Hello!

L

LaneyBear13

New member
Hi there! I am new to this site and was hoping to get some tips and advice in my weight loss goals. The story of my weight loss/gain issues is quite long, so I don't know if I should post it here or in another thread, but I'm needing some help and as soon as possible! Thanks :)
 
Hi, and welcome :)

Here's as good as any other place to post it (or in your diary if you choose to make one).

Can you tell us something about yourself, your current situation, and your weight loss goals? What have you tried to lose weight so far?

I'd recommend having a good search through the forum- in particular read the stickied posts in the areas that interest you (they've got some very good information), and the diaries to see what other people are doing and what's working for them (possibly also the before/ after section to see how other people are doing/ have done).
 
thank you! well here goes! Sorry if it's too long

I was always an active child and never even thought about my weight. I can say from what I remember, I didn’t eat the best, but always being out playing with my friends, I kept fit. Then, at age 11 I started becoming very self conscious of my weight. I still to this day remember walking out of the lunch line to grab a seat with my friends and this boy who was looking right at me says, “She has fat legs!” I was mortified one because I knew he was talking about me and two, because I wasn’t THAT over weight, ten pounds at most. From that day on, I had become very critical of my figure. Always comparing myself to other girls, wishing I could look like them. It didn’t help either, that my mother used to be a ballerina, and was always telling me I needed to lose weight and this was when I was 12.


As I got a bit older, my eating habits didn’t get any better and my activity level diminished quite a bit. I hated P.E. in school because I wasn’t good at sports and all the other kids laughed at me, so I would always get a note to sit out. Then when I was entering high school, I had to have a P.E. credit to graduate, so I took dance since I did it when I was little. I had that class an hour each day and I also walked to school, about a mile each way and walking in between classes. I still thought I was over weight, but I never weighed myself to know. Then the beginning of my junior year, I was taking a stretch and strength class for the other half of my P.E. credit. We had to weigh ourselves and get our % body fat. I weighed 136 and had 28% body fat. I though I was HUGE!! I couldn’t believe that’s how much I weighed and thought I was just gross looking. This was in September 2006. Shortly after that we moved and I went to an online school so my activity level pretty much disappeared.

A year later in 2007, I weighed myself and to my shock, now weighed 157! I had gained 11 pounds in a year! I tried to work out and then 5 months later in January 2008, I decided to go on Nutrisystem. I had to weigh myself for a starting weight and almost cried to see I now weighed 169. I had gained another 12 pounds in 5 months! I did Nutrisystem for about a month and a half and got down to 153, so I did lose some weight. Once I got off it though, I’m sure I gained that weight back. Then from August 2008 to May 2009, I went to cosmetology school and that pretty much consumed my life, so I didn’t work out, eat right or weigh myself. Then in August 2009 I felt heavy so I weighed myself to see I now weighed 181, so I went on Nutrisystem again, but quit quickly.

For the rest of 2009 and 2010, I tried to eat better and exercise, but I never saw results. Then in January 2011, my boyfriend said he wanted to go on vacation in October and I DID NOT want to weigh that much. So on April 1st, I weighed myself again and saw 190. That was it; I was not letting myself get to 200. I started eating better and going to the gym and 6 weeks later, I have lost only 5 pounds…I feel like it should be more. I am hoping to get back down to 136 by October, so any advice would be greatly appreciated.
 
I understand completely where you're coming from :)

Have you tried to change your diet to lose weight? Exercise is good, but it's only 10-20% of the equation. I've done the "trying to eat better" thing as well, and it was pretty much a failure for me. I now calorie count- and while I understand it's not for everyone, I think you should at least have an idea of your requirements and what's in certain foods. Use this website to calculate your requirements:

Feel free to check out my diary (linked in my signature) to see what I've been doing to lose weight- I've lost close to the safe maximum (1kg/ 2.2lb) a week for 5 weeks (I lost a kg a week for 4 weeks and 0.5kg last week after a binge day). I track all my food and try to keep it at between maintenance -500 and maintenance -1000, with good nutrition. I don't deprive myself or go hungry, and I actually eat a lot. (It's not as complicated as I make it look- I have a calorie counting program that gives me the breakdowns and statistics- I just weigh and enter my food) Heck, I even had chocolate tonight- because I can! (I'm under my allowance, I've hit my nutritional requirements for the day, why not?)

