Question for People Who Have Lost 30+ Pounds in 6 Months

Give up red meat and all refined sugar. It will melt off.

I lost 30 pounds in about 7 months, eating an average of 1600 to 2000 calories a day total (base plus exercise calories), running 3 times a week and doing light resistance training 4 times a week. (Since then, I switched to heavy strength training, and while the scale has gone up, my body got smaller.)

I never cut anything out of my menu. Still had breads, pasta, bagels, pizza. I did best when I aimed for 100g of protein a day.

The way I lost 35 pounds in 6 months was to cut back on my portions (try cutting your portions in half and see what happens) and not eating processed or fast food. Good luck to you!

I credit my success with portion control. Bought myself a set of food scales, measuring cups and in the beginning I weighed or measured every helping of everything. I was surprised at how I had guessed at portion size and lied to myself so much. I gave up eating out until I felt I had the strength to make healthy choices.

Exercised faithfully every day and logged all my time spent burning calories.

This worked for me.

I lost 30lbs from April 2010 to Sept 2010.

I did it by going to the gym 5-6 days a week and running each time I went. I did it by being cautious with my food (I stopped drinking pop and stopped eating ALL fast food). I started reading labels and paying attention to serving sizes. I still had cookies or a candy bar, but I definitely paid attention to what I was eating.

I feel like learning portion control was probably the biggest factor in my weight loss. Learning what 1 cup of rice is vs what you think is 1 cup is a HUGE eye opener.

I've lost 38 lbs in 5 months. My weight loss has slowed down a ton since I started working out, and doing my 3rd week now of P90X. That is because I am gaining much needed muscle mass. I started out at 1290 cals and got down to 1200 and the weight loss stopped. I am now up to 1400 to 1500 net while doing an hour a day workout, 6 days a week. I try to avoid processed food when possible, eat more whole foods and veggies, fruits, NO soda at all, no artificial sugars, etc. If you can cut out chips and replace with carrots and hummus or a greek yogurt dip, you will see change. Processed food is poison for your body.

You are welcome to look at my food diary. I am living proof that you will lose by eating more!!! I've lost over 55 lbs since January 1st.
- I exercise 6 days a week, and take one day to rest. But sometimes on my exercise day off, I get some sort of activity in such as walking at the mall, buying groeries (yes, when I'm walking around a grocery store for 1 - 1 1/2 hours, I count the calories I burn.
- I have my settings set on sedentary and eat all but about 200 or so of my exercise calories back. So that I have that to fall back on my exercise day off.
- I allow myself a meal, sometimes two, of what ever I like, but still count my calories...
- I weigh/measure everything I eat.

Every body is different, so you want to find what works for you. For me, this works; for others it may not.

the ticker at the bottom of my post was reset in January so 50ish pounds about a third of the way through the 6th month. I looked at your diary and I would say that you need to log everything; you can't review what you did right and wrong if you don't keep an honest account.

keys to my success so far. 1200 calories (like a religion), I eat a high protein and low carb ratio. I exercise 4 times a week for no less than 45 minutes usually an hour. I swim, do water aerobics with and without weights, and walk a moderate to fast pace outside or on a treadmill. I do not eat my exercise calories more than 2 times a month allowing for my version of a cheat day so I can have things like sweets.

I lost 30 pounds in about 4 months back in 2010, going from a size 18 to a size 12. I was around 159 lbs.

I found an online calorie counter (elsewhere) and just started logging calories. I ate pretty much whatever I felt like, keeping within the basic macros they provided. I was allowed between 1300-1550 calories. I learned pretty quickly to budget my calories, ate more tuna , chicken and vegetables. I'm not big on raw vegetables and if I have a salad I tend to top it with a lot of stuff. But it was still healthier than what got me fat. My favorite vegetables were mushrooms, corn, green beans and black-eyed peas!

When I wanted to eat out ( and I still did-often!) I had the nutritional stats in my hand and budgeted my calories accordingly. I did little to no exercise. The pounds melted away effortlessly. It was the first time I'd lost weight so easily!

And then...I took a break for the holidays, lol. I never really got back on track and with several major deaths in my life the following year and a devastating death of a friendship I just let the pounds creep back up. It took some time, but today I'm at 209 (my heaviest ever, oy!) and struggling to get back in sync. I'm not quite sure why something that was so easy is so hard to get started again.

I appreciate this post! Another spark to help get me motivated and see if I can get this done again! I know it can be done and there's so many people in this thread who are proof- no matter what method helped them achieve it. When you look at it with this view, isn't it silly NOT to take six months and be 30+ pounds lighter? Time to start kicking myself in the butt again...

Keep it up everyone!

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