It's working...
Fit2btied2016
Posts: 384 Member
18 days, and down 8 lbs. I am going to have to have some clothes altered soon if this keeps up. For the moment I have figured out a few foods I can eat (and rotate through them) that don't aggravate issues I have.
I am running out of ideas though and want to be able to eat more of the foods I like, so I will be hunting around for an RD (and an NP-to be blood tested again for delayed food reactions) so I can have a meal plan made up, and then just have that tweaked.
Tracking calories has made a huge difference, and noticing the actual "portion" sizes of foods on labels (most of which are unrealistic for the average person-6 potato chips, 5 candies?)
Anyway, I have also figured out how I lose weight. My body will lose about 2 lbs. of water weight in a few days, then regain, then lose it again. This goes on a few times in a week. It's also normal to have weight fluctuations during the day. My true weight (that holds for a few days) is the one that I go by, and the one that is lower at the end of the week. (I weigh myself daily at the same time, but I could just as easily only hop on the scale once a week at the same time--I don't think it would make much difference is what I am saying).
Finally have been able to relearn hunger and satiety cues and true hunger (and also how to ignore hunger) after many years of hormonal issues, and this was mostly accomplished by doing 3 and 4 day water fasts, and learning what it feels like to go through carb withdrawal, and so on (carb hangover), etc. I am figuring out the Glycemic Index a bit.
These are all HUGE steps for me. A lady down the street is going to help me with some weightlifting down the road (pardon the pun, lol). It turns out she won some competitions she said and is quite willing to set up a program for me. Hoping to get below my goal weight and then lift to see what I am dealing with. I put on muscle very easily, so not worried there.
Exercise is pretty tame at the moment--a bit of walking here and there, playing football with the dog a few times each week, a couple of classes of aquafit, a few times out in the kayak, a bit of swimming, and repetitive lifting buckets of gravel (maybe 65-70lbs each) for about a week while we redo our backyard.
Looking forward to planning when to redo my SCUBA ticket--last dive was at 188lbs. and I needed a lot on my weight belt to get down, lol. Aiming for Spring.
Actually going to take my horse tack down in the garage and clean it off this weekend and call up some old barn buddies to see if I can take a few refresher lessons, and if they still have their old "tank" of a horse hanging around. That's a new goal before Christmas.
Found my knee brace, so will pull that and my skipping rope out this weekend, too, and give those a whirl. Now that ligaments have healed sufficiently and my meniscus, I hope to also maybe go skiing again this winter after several years off. (But we are in a drought here--unless we get rain, there will not be snow this winter).
Working on doing push-ups, and that is freaking hilarious, (it's been too long) so I adapted it a bit, and then discovered I can do a modified push-up against my kitchen counters, so have been doing those instead. Huh, my core is getting tight again, and somewhere under the flab, the flat tummy is there, LOL.
My shirts are fitting better, and I can see some definition in my waist from the sides, and my backside is slimming, too. (Down from some 2x tops to XL, and some large, depending on the cut). My pants were the first to loosen all over. Down a size (20-18--the new size is getting too big). I should easily be out of the Plus sizes by Spring! (And I ain't ever going back, ha, ha).
Kind of kicking myself that I didn't take starting measurements, but oh well. I can feel that I have lost significant inches all over if you add them all together. My husband has noticed, and so it must not be my imagination, lol.
Losing weight requires constant attention and making your food choices a priority. I am REALLY noticing how much sugar and salt are in certain foods, and really prefer to eat a lot of plain, natural and whole foods more often than not. Things just taste gross to me now, whereas before, I would have no problems stuffing my face with a bag of chips watching a movie.
Oh. I have hardly turned on the TV in more than a year, and even less so while trying to lose weight. Because of that, I no longer sit down to eat that habitual bag of chips, and I would much rather be checking out the weather to take the kayak out, etc. (If it were just me, I would cut the cable).
It's weird how people's attitudes are changing towards me. Some of the neighbours have commented on how often they see me out walking, and a few have asked me if I got new glasses or got my hair done differently or something. Hmmmm...They are noticing something, lol. One neighbour pulled out his bike and started riding it again after a long time, and other neighbours have started to "want to hang out." I guess they figured out that I was serious when I invited them to join me in activities. ;-)
My first mini-goal was 5lbs., so next will be to hit 10, and so on. That's about it so far, but also planning how to celebrate 5 years brain-tumour free on the 31. Oh yeah!
Grateful...happy...positive...looking ahead...one day a time...
