The Weight Loss Club Thread (No tomfoolery)

Hello, I'm new to this thread! With the holidays coming up I'm getting seriously too indulgent in junk foods and such. I think posting about my success/failure is exactly what I need to stay strong!

Normally my MIL does the grocery shopping. I went with her the other day, though, which is why I'm drinking sweet, sweet almond milk. And ate plain yogurt with blueberries for breakfast. And am about to eat cantaloupe. Yeah, I need to go to the store with her more often.

Week 40: No excuses, it was a bad weekend, but after reining it in for the rest of the week, I'm only up 0.2kg. Still not quite back down to my previous low, though.

My weekend is starting off bad, I really need to just take a step back and tell myself that I can do this. No pizza, no excuses.

so uh.
i threw cares to the wind and walked 2.4 miles because I didn't want to wait for the bus for an hour.

IT FELT GREAT. yes my knees are throbbing a little, BUT FUCK YOU KNEES, I GOT TO MOVE! :D

also the scale said i magically gained two pounds overnight so that was enough to make me freak out/decide to walk ahaha...hahahha..../sobbing

Wednesday: Walked 3.0 miles
Thursday: Walked 5.5 miles
Today: Walked 3.7 miles

Feeling good. I've been trying to move more.

Welp, adding 3 days a week of using the Arc Trainer that we spent money on and everything seems to be paying off, down 2.6 pounds this week for a total of 80.8 pounds lost. I now weigh 167.2 pounds.

I was actually trying to find things to eat in the house to make up for the huge deficits I was having, but since I purposely don't keep around much extra food (other than stuff like pantry staples, and whatever I've planned on eating for the week,) I ended up with a couple of days of silly net calorie totals.

I'm thinking that maybe I'll get a couple of those tiny 150 calorie thimbles of ice cream I saw at the store next time I go shopping, and see if I can exhibit self control.

Those single-serving cups are awesome. I have a very hard time with ice cream -- hand me a pint and I'm likely to eat the whole thing. I know this, so I don't buy pints more than a couple of times a year when I'm feeling really down. Usually I get the single-serve cups. Those are perfect.

Congrats on the weight loss! I'm trying to get my butt back in gear and actually exercise....

I have a heavy bag in my basement that I finally decided to use. Did a 48 minute workout (3 minutes punching, 1 minute resting) and it was surprisingly intense and fun!

I've been away for a while. Decided, hey, let's go off book see if we can make it work. Turns out: nope YOU MUST TRACK EVERYTHING ALL THE TIME.

I've managed not to gain any weight during this period sticking at 193 which is exactly where I was when I turned away from MFP. I've picked up some jogging BECAUSE I HATE MYSELF - and I have an anxious dog who needs to be run to the ends of the earth to get her to relax.

So that's worked out well. People who run in the morning before work: How in the hell do you do that? I think that'd be my best bet for a steady routine (with winter coming, my bike will be going bye bye soon).

I need like - mental tips because everything in my body says "That run can go fuck itself."

Its tough, but there is a whole bunch of research that says that exercising before breakfast is a great way to accelerate the burning of fat, so if your brain works that way you might think of it as not only the most convenient time to exercise but also the most efficient. I think the science is that your body is already in fat burning mode after sleeping and not eating for 8ish hours so adding the exercise on the end of that process just extends that burn a bit longer.

I find that I usually resent starting exercise in the morning but once I've done it I'm pretty much always glad I did because it gives me a 'pumped!' moodlet for the next few hours at least and I don't have to figure out how to fit a workout in for the rest of the day. If you have any friends/partner who also need to get fit dragging them out too might help your motivation in the long term the more people involved the more peer pressure to keep going. MFP also helps with this of course.

On a personal note I've been doing the first week of maintenance calories (much to the chagrin of the people still weight-lossing I'm sure!) it has actually been quite tricky (In a first world problems way) to adjust to the new level because I had established a fairly firm eating routine for my previous one pound a week loss calorie target.

