Food making me miserable

Warrior_Thunder wrote: »

How do I meet the calorie count without being miserable? Anyone has insight?

What weight loss rate are you shooting for? Too many people target 2 pounds a week (or more!). That's optional. Anything below maintenance calories = weight loss, just a little slower. In a lot of cases, a less aggressive goal will get us to goal weight in less calendar time than an aggressive plan that (in practice) results in deprivation-triggered overeating, breaks in the effort, or even giving up altogether.

On top of that, some people try to revolutionize their eating patterns: No "bad foods", all "good foods" kind of thing. Not essential, makes it harder. IMO, there aren't really "good" or "bad" individual foods. What matters is overall good nutrition, and even that has only an indirect effect on body weight (through fatigue or appetite) as compared with calorie intake. Calorie intake is the key thing for fat loss.

And on top of that, some people think miserably intense, exhausting exercise is an essential element. It isn't. Exercise is about fitness and health, more than about weight loss. The exercise sweet spot for either fitness or weight loss goals is manageable, ideally fun (at least tolerable, practical) activity that's a mild challenge to current physical capabilities. You want to be energized for the rest of your day (maybe after a brief few minutes of "whew" right after the exercise), not exhausted. Exercise that is too fatiguing bleeds calorie burn out of the rest of your day (via resting more, doing less - maybe in subtle ways). That's counterproductive.

Losing any meaningful total amount of weight is not a quick project with a near-term end date, after which things "go back to normal." (That's a recipe for yo-yo weight, probably the least healthy route.) Losing a meaningful amount of weight - even doing it "fast" - is going to take many weeks to many months, for some cases maybe even years.

To me, that puts a premium on reframing that effort: The key idea is not "how do I lose weight fast", but rather "how do I remodel my routine habits (eating and activity) in sustainable ways to gradually reach a healthy weight, and stay there forever, almost on autopilot".

Think about how to make weight loss (relatively) easy, not about how to make it fast. Think about finding new long-term habits - eating, exercise, daily life routine patterns - that gradually lead you to that healthy weight, and keep you there.

Wishing you success!

As others have said...I think you need to give some more detail about what you mean.

Do you mean that you eat a certain amount of your daily calorie goal and then you are under it but are no longer hungry to eat more? I find that this seems to be a bit 'common' - especially when people are restricting their calories too much...or told MFP they wanted to lose 2lbs/week which usually defaults their daily calorie goal to 1200 cals (for women).

Ultimately...you need to eat your calories. The goal MFP gives you is already at a deficit from your maintenance calories and under-eating....creates too high of a deficit. So, you kind of need to get to the bottom of *why* you're not feeling hungry. You hunger cues might be messed up. I had that issue when I started using MFP so so long ago...and I was undereating. I was still mustering up the energy to workout but other than that I felt lethargic and was sedentary. And I struggled to even eat 1200 cals. I might get to 800 and be like, welp I'm not hungry so I don't need to eat. Wrong.

So if you really are struggling to have a hunger cue, but need more calories you can do a number of things: add fats to your meals (like adding more butter or olive oil to a soup, etc), use full fat ingredients (like cheese, etc), eat some nuts/dried fruits (calorie dense but low volume foods). Don't choose to use 'diet' or 'light' anything...this will get you more calories for the same volume of food usually. Ideally, once you are eating amore appropriate amount of calories, you can get appropriate hunger cues back. And then you can work towards the idea of eating when you're hungry and trusting those cues from your body. In a pinch you can use something like a meal replacement or bulking supplement (like soylent or BSN True Mass) which can get you a good amount of calories in (in a fairly balanced way in regard to macros) for not a lot of volume.