I am running out of ideas though and want to be able to eat more of the foods I like, so I will be hunting around for an RD (and an NP-to be blood tested again for delayed food reactions) so I can have a meal plan made up, and then just have that tweaked.
Tracking calories has made a huge difference, and noticing the actual "portion" sizes of foods on labels (most of which are unrealistic for the average person-6 potato chips, 5 candies?)
Anyway, I have also figured out how I lose weight. My body will lose about 2 lbs. of water weight in a few days, then regain, then lose it again. This goes on a few times in a week. It's also normal to have weight fluctuations during the day. My true weight (that holds for a few days) is the one that I go by, and the one that is lower at the end of the week. (I weigh myself daily at the same time, but I could just as easily only hop on the scale once a week at the same time--I don't think it would make much difference is what I am saying).
Finally have been able to relearn hunger and satiety cues and true hunger (and also how to ignore hunger) after many years of hormonal issues, and this was mostly accomplished by doing 3 and 4 day water fasts, and learning what it feels like to go through carb withdrawal, and so on (carb hangover), etc. I am figuring out the Glycemic Index a bit.
These are all HUGE steps for me. A lady down the street is going to help me with some weightlifting down the road (pardon the pun, lol). It turns out she won some competitions she said and is quite willing to set up a program for me. Hoping to get below my goal weight and then lift to see what I am dealing with. I put on muscle very easily, so not worried there.
Exercise is pretty tame at the moment--a bit of walking here and there, playing football with the dog a few times each week, a couple of classes of aquafit, a few times out in the kayak, a bit of swimming, and repetitive lifting buckets of gravel (maybe 65-70lbs each) for about a week while we redo our backyard.
Looking forward to planning when to redo my SCUBA ticket--last dive was at 188lbs. and I needed a lot on my weight belt to get down, lol. Aiming for Spring.
Actually going to take my horse tack down in the garage and clean it off this weekend and call up some old barn buddies to see if I can take a few refresher lessons, and if they still have their old "tank" of a horse hanging around. That's a new goal before Christmas.
Found my knee brace, so will pull that and my skipping rope out this weekend, too, and give those a whirl. Now that ligaments have healed sufficiently and my meniscus, I hope to also maybe go skiing again this winter after several years off. (But we are in a drought here--unless we get rain, there will not be snow this winter).
Working on doing push-ups, and that is freaking hilarious, (it's been too long) so I adapted it a bit, and then discovered I can do a modified push-up against my kitchen counters, so have been doing those instead. Huh, my core is getting tight again, and somewhere under the flab, the flat tummy is there, LOL.
My shirts are fitting better, and I can see some definition in my waist from the sides, and my backside is slimming, too. (Down from some 2x tops to XL, and some large, depending on the cut). My pants were the first to loosen all over. Down a size (20-18--the new size is getting too big). I should easily be out of the Plus sizes by Spring! (And I ain't ever going back, ha, ha).
Kind of kicking myself that I didn't take starting measurements, but oh well. I can feel that I have lost significant inches all over if you add them all together. My husband has noticed, and so it must not be my imagination, lol.
Losing weight requires constant attention and making your food choices a priority. I am REALLY noticing how much sugar and salt are in certain foods, and really prefer to eat a lot of plain, natural and whole foods more often than not. Things just taste gross to me now, whereas before, I would have no problems stuffing my face with a bag of chips watching a movie.
Oh. I have hardly turned on the TV in more than a year, and even less so while trying to lose weight. Because of that, I no longer sit down to eat that habitual bag of chips, and I would much rather be checking out the weather to take the kayak out, etc. (If it were just me, I would cut the cable).
It's weird how people's attitudes are changing towards me. Some of the neighbours have commented on how often they see me out walking, and a few have asked me if I got new glasses or got my hair done differently or something. Hmmmm...They are noticing something, lol. One neighbour pulled out his bike and started riding it again after a long time, and other neighbours have started to "want to hang out." I guess they figured out that I was serious when I invited them to join me in activities. ;-)
My first mini-goal was 5lbs., so next will be to hit 10, and so on. That's about it so far, but also planning how to celebrate 5 years brain-tumour free on the 31. Oh yeah!
Grateful...happy...positive...looking ahead...one day a time...
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Replies
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Congratulations. You deserve the results you are getting. Just a short warning. Since you started so recently, you are experiencing something almost all of us have been experiencing when we started: encouraging fast weight loss. That is indeed "water loss". It is also, to some degree, something that almost never gets mentioned: "poop loss". Depending on how much you ate before, you will be losing a bit more than you ingest for a few a days.
