Accountability Buddy

Hello and welcome!

Truth in advertising, I'm not a great accountability buddy candidate, being honestly kind of a flake, and at a different stage of the process besides (year 9+ of maintenance in my case).

I did see your post, and wanted to offer some encouragement.

First, I think it's very smart of you to be getting this in hand at age 32. I wish I'd been that smart, because my life quality would've been better for literal decades if I had. (I finally lost weight at age 59-60, after some of the consequences of excess weight had already come home to roost.)

Coincidentally, I started that loss at about your current weight (183 pounds in my case) and height (5'5"). In a bit under a year, I lost around 50 pounds, have been at a healthy weight since, 130.2 this morning.

I feel like you have a lot of good elements in your plan: Leveraging your interests in food and cooking to find delicious, nutritious, filling ways to hit your calorie goal; new hobbies are a good way to replace bored, habitual, or even emotion-related over-eating; and exercise can help with mood and stress management in addition to calorie expenditure and body composition, as long as a person doesn't over-do.

When it comes to sticking with exercise, my suggestion would always be to find some active things that are ideally so fun you actively want to do them regularly, but are at least very tolerable and practical. I admit, I love my Summer activities (on-water rowing, cycling on the paved trails here, mostly). Winter indoor activities are less fun, but I know I need to keep it up so I'm not having to start conditioning over from zero once the outdoor activity season starts.


One thing that has helped me is a mindset thing: Making a specific plan, scheduling it, then treating that as something I just do rather than something I make a decision about every time. In that sense, it's like essential but non-fun home chores: We usually brush or teeth, wash the dishes or vacuum the floors on some kind of schedule, whether we feel "motivated" or not. It has also helped me to schedule things that involve other people, where that's an option: Group classes, appointments to meet a friend, etc.

Since you enjoy games, have you considered VR or real-life active games? Those can burn some calories, plus be enjoyable for some game fans.

I can't really suggest anything for the avoidance of fast food, takeout, or processed foods. I'm not saying you're wrong, but that's kind of not how I think about it. I try to get my desired nutrition within calories available, then am willing to spend any remaining calories on . . . whatever. I also worked on finding snack foods I enjoy, but that contribute at least something to my overall nutrition.

On the fast food/takeout front, I'm not really a fast food fanatic, but I do sometimes pick up takeout or eat in a restaurant when things get busy or I feel too busy. When first losing, I started looking at menus of places near me - online ones, which in the case of fast food places often offer more options than the in-restaurant menu board. Doing it that way, I could identify calorie-appropriate, reasonably-filling options I could turn to when that helped me out with my overall schedule.

For me, overall, what helped was thinking of this a search for new, positive permanent habits that would take me to a healthy weight and fitness level, rather than as a project with an end date. YMMV.

Apologies for rattling on . . . didn't mean to do that, but have to admit I'm like that. I'm wishing you success, because IME it's very much worth the effort!