Different systems work for different people- and there are a variety of diets on this forum. Not very many programs are accepted here- a lot of them are regarded as scams or a waste of money. I don't know anything about what you've done, but in general I would say you don't need that sort of thing. If I can do it without programs (I have a massive appetite and sweet tooth, and two medical conditions which radically increase my likelihood of obesity), so can almost anyone.
 
Well right now, I'm a member on a website called Sparkpeople. I enter my age, height, and current body weight and it gives me a work out plan and how many calories I should be eating. It said, for me to get to 136 by October, I should eat between 1200 to 1500 calories a day and burn 650 calories per week. When I first started April 1st , the first week I lost a pound with minimal exercise, second week I lost another pound with minimal exercise. Then I was bad the third week and gained the 2 pounds back. the fourth week was the best, I went to the gym, burned my 650 calories and lost 4 pounds! Then the 5th week I did the same, but only lost a pound and now today for my weigh in I lost nothing, still 185. The only thing I did different was the first week I went to the gym, I went in the afternoon and then for these past 2 weeks, I went in the mornings...I feel like that's why I haven't lost much weight. i'm thinking of starting weight watchers, but again I'm not sure. I calorie count as best I can every day, so i don't know why I'm stuck at 185 when my website says I should weigh 178 as of now.
 
How are you going about calorie counting? I recommend investing in a set of digital scales, they're not very expensive (I'm in the UK, so I couldn't tell you how much they are there, but I paid about $US16.20 for mine, which weigh to the nearest gram or ml- 0.035oz or fl. oz). Are you using a calorie counting program? (I'm not familiar with sparkpeople, but ones talked about here are fitday and myfitnesspal. I use one called cron-o-meter).

The way in which you've calculated your calories is different from the way I've calculated mine. I've calculated based on my current weight and thus current maintenance requirements, which I'll recalculate as I lose weight. I also don't have exact figures of how much to burn (it's just not the system I found, but as I understand it most systems for calculating how many calories you burn are pretty inaccurate). This is the kind of system I used: Nutrition (this isn't the specific website I used, but it's the same idea). There's a risk in eating at your goal in that it might slow down your metabolism- you want to be able to eat as many calories as you can while still losing the weight.

Keep at it- don't look to the short term of weight loss (and this is the short term), particularly not losing/ gaining after a binge. Look to forming healthy eating and exercise patterns over the long term, doing what you can to stick to your plans hour by hour, day by day, and the rest should take care of itself.

Would it help you to set up a diary in the appropriate section? I really enjoy the encouragement I get from other people and the accountability it gives me. (Not only do I record every morsel of my food in the calorie calculator- which I'd say is essential when you're starting out- but I record it all here. Do I really want the people on here, some of whom have started to become friends in a strange internet-y way, to see that I've eaten that? Generally not, and it helps give me the willpower to not have it, or to find an alternative)

If you're interested in Weight Watchers, check out caffeinehigh's diary. She's lost an incredible amount of weight on it (and takes gorgeous pictures of her food). http://weight-loss.fitness.com/weight-loss-diary/48011-my-weight-loss-diary.html
 
Thank you for all your advice. I look at the nutrition labels on pretty much everything I eat and i just enter that on the website. to my dismay though I recently learned that the calories counted on the gym machines are inaccurate and so now I don't really know how many calories I've been burning, if any! I know everyone that is trying to lose weight says this at some point but i feel like I've failed too many times for it to work, but I know i can do it at the same time. I'll definitely look into weight watchers and hopefully that can get me on track with losing weight again because October will be here before you know it!
 
Don't worry too much about a "timeline", it's more important to make this sustainable (and for you to lose weight in a way that doesn't jeapordise your health). If you've got an event you want to lose weight for, surely anyone who's worth knowing would be happier with "I've developed healthy lifestyle habits, have become fitter, and have lost (healthy amount of weight)" than "I've starved myself, made myself sick, but look, I'm really thin!" (I know it's likely not that simple, but I'm sure you see what I'm saying).