After a few days of unleashing my pent up snacking urges (on chocolate chip cookies and fatty chip shop chips) I've now had to drag myself out to buy some more snacks on a couple of days for fear of falling hundreds under budget. My saviour so far has been rich tea biscuits; low enough calories per biscuit to allow for micro managing my total but enough in a packet that I can make up a couple of hundred deficit at the end of the day if I need to. NyimaR has just bought a wagon load of diet snack foods from M&S though so I should have a bit more variety this week. I'm still tracking everything on MFP of course otherwise it might be easy to slip completely off the wagon into fast food pizzas and the like.

Results wise, I actually maintained my weight from last week, roughly as planned, but as I'm now going to be measuring body fat % instead I have a brand new stat to look at with a new baseline. I'm using this calculator:

http://www.fat2fitradio.com/tools/mbf/

Which for me produced a result of 12.7% body fat.

Apparently the healthy range for my age and sex is from 8% to 19%, so I'm happy enough with 12.7% which is slightly below the middle of that range. As such I'm not really aiming to push the percentage lower or higher for now. I'm just going to keep an eye on it as I maintain my exercise and diet regimes as I think it'll be more meaningful than a plain weight measurement as I go forward.

Fucksticks. I've gained 3 pounds. Ugh.

For me, it was just all about establishing a habit and sticking to it. I get up, put on exercise clothes, and go out and do it, and then shower ... and the day begins. Listening to audiobooks helps keep me motivated, as I want to keep listening to know what's going to happen.

Don't forget nuts! They're packed with calories and nutrition as well, so if you like them at all, they're a good way to add some additional (and filling) calories.

Due to a sore Achilles tendon I haven't been running for the last ten days (I normally run three times a week). I've also been overly indulgent, in part because I've got the gap where I normally run and have taken to shoveling food in my mouth instead. This is not conducive to maintenance mode. As a result I popped above my maintenance mode weight for the first time. Fortunately I only exceeded it by 0.4 pounds but the trajectory has been on a steady upward course for the past week.

Yesterday I ran and finally earned some extra calories, but chose not to use most of them. This morning I was back to my maintenance weight exactly. This is a relief.

My partner bought Nanaimo bars yesterday, though, and they are sitting in the fridge taunting me. This is a concern for they are my great weakness.

Down to 76 kg. I'm fine with weight loss being pretty slow now, my original goal was 80 kg and I consider anything more than that a bonus. I will say, though, that if I ever get below 72 kg - the least I've weighed in my adult life while not being so skinny I've been sickly-lookin' - I'll, I dunno, start eating more simple carbohydrates or something. 'Cos I don't want to end up looking like I did before my stint in the army. My parents have a picture of me from that time, and I was looking almost anorexic, at 67 kg.

Went to phys. ther. with the intent to walk home again.
NNNNNNNNOPE. Something about the stretches I did today actually did something, so it really hurt to walk at all. It sucks being reminded that I am in fact NOT okay. /sigh

So Jawbone Up is finally being re-released: https://jawbone.com/up

I had been looking at this early on in my weight loss career but I guess they pulled it and had to totally redesign it since it apparently sucked. Anyway it is now back it seems and better than ever. I just wonder if these things are worth the price. My eating habits are fine, now. I use Strava for my biking and it can also be used for hiking/running. So would a device like this give me more of what I need? Is it overkill? I admit that I do see a benefit in tracking all daily activities just to get a good idea of how I am doing - more information is certainly better than less.

Anyway just wondering about thoughts on this and some of the other gadgets out there-and if anyone is using say the Fitbit or that Nike fuel band.

I guess it depends on how much more info you want. I know that I like the more precise calorie counts from exercise that my HRM gives me, and if I had the spare scratch I'd probably get a device. It seems like there are a lot of these devices coming out lately.

Two pounds down this week. And I managed to squeeze into a pair of trousers two sizes smaller than what I had been wearing. I couldn't move in them, but they did do up.

i am going to just do an hour of DDR every night with the jumps turned off
this will end wonderfully

OKAY THANKS DDR THAT'S COOL
this whole time, i thought one kcal = 1/1000th of a calorie (strictly in weight loss terms), so I've been obsessing.
As it turns out, they are the same thing and I have been burning a whole lot of calories.

