How long did it take you to adapt to your new way of life?

Starting at 285 lbs, I’ve lost over 100 lbs and have maintained for years. I lost about the last 35 lbs or so on Weight Watchers. WW is just calories counting dressed up for copyright protection. My WW goal was 184 lbs. I haven’t been over 186 lbs since 2006. If you’ve ever done WW you understand the significance of that 2 lb difference.

It took years to lose 100 lbs. and I basically did it in 2 phases. I lost on my own from 285 to about 220. I quit drinking alcohol, “watched what I ate” did modest exercise, mostly long walks and just rode the down trend. I lost about 65 lbs in 18 months. It was fairly easy. Then I became stuck. Then like a lot of people, I decided that if I wanted to get back to losing, I needed to go to the gym.

The gym changed my life. Lots of good stuff about the gym. Lots of amazing benefits from training and fitness. Weight loss isn’t one of them. The gym is vastly overrated as a weight loss tool. But I did build muscle. Enough that people took notice. My wife liked it. (BTW, don’t get into this being “older” thing. I was 44 when I started.)

So I build my body but didn’t lose weight. But I also learned the value of incrementalism. If you take a healthy person, eat enough protein, and train with weights, just basic Arnold 101 sets and reps, that person with build muscle. It has to work, its how our bodies are designed. Later I came to understand that the same process can be reverse engineered into weight loss.

I went on like this for years. No matter how hard I worked in the gym, I never got under 212 lbs. Then one day my neighbor sat down on the couch and died. When I started WL my goal was to get to 204 lbs. Here I was, been working for years, had lost a lot, done all kinds of work in the gym, but could never reach my goal. Now the death of my neighbor was a slap in the face. We don’t have unlimited time to work on stuff. I needed to finish what I had started. I joined WW.

WW is where I learned tracking. We call it logging here on MFP. I soon figured out that to hit my numbers, it was best to make plans. I started making plans for the week. It worked. Sometimes I was hungry. I found that I could tolerate being hungry if 1) I wasn’t too hungry. Too hungry results in a headache. And 2) if I knew what and when I was going to get to eat next. It also helped that I tried to eat things that I liked and found satisfying. Stuff had to be worth waiting for. I wasn’t going to get past the office vending machines on the way out to go home and eat carrot sticks.

As soon as WW started working for me I could see that my 204 lb goal was wrong. It was too much. So I set my sights on under 200. Then 190. The highest official WW goal for me was 184 lbs, to then I aimed for that. It took about 6 months to get from 216 lbs my WW start weight to under 184 lbs and make WW Lifetime.

I went to my meeting every week except when on vacation. I learned a lot. But mostly not what WW thought they were teaching me. I came to think of the meeting as the school of what not to do. People came every week to tell their stories of failure and frustration. They all started out the same- something happened, went over my number, quit tracking, planned to start over but did not. Now it is X weeks or months later. WW had a revolving door. I vowed to not get in it.

My number 1 WL advice- start a food diary and never stop. Unlike nearly everyone else I met at WW, I made goal and kept coming to the meeting. I continued to weigh in nearly every week. My initial tracking project lasted 5 years. I tracked with pen and paper in little blue books that WW handed out. After 5 years I found I could maintain for long periods without tracking. Right now I’ve adjusted my goal to 175 lbs. If I go over for more than a couple of weigh ins, I start tracking again. It has worked every single time I’ve done it. In a typical year I probably track about 2 months. Most of my goals now are fitness related, the number on the scale is one facet.

Weight loss is mostly about problem solving and persistence. Use your food diary to identify your problem areas. Solve enough problems and you get to goal weight. There is no grand secret, no big “the answer.” We are all just stumbling around trying to learn to live with some reasonable limits. Mother Nature gave us bodies designed to survive hard times by storing extra calories. Those times don’t arrive for most of us. Its a good problem to have but vexing for most people. You are doing yourself a huge favor by not letting the time factor take over your plan. It’s what messes up most people. Always pay attention to how you are living. A plan we cannot actually live with is not a good plan. The good news is ineffective plans can be fixed. Never quit. Not much changes at goal weight anyway. Hope something here helps you. Good luck.