You will have been burning some calories, it's just hard to know how many. Apparently (outside of expensive medical equipment and specialist appointments) the most accurate way is with a heartrate monitor, but even that's not perfect. I personally don't worry about it- I calculate my calorie allowance with the Harris Benedict formula, which just gives you some more calories every day to make up for the exercise you're doing (in my case it gives me about an extra 400 calories for my moderate exercise as compared to what it would give me if I were sedentary). Here's the formula:

1. If you are sedentary (little or no exercise) : Calorie-Calculation = BMR x 1.2
2. If you are lightly active (light exercise/sports 1-3 days/week) : Calorie-Calculation = BMR x 1.375
3. If you are moderatetely active (moderate exercise/sports 3-5 days/week) : Calorie-Calculation = BMR x 1.55
4. If you are very active (hard exercise/sports 6-7 days a week) : Calorie-Calculation = BMR x 1.725
5. If you are extra active (very hard exercise/sports & physical job or 2x training) : Calorie-Calculation = BMR x 1.9
Click to expand...

I'm a reformed failed dieter. I'm 25, and I've been on several different diets since I was 15 in attempts to lose weight. Nothing worked until now. My mum's been on diets since I was born, and nothing's worked until she started consciously eating lower calorie diets (she's done so many types of diets I can't even tell you)- she's apparently gone down from a size 22 to a size 16 (I haven't seen her in over a year because she's in Australia- and those sizes are different from the ones in America, that's not quite as big as you think it is).

Just keep at it (or join Weight Watchers, I personally feel it's not needed but it works very well for some people). I'd seriously recommend starting up a diary for support and ideas (and/ or critique/ suggestions for improvement). Giving up is the only guaranteed way to fail.
 
Yeah I completely understand and I in no way want to starve myself for a deadline. I do however, want to look and feel better since I have been overweight for so long. I usually wouldn't care about how many calories I've burned, but i was always lead to believe that you had to keep track to lose weight. Well I'll see how things go with weight watchers and if it doesn't work out, I'll just continue to exercise and eat better and eventually look the way I want to.
 
Hi Laney, welcome

I think the one thing you've probably done wrong is to take any notice of how many calories you are burning for your exercise. As pointed out its a wild guess. So just totally forget about doing that.

Just do your exercise at least 4 times a week, and increase it or reduce it according to your fitness needs, busyness and general health and well being. Eat the appropriate amount of calories as per what the programs tell you. (I really don't think there is anything different between the way amy and you have done it. They all work with age, height and current weight to get your BMR and which is then multiplied by a factor for your activity level. This gives you your maintenance weight.

After you've got that number, you take off about 500 calories and that's how many calories you should eat a day. You can take off more but don't go below 1200.

That's only the start of what you have to do. While its true in one sense that it doesn't matter how you get your calories, in the bigger picture its important to eat the right sort of foods - high nutrition and all your macros in roughly the right proportions - most good carbs, less proteins, less again fat. 50%, 30%, 20% is a good ratio but i know its too tedious to work that out and all sorts of methods alter those numbers a bit and it doesn't really matter hugely if its slightly different. In the bigger picture also its good to eat generally low calorie foods because you don't want to find yourself still hungry at hte end of a meal. A big low cal meal will make you feel full and happy. A small high cal meal will leave you feeling hungry.

Compare this

1/4 of a litre of icecream is about equivalent to what i have in a meal. I"d say most of my meals are about 500 calories. So i can eat either 1/4 litre of icecream or

i could eat a piece of grilled atlantic salmon, lots of vegetables cooked with no fat and probably something else as well.

Or my breakfast of 1/2 cup of rolled oats with 1 cup full cream milk, 1 piece of fruit on it and then 1 cup expresso with 1/2 cup of full cream milk. That basically what i have eaten for breakfast almost every day on my diet so far.

These latter two meals are actually very satisfying and keep me going for hours. While if i ate 1/4 litre of icecream, i would have to keep eating till it was all gone. And then of course i wouldn't want to eat any dinner because I was too full.

Do you get the picture. If you want to lose weight, fill up on good food and then you won't be hungry and won't need to eat junk food. If you want to eat any sort of sweets and think you can do it moderately, do it when you've eaten a good meal already because then you should be satisfied with only a small amount.

For snacks between meals, try to limit it to fruit. Or a cup of milk or something like that. Avoid strong flavoured foods. They are too moreish.

Oops i've gone on a bit again.

Start a weight loss diary and log all your foods and the quantities daily.

Everyone will support you.
 
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