WHOO.

Week 41: Down 1.0kg this week, so it's finally starting to feel like I'm back on track. Probably won't hit the end-of-year goal I'd planned, but it'll be close.

190 again this week...bah! I know I am getting lazy and I really don't want to rest on what I have lost so far- I really WANT 5 more pounds dammit!

The thing I always point out to people is, "Hey, you know how in old glassware sets, they used to have juice glasses? You ever notice how they hold like, 4 ounces? That's how much juice one should probably limit oneself to in a day."

Down, but less than a pound, so my little experiment with consuming more calories on the days I'm burning more calories sorta backfired, but that's alright, that's why I did it. No more mini ice creams for now!

I like to heavily dilute my juices with water so it's more like I'm having flavored water instead of weak juice.
It's amazingly refreshing.

I used to take juice, dilute it with an equal part of water, and then add a bit of splenda to make up for the dilution. I enjoyed that a lot.

That's a great idea! Although I'm one of those special people who actually absorbs the poisonous chlorine in Splenda and other sucralose so I should probably just try and get used to the lack of sweetness...

Just put a tad of sugar in, if you want. If you control the portion sugar is not the devil. 16 per level teaspoon.

Awesome, thank you!

"I think I need to eat less and you need to eat more."
This makes me mad. It makes me mad because a kid's meal is enough food for one meal. And being told that it isn't enough and thinking so is wrong is making me really really irritated. The calorie content and size of things in a kid's meal at a place, ANY PLACE, is just fine for one adult meal and I just why is this making me so angry

Tomorrow is my official™ weigh-in day on MFP and for the first time in awhile I'm looking to be above my maintenance weight. The combination of a new job with longish commute, no running (only once this month to test out the Achilles tendon) and the ubiquitous presence of convenient snacks has led to predictable results. More positively I'm expecting to get things back on track this week. I'm going to force my partner to walk after dinner with me each night, for one. We'll stay in shape together, dang it.

The idea for the daily walks was inspired by Athryn and her mega-walks and hiking.

Because it feels like it's not really weight-loss related?
It's food related? Portion size related? I don't know why I did it, lemme fix that.

Anyway, good luck with the night walks! C: BE SAFE.

Week 2 of maintenance calories rolls around and I'm still at basically the same weight of 154 lbs, which is good as that's the point of being on maintenance calories.

I did the old body fat % calculation again but I'm becoming a little dubious about it's general level of scientificy-ness as in making the tape measure er... measurements, a huge amount depends on exactly where I judge the 'hip' point to be, how much I breathe in and how much I tug the tape measure tighter. A 0.5 extra inch here or there and the calculation jumps up a couple of percent. That being said I came up with a percentage of 12.2% this morning which is about where it was last week, something that isn't too surprising given that I haven't been attempting to move it up or down.

Diet-wise I've been eating loads of rich tea biscuits still and drinking as many cups of tea as I can to keep the cold weather at bay. Fitness-wise I've been working on my running (a little bit) and my upper body strength (a small amount) and I'm about to transfer to 'level 2' of the so called 'six week six pack' Jillian Michaels training regimen (which I've been spreading over something more like 12 weeks, with gaps for holidays). Given how tough the level 1 part was I'm pretty fricken' trepidatious.

As expected I am 2.2 pounds over my maintenance weight. Not a big (ho ho) deal and I should be able to banish these few extra pounds without much difficulty. My first test comes later this morning at work when the siren song of the apple fritter calls to me (I'm working at a college and the cafeteria has a Tim Horton's, which is too convenient by half).

Bah I gained back some weight, and it's not even Thanksgiving yet. I need to work out more!

*Gets super pumped*

Hell food week commences...UGH!

I would just relax and not worry about Thanksgiving. It's only once a year, so I would just give the day a pass (that's what I'm doing!)