Please do not be disappointed when this encouraging weight loss suddenly slows down or even seems to stall for a while. As long as your intake stays below your calories burned, you will lose weight. If it stalls for a month or so, that would be the time to reduce your intake a bit more. That will happen too. Unfortunately, the more we lose, the less we need. That's just physical reality, and it is something we can do nothing about.
Whatever method you chose to reduce your energy intake that suits you best, is the best method for you, regardless of what other people say.
I like that you are weighting every day. Keep it up. As you say, it does not really make much difference with weighing weekly or even less frequently, but it does something that less-frequent weighings do not: it smooths out the curve and helps to correct for weighing errors. Depending on the quality of the scale you are using, those errors may be significant. The personal scales I had in the past were so bad, my weight often went up after a bathroom visit, which is nonsensical. I since bought a mechanical Seca medical scale and that problem was largely solved, even though there still are fluctuations that are entirely due to mechanical issues. However, these fluctuations are tiny, and I largely eliminate them by ignoring the 50 g marks and only looking at the highest 100 g mark I am clearly under.
As for exercise: great. I just ignore the calories this burns. Nobody knows for sure, and there is no need to depress over it. I just take whatever weight loss I get from my exercise as an unexpected bonus even if I have to confess I did not notice any unexpected bonuses so far. The difference between weeks of what is for high-intensity for me and low-intensity or even no-intensity has so far always been zero or unnoticeable. Yet, logic dictates that there should be a difference between a day of sleeping and sitting at a desk and a day with a six hour walk, even more so between a week of the first and a week of the last. I am sure there is such a difference, it is impossible to not have a difference, but that does not mean we can actually detect it by weighing.
That is why doctors will almost always say to ignore the effect of exercise on weight loss, but to keep doing it, because it is great for almost everything else. Just don't be discouraged when you don't see a weight effect, enjoy it when you do, and be happy you did it, because it is great for your health anyway.
As for hunger cues: fantastic. Even now, after having lost so much weight, I have no hunger cues. I am hungry all the time, so I do what you have learned: I try to ignore the hunger. As long as it is tolerable, that is possible. For the rest, I weigh everything precisely, so I don't really need the cues, even if it would certainly be very desirable to hav them. Since you do: praise yourself lucky. They can be a great tool.1 -
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Good for you I don’t routinely eat those exercise calories but there are days that I eat some or all of them. Keep up the good work1
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Fit2btied2016 wrote: »Thank-you, you are very kind! I am pretty realistic and not expecting miracles, but the scale is down a consistent 1% body fat, which seems pretty accurate based on how my clothes are fitting/the downward trend. It's a FitBit digital one. It seems to be fairly accurate. I have gone to the doctor's office and been within a lb. of that scale, so I trust it.
The exercise is to keep the machine burning and prolong health--use it or lose it. I honestly don't find fat attractive. A little fine, but I do like proper proportions and so on. It won't take me much to get back into semi-decent shape once I put my mind and effort into it down the road, but I have been pacing myself because of the knee ligaments/meniscus--it's pretty crunchy with bone-on-bone, and while I like running to some extent (it's like a Turbo boost for me and really does jumpstart things), I can't see how I can do it for long periods pain-free. I might have to go back for shock-therapy, we shall see. The harder work will be tweaking the semi-decent shape into having maybe 20% body fat, say. That would be a perfectly reasonable goal for me, and if I get a bit lower, bonus.
One thing I don't do, is eat back the calories it says I am allowed. My Doctor years ago had told me for any weight loss, never go below eating 1200 calories, because it is too hard on the body. It makes sense, but I might jump down to that to lose a bit more quickly (I am playing around with eating1600-1700-1500 and seeing what difference it makes). Later on, I will give myself a wider range of calories (up to 2000, say), and work with that once I am exercising even more. Like you, I don't think the calories burned is accurate--at best, it's a guesstimate.
I go by how much I am sweating and for how long. I know when I am dogging it versus going all out, and I am looking for the recovery on my heartrate to gauge increasing fitness. One thing I will be really excited about will be working on doing a chin-up or pull-ups in the park again! One day...I don't have enough upper body strength to haul my butt up yet, but I will get there again. (Remember those Olympic-type-Rings? I could hang upside down on those and do a few tricks in gym class in Grade 10--I am using those as a gauge of my strength, and hopefully can find a set in a gym somewhere. I would be thrilled if I could get to the point where I could get on those again).
