rosebarnalice Member

I use the community boards primarily for affirmation and validation that I'm not the only person who has the struggles I have, and there are people out there whose experience can inform mine. With that in mind, when I respond to a thread, I try to ground my words in the truth of my own experience. Sometimes the act of…

It's important for me to treat eating well and exercising as acts of self love and self care. The flip side is treating eating or drinking too much, and loading up on salty/ fatty/ carby/ sugary junk is the opposite of self care: it's brutal punishment to my body that leads to self loathing and self hatred. An occasional…

Two things that help me through times of great stress and multiple commitments/obligations are (a) putting exercise time on my calendar in advance-- even of it's just 20 minutes for a walk around the block, and (b) making time on the weekend for some meal prep -- usually a casserole or soup/stew with lots and lots of…

Log your calories and activity, and cruise the community board for inspiration and support!

My experience is that as I aged it took much longer for my skin to rebound from weight loss.

When I first started, I found repeating focus words or short phrases helped. "I inhale Joy, I exhale Release" was a good starter. When my mind wandered, it was easier to bring myself back to my breath by bringing myself back to the core words Joy /Release. Then with time, it was easier to bring myself back to my breath…

You poor thing! You've been through a lot! In your situation I'd be frustrated, too. But I hope you're able to give yourself some grace. I recently had hip surgery, and since inactivity means there's not much I can do about the "calories out" side while I heal, I'm focusing on the "calories in" side. I'm really trying to…

Logging calories in, calories out (CICO) can get you there!

I love swimming! Keep up the good work! Logging gets much easier with time. Once you've built a history of food you eat often, predictive text will find them :-)

For me, it involved patience, self-honesty, and adaptability. The patience was about making mistakes, not expecting perfection of myself, and having realistic expectations (no, I'm not going to magic away 10 lbs a week in a healthy way.) Self honesty was the hard part that took me a while. I had to examine why I had failed…

I successfully added all my supplements using the bar scan feature. I then created two "my meals" for am vits and pm vits so they're easy to log every day.

The bar code scanner usually picks up all the correct nutritional information.

I go for the organic produce (small selection but great prices on what they have), fair trade coffee, organic hummuses, and house-brand (Earth Grown) frozen veggie meat alternatives like chick-un patties and cheat-balls. I also like several of their house brand snack crackers and cookies (animal crackers and graham…

I do what I call "integrated" meditation. It started with using an alphabet of short alliterative affirmations to keep track of my laps when I swim (e.g accept abundance, accept abundance . . . breath and balance, breath and balance) . Then I started using these same affirmations with simple box breathing to self-calm when…

I'm about 6 months into maintenance, and I still have a goodly amount of belly fat. It's just where my body likes to keep it. Although my weight has stabilized, my body is definitely adjusting. My saggy skin is slowly firming, and I've added a few core exercises that have definitely helped firm the underlying muscles so my…

Welcome and best of luck to you :-) One thing that helped me with late-night eating was (a) logging very honestly; (b) taking a serious look at what it was I was "hungry" for at those times and (c) adopting some "self-coaching". It looks something like this: When I found myself drifting towards the fridge or pantry in the…

What @Speakeasy76 said. Don't try to do everything all at once- it's a recipe for failure. If you're on the picky side, what has worked for you in the past? Do you do better with several smaller snacks/ meals or eating once a day? Do you tend to eat the same few dishes over and over? Nothing wrong with that. Maybe explore…

Breaking other people into body parts and comparing my parts to their parts is extremely damaging thinking for me. First, other people aren't "parts"-- they're whole people. It's disrespectful of me to look at others and see them as hair and upper arms and waists and thighs and skin color and hands and feet. It's also…

Sounds like you've got a good strategy for you. :-)

I'm 4 days out from one hip replacement (anterior approach). I didn't change my MFP maintenance goal, but my problem is that I'm having trouble eating enough. I've been 300-500 calories below goal since surgery. The pain meds make me somewhat nauseous, and post-surgery constipation discomfort isn't helping. I'm hoping that…

I've learned I have to spread out my calories until later in the day--even if that means a smaller meal at lunch. Once I'm at or near my calorie goal, if I'm still hungry in the evening, I'll drink water or a warm beverage like decaf tea, low cal boullion, or sugar free hot cider

I've been successful by having "save days" and "spend days" inside my weekly calorie budget. I'm typically under my daily goal on weekdays and over my goal on weekends, but it balances out. I treat the holidays more or less the same: Did I spend a bit too much yesterday? Cool- I'll save a bit today.

I would love love love this option! I hate the visual clutter of seeing the same posts pop up all the time (usually "check in" thread that doesn't apply to or interest me, or some "chit/chat" fun-and-game crap thing with 4,000 responses). I would love to just click "ignore" and never see them again!

Swimming laps.

If I'm honest, I have to say no. Although I am tall and have big boobs and long blonde hair, I always had such a poor self image that I was convinced I was an ugly ogreish monster and that no one would be attracted to me heavy or thin. Now, at 60, when I look back, I was never classically "beautiful", but I wasn't as ugly…

Pain. In the early part of lockdown, anxiety and isolation helped me poof up almost 25 lbs in 4 months. That summer, my hip failed me at mile 3 of a 5-mile remote mountain hike. Nothing to do but suck it up and get off that mountain. Nearly couldn't walk at all the next two weeks. But that flipped my switch I knew I had to…

Whew! you've got a lot going on-- no wonder you're stressed! Begin by giving yourself some grace. If beating and blaming myself was an effective motivator, I'd be queen of the world by now. So let's take stock of a few things that should give you some comfort and offer you some self-grace:* YES, you've got real stress in…

For me, it's easier to set my activity level as low, and add my activity as exercise

I know from past experience that's a dangerous strategy for me. It's better for me to keep on track with a few blip days here and there through the holiday season

Oh our marvelous powerful brains! I sabotaged myself for so long with insidious negative self talk-- I'm not thin enough or pretty enough, it doesn't matter how hard I try to lose weight I'm just a big fat loser and will never succeed, nobody loves me because I'm fat. Our brains LOVE pattern and making sense- which is why…