Introduction & Advice

BUmping to help you out

Come on MFPers..help a fellow friend of mine out

12 weight loss tricks.

Everyone can use a little extra help when they're trying to lose weight. Here are some easy-to-do diet tips.

Switch one soda, diet or regular, for water. If you replace all added sugar beverages with plain water, you could lose an average of 5 pounds more than if you don't. Cutting down on diet drinks can help too.

Eat and run. Before you reach for that candy bar, think about how far you're willing to go for it. How about a 2.87 mile walk? One mini peanut butter cup will cost you one third mile. A small brownie? A 26 minute run ~ (I don't know about you but that's peanut butter cup just isn't worth it!!)

Chew slowly. In a recent study, when women were told to eat quickly, they ate 646 calories in nine minutes, but when they were encouraged to pause between bites and to chew each mouthful 15 to 20 times, they took in only 579 calories in 29 minutes.

SLEEP!!! Shut off the late night TV. Replacing one hour of all of inactive awake time with sleep cuts your calorie intake by about 6% simply by giving you fewer chances to eat. Turn in a little hungry. Night time snacking can add up to 300 extra calories daily. Don't go to bed "starving", but don't go to bed with a full stomach either

Go a little vegetarian. Going meatless for at least two meals a week can help reduce the amount of saturated fat and calories you consume.

Change your dressing. Salad is certainly a healthy choice, until you pour on the dressing. In fact, women can often get more fat and calories from dressing than from any other food. Try salt & pepper and a squeeze of lemon or one of the new salad dressing spritzers, which add flavor for just 10 calories.

Leave a few bites behind. This equals about 100 calories, which is all you need to cut from your daily diet to avoid gaining the one to 2 pounds most adults put out every year.

Go the extra mile to help ward off weight gain. That's just 2000 steps or about a walk around the block. - just finding something you enjoy makes all the difference.

Jump rope to up the calorie burn of your walking workout. Start by doing 20 jumps for every five to 10 minutes.

Sit in front of the TV on a stability ball. It gets you to hold in your abdominal muscles so you're building strength and helping posture.

Exercise while you e-mail. Sit upright and inhale deeply. As you exhale slowly, drawing or lower abdominals in toward your spine. Hold on tight, while you take a few easy breaths, for as long as it takes you to write an e-mail or listen to a song on itunes.

New, just joining today. I have a goal of 50 pounds to start with, does anyone have any ideas for exercises for someone with a bad knee and ankle?

You might want to move this to it's own topic, but swimming would probably be awesome. It is zero impact and if your knees or ankles are sore, you can just swim with your arms and get just as much of a work out. A lot of YMCA and gyms, if you can afford them, have indoor pools so you can go regardless of the weather outside. You might want to research exercises for the wheelchair bound if getting up on your feet is a real problem. If you can handle a little bit of being on your feet, ellipitcal machines are good low impact and there are many exercises that involve moving your arms and bending at the waist that would be zero impact for your bad knee and ankle.

(I know this is an old thread, but since you're kind of back (or at least your husband is), I thought I'd rewind and go from there.)

Are you weighing and measuring your foods to know that you're logging correctly?

Are you certain your 1240 daily target isn't creating too large of a deficit? (If you told MFP you wanted to lose 2 pounds/week, it's probably too great of a deficit as you only have 15-20 pounds to lose. Perhaps try just 1 pound/week?)

Have you consistently stuck with your calorie target for a sufficiently long enough period of time (say, 4-6 weeks) to determine if it is an appropriate one?



Welcome to MFP. And best of luck with all your health and fitness goals. :flowerforyou:

Come on MFPers..help a fellow friend of mine out

When did you guys get married? Congrats!

I would try weight training. With so little to lose you would likely hit your ideal 'size' long before you hit the 'ideal number on a scale' and be stronger for it.

I have a bit more to lose than you as well. I have lost about 15 so far and have about 30 to go!

I have basically stuck to the guidelines MFP set up for me. I set things up to show that I am lightly active and will shoot for exercising 4x a week at 30 min or 120 min for the week (there have been some weeks where I have been shy of this or have gone over by quite a bit). I set it to lose 1.5 lbs a week.

First thing to point out, I DID NOT change my diet! Sure, I may be eating more fruits/veggies and drinking more water, but I still eat everything I did before. I have cut back on the diet soda I consumed, but not cut it out completely. If I want it, I have it. For me, it's been more about cutting back. I was eating WAY more than I thought I was and realized that when I first started entering things into my diary. Now 60 days in, I can honestly say, my body is not deprived in any way by the small cutbacks I made. Instead of having a huge pile of rice or noodles on my plate at dinner, I have only 1/2-1 cup and add in more veggies/fruit to get more of a fill. I don't have second helpings anymore because I don't need them.

By following the guidelines set up by MFP, I can eat back most, if not all of my exercise calories. If I want a little more of something or if I am going out with friends, to a family party, etc... I make sure to get a good workout in so I have a little bit more of a cushion.

I have consistently lost 1.5 to 2.5 lbs since I started. This may stall eventually and I will have to figure things out. But I figure I must be doing something right if I can eat how I am eating, workout how I do, and consistently lose a good chunk of weight every week!

You will have setbacks and that's okay. You may have a day where you go over your calories by 500 or 1000. As long as it's not a regular thing, it will not set you back in the long run!

Seeing that you have only 20 to lose, I would think you'd want to set it up to lose 1 lb a week. That should give you a few extra calories to eat, too!

Feel free to add me as a friend for support! I love to encourage all my MFP friends! And my diary is open to friends, too, so you can see what I eat on any given day. It definitely would not be considered "healthy" to some, but it works for me!

And good luck to you on your journey :flowerforyou: