and a seemingly permanent cough. I was drinking too much and eating too much. Nothing I liked better than an entire evening of wining and dining. Our daughter was about 2. We were watching TV and she decided to go play with her brother. As she left the room she turned and waved and said “bye bye daddy.” I thought- she’s going to be doing that at my funeral. That did it. Leaving 2 little kids with no dad was the thing I wasn’t going to do.

She just turned 28. I ran my kids ragged at the parks in Orlando. That was a big NSV at the time. You can do this.

Start a food diary. Get a food scale to crunch the numbers. Never quit your food diary. Well, I quit my after 5 years at goal weight but I go back as needed to maintain. But I’m trying to convey the idea that if you are going to get involved in weight loss there is no end. It’s a way to live.

Start to monitor your thinking. Beware of your own brain as it will try to wreck you. It will tell you that calorie counting is too hard, or too picky or extreme. Your brain will tell you that it takes too long or it will exaggerate every bump in the road to prove to you that it doesn’t work. Or that it may work but it doesn’t work for you. Your brain will try to convince you that your metabolism is damaged. Or that its not possible to lose weight without punishing exercise programs. None of this stuff is true.

What is true is that we lose weight eating in a calorie deficit. Counting calories works. It has to work because of how our bodies are designed. Our bodies are made to try to survive hard times by storing excess calories as fat. Fortunately, for most of us those hard times don’t arrive. But just like eating excess calories puts on weigh, eating in a deficit will take it off.

But there’s a fairly long calorie counting learning curve that gives a lot of people trouble. There’s a lot of number crunching at first. But that gets easier with time. Plus there are a lot of potential missteps. Everything from bad planning, fatigue, misread menus and nutritional information, to basic math- lots of ways to make mistakes. In fact mistakes are unavoidable. You know that thing about experience is the best teacher? In weight loss its really the only teacher because everyone’s program is a bit different. And that’s because we each have to live our own lives.

Weight loss has 2 parts- eating in a calorie deficit and living with it. Avoid the temptation to go all in on the deficit to where you have to beat yourself into living with it. Suffering isn’t necessary. Stay away from the idea that you have to rush through this. Like I said before, there’s no end. We have to live with our plans every step of the way. A plan that we won’t actually follow is not a good plan. The good news is plans can be fixed. In fact the tinkering and adjusting never ends.

Weight loss is mostly about problem solving and persistence. Face each problem one at a time and try to find solutions. But you don’t have to win every battle. You just need to win enough to keep losing. The process doesn’t have to be perfect. It just has to be good enough.

Sorry this is so long but your post hit a nerve. You can do this. Start your food diary and log in everything you eat or drink that has calories. Over your number? Wildly over? Log it all, the good, the bad and the ugly. Everything gets logged. Your diary is the record of the problems you face. Those problem areas are standing between you and goal weight. Pretending they aren’t there won’t solve them. Personally I hated logging over my number. But I found that I hated it so much that I worked harder not to do it. But you are never “off” your program when everything gets logged. The process is more important than the numbers.

Last thing- use the MFP calculators to find the maintenance calorie target for your current weight and make a plan for that. When you have the process in place, experiment with the calculators to aim for a calorie deficit. No, it doesn’t have to be 2 lbs per week. 1 lb or even .5 lbs is perfectly fine so long as you actually hit the numbers. You can adjust more later as you learn the process. Read this board much and you’ll see how many people wreck good efforts trying to go fast. Don’t be one of them. You can have the life you want. I thought weight loss was going to be the death fo fun but what I found was liberation. Friend me if you want. I’d be happy to help you if I can. Good luck.