Body-weight exercises work well for me--I hate gyms and I hate exercise, so unless it's fun, or somehow incorporated into an activity, you will not find me willingly going to gyms. Yes, I have been in gyms, but with great reluctance, and to do PT, rehab, etc. Ask me to lift something like buckets or heavy loads, and no problem.
Bit-by-bit. It's already automatic to come here, because I need to figure out how much I ate each day, and so the tracker is the draw. But yakking with other people and hearing their tips and stories is super helpful, and also takes my mind off food. I just go about my day, and log in a few times.
But I need to set a timer or something for 15 or 20 minutes and not yak my head off. I think since Covid, there was a lot of pent-up stuff for a lot of people, so I have heard a few people say how much they talk now, LOL.
It's interesting all around though. Just for the heck of it, I tried on a pair of jeans today that I bought I think about a year before Covid. I was kind of stunned when they fit, and I could do them up, and even squat down, but they are still too tight overall, but not by much! That means in a few weeks or less from now, I will have dropped down another size. (And I will be officially out of Plus Sizes then to a 16! Hooray!)
And I have never spoken to a group of random strangers this much about weight or anything this personal, for this long, EVER. It's almost like the more I talk, the less I need to now. The switch is on, and the metabolism is working again, and it feels good. I can't wait to take a picture one day and send it to my endocrinologist and say, "Hey, remember me? Check this out. Thanks, Doc!" He will be super-thrilled. He was awesome to have on my team.
Anyway...my biggest thing to watch right now is not eating too much pumpkin pie. Oh my gosh, it's my absolute favourite, and between Oct-early January, it's all over the bakeries. Caveat Emptor, lol.
It looks to me as if you are doing all the right things. Where the minimum calories are concerned, the best thing you can do, is track everything by keeping an as-precise-as possible diary, including foods, food quantities, estimated calories and regular weighings. Including exercise is a potential bonus, but since it has no discernible effect for me, I stopped logging it after a year or so.
Online trackers can be a bit of a pain because –for understandable reasons– they don't like to be seen encouraging potentially risky behaviour. That is why it is best to talk to a doctor and be brutally honest about everything. Doctors are not clairvoyants, and while they can spot inconsistencies and things that don't seem normal, they cannot generally take into account things they don't know or that they have been misinformed about. That is something I have had to learn, even though I knew that full well, because my parents had forced me to lie to the doctor since I was a little child and it was an astonishingly difficult habit to break.
Food tracking is incredibly easy for me, because I cook so simply you could reasonably argue I am not cooking at all, but everyone is different here. I started making soup in a rice cooker years ago, and now I am not even bothering with that anymore, I am just using the microwave. It actually made my food tastier because there is no water, and I don't need salt to make it less watery.
Good for your scale. You are doing the right thing figuring it out. There will always be differences, and that is not important. What is important, is that the differences are consistent so you can compare the results. I did that by weighing the clothes I wear when going to the doctor, and (as far as possible) always wearing the same ones in order to minimise the work and the risk of errors creeping in.
You are clearly more sporty than I am. I am only allowed to do very low intentity exercises, which essentially boils down to walking and cycling (for transportation, not for imitating Lance Armstrong) but I compensate by doing it for a very long time, sometimes too long, so my feet have to complain for me to hear them, but I should add to this that I was used to make 40+ km walks in the past, I am not even comfortable to do half of that right now, so there is room for improvement.
Smaller clothes that start to fit really is an encouragement, is it not? I went down from XXL sweaters to large ones, and I am now on the fence to switch to medium. I think it is too early, but the large ones are starting to feel quite loose. Same with pants. I was only able to buy them at Walmart in Toronto for years, now I can buy them anywhere. I had to use suspenders to keep them up because I was so fat, and now I am starting to have to use them again, because the pants are getting too big... It is all pretty rewarding.
Pumpkin pie! Great. I honestly don't even know anymore what that tastes like.
Keep up the good work. You are doing great.
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What a great start! Who cares if it's water weight, it's gone. You've changed your eating habits which allowed your body to let go of some of the water retention. I think you're off to a fantastic start!2
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I agree with that assessment. Water (and poop) loss has only one potential negative I can think off: when it's gone, weight loss slows down to more realistic levels and when someone is not prepared for that, they may become discouraged. They shouldn't be, but they often are. Sadly enough.TamiVsTheTrail wrote: »What a great start! Who cares if it's water weight, it's gone. You've changed your eating habits which allowed your body to let go of some of the water retention. I think you're off to a fantastic start!
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