TODAY I HIT GOAL doing this... (5'7 sedentary female)

I haven't had a single one of these since I started losing weight. I told myself and others that once I reached goal, I'd eat a pack of them lol:



In anticipation for sunday (weigh in) I picked up a pack. Today, I woke up to this:


GW: 120! I skipped it The rest of my stats are in my profile. There are photos below. I included some oreo pictures for luls. Some of the success stories have awesome shots, but sorry, these are no model shots, just poorly lit Galaxy Nexus phone pics lol.

Before the oreos were opened lol


Nerdy @ symbol belly button ring ftw. I plan to use the Iron Gym more (the thing behind me) from now on.


Front


Side me, emerging from Oreos lol.


If you start getting lost anywhere, there's links provided in the next few posts for information.

When we come here many seem to suddenly think 2000 is a gargantuan amount of food, when most nutritional values are based on a 2000 calorie diet. I eventually decided I didn't want to be that person, as I never was before. So, I ignored MFP calculations as I felt I could speed things up if I did some research/math on my own. I reached goal eating above/below the NET of my estimated TDEE. I trying to always NET above BMR. The calculations were underestimated for me, so eating at this so far has enabled me to lose a pound a week for months. This essentially worked out to be "maintenance" with no expected weekly exercise according to the MFP calculations.

Food

Well, I was never afraid to go over my calories as long as I was under for the week (sometimes I wasn't). I got a digital food scale and measuring cup to try and weigh food accurately. Make sure the values you use for your food is actually the real nutritional value. Many of the values can be off. Especially if you don't realize there's say, Canadian and US products with the same name but different ingredients.

Exercise

HRM: good for cardio things like running and cycling. When you get into weight training and other things this tends to be less accurate.

Sparks People talk about HRM: http://www.sparkpeople.com/community/ask_the_experts.asp?q=75

MFP: I have a HRM but since it's not continuous, this is what I use. Those I've asked say the MFP values can be nearly double the amount on their HRM. I'm guessing it'll depend on your size. I usually ate at least half of my exercise calories anyway.

Steppers: If you wave or it's windy or if you get in a car these things will increment. They have no way to determine if you're exerting yourself, if you're moving your limbs with all your might, if you're walking quickly or jogging slowly. Keep that in mind when using these values.

Activity Level

I was in a motorcycle accident, left dance, was in school, worked, and did open source projects on the side. For most of my journey walking from my car to class to my car when I bothered to go to class was my exercise. I ate at my sedentary TDEE at first, so I made sure I logged all/every activity I did and ate my exercise calories back. Remember, if you're on your feet all day, you're not sedentary. Starting the end of April I'm eating at a higher activity TDEE now, but I still have things set up the same, I just have more exercise calories to eat now. I could just as easily set it up to my new activity level and not log exercise and it works out to be about the same.

Weighing, %BF, measuring tapes

Stats on my profile.

Weight, body fat, and measuring tapes can be misleading sometimes. I realize that I'm a female, and with that, comes trouble with this topic. Females weight fluctuate a lot, and peoples weight fluctuate for a lot of different reasons not necessarily related to consistently gaining weight. All the calibers and bio-electrical impedance machines and weight scales in the world are going to give me a realistic value unless I look over all the values over an extended period of time and notice all the different variables at play (which is almost impossible). Especially if I want to compare myself to someone else. I can bring my weight scale to a different part of the world, and depending on the latitude, longitude, and height, it will tell me I'm a different weight. If I eat different things, different amounts, move different amounts, get my body fat taken different ways or at different times between food, activity, and cycle, the numbers will be different if I compare myself to last week. For those reasons, I didn't mind weighing myself several times a day. I did several experiments with it. Just because weight goes up, it doesn't necessarily mean evil is happening.

With that being said, I'm going to start exercising and lifting weights (at least my own weight) and I expect the scale to go up, and I expect to look better. Hopefully both of us will stick around long enough to see the differences I'll hopefully post later :flowerforyou:

Thank you everyone, especially all the MFP friends I've made along the way