Recently Mrs. J. overheard a conversation at the gym between a patron and a “fitness consultant”.
The patron was going on about how diligently he exercised and dieted, but couldn’t manage to lose any weight. Then he mentioned his nightly bowl of ice cream - but insisted that shouldn’t matter since he otherwise faithfully adhered to a low-calorie diet.
Hmm…
I aims to please! 
For the record I’m in sort of the opposite boat as you - I am capable of losing weight (once dieted/exercised and lost 100lbs, then slacked off and gained 150, now have got back on the wagon and lost 35 of that so far) but when I do lose weight there are no physical benefits whatsoever. I don’t get better skin, don’t get better wind, don’t feel better, don’t get stronger, don’t nothing. Literally the only effect when I lost that 100lbs was that my beltline shrunk slightly (but not enough to make me not look fat) and my sleeves got several inches longer due to my shoulders shrinking. Oh and I got un-diagnosed with diabetes, my doctor liked that part. (For as long as it lasted, anyway.) But yeah - aside from the medical business, no payoffs whatsoever. It’s kind of a ripoff.
(I can’t really speak to my prodigious girth’s ability to repel women - I never meet anyone so they don’t get the chance to flee. I have a theory that they would if they got the chance, though.)
Never counted a calorie in my life. (I do eat less, when not being a slothful blob; I just don’t measure it.)
How are you meeting these guys? Online dating or in person? Are you talking between initial contact & first date? Are you sharing additional pictures during this time? Be honest, are they good pictures or are they car selfies? Are they new pictures with your better skin? I looked at some pictures of other people of similar height/weight. I wouldn’t not (double negative, I know) date someone of similar proportions if other things made her desirable. IOW, is there something else between initial contact & first date that’s making them run?
Sorry for being blunt, but do you believe losing and gaining 100s of pounds is the sign of somebody serious about changing their weight? If I said I quit a pack per day smoking habit but then shot back up to 2 packs a day and now I am down to a pack and a half per day, would you take me seriously if I then claimed: “I am quitting smoking”?
I am actually forever quitting smoking. I started up again last August. Smoked about a pack over the course of a week. The last time I smoked before that was about a year earlier. Even if I hadn’t touched a cigarette in 10 years, the really honest thing for me to say is I am forever quitting smoking. I misspoke in my prior post and those kinds of cognitions might fuck me over some day.
Do you drink soda pop? That stuff can pack the calories on.
Yeah. I’m not eating a nightly bowl of ice cream. If I were, I’d know what the issue was.
No. I don’t. My beverage of choice is flavored seltzer, at zero calories.
Similarly, post-gastritis (or, at least, post what I think was gastritis), I don’t eat ice cream, cake, pizza, cheese, or french fries (ugh!). Really, anything greasy or heavy is out, as is anything that’s got a ton of sugar in it.
Maybe I’m eating mass quantities of tofu. Or maybe I’m having fatty fish more often than I realize. Or I’m eating more at night, when I should be sleeping, in ways I don’t see. But it’s not going to be something obvious, like soda.
Speaking of dietary hazards:
This is a package of salad and dressing. It’s advertised as having 300 grams, and 90 calories per gram.
The problem with this: 100 grams of that are french dressing. French dressing typically has upwards of 400 calories per 100 grams all on its own. So it’s just straight-up lying to me, and I have no way of telling how many calories are actually in there. Because of this, I’ve been drastically overeating on my lunch break, despite carefully checking how many calories I consume. So fuck you, Lidl, and fuck all this shit. Even McDonalds is honest about its fucking calorie counts in its salad dressing, you shitbags.
That’s absolutely possible. People lose weight allthetime without keeping track of numbers.That’s not a miracle.
The miracle is to NOT lose weight if you do track the numbers. Technically, you have to track calories going in versus going out, but just tracking the calories going in is almost always sufficient. And anything below 1500 is almost always sufficient to drop several pounds a month — for a normally active person.
Take it down to 1200 or 1300 and throw in some light exercise, and it would ALMOST be a miracle not to drop a pound in 10 days. And two or three pounds is more likely,
A digital scale will let you follow the process on a daily basis, if being obsessive is appealing.
This line amuses me. It’s a lot more hassle to keep track of every calorie you consume than to step on the scale once or twice daily.
OK. So, you guys have inspired me to go back to logging my eating and keeping track of my calories. Let’s see if that helps. I’d expect it to, especially given that I’m now eating a lot more low-calorie stuff, and less of it.
If there’s no change in the next month, I might ask my doctor about reversible weight loss surgery. (The irreversible kind probably isn’t a great idea for me, for a few reasons.) I realize I wouldn’t lose much weight with it, since I’m starting at a low BMI for surgery to begin with. A weight loss balloon, for example, would probably give me only about an 11 pound loss, according to Bariatric Surgery Source.
Everyone tells me that losing 11 pounds should be trivial, but it doesn’t seem like that for me. And if I don’t see any change on the scale in the next four weeks, I don’t know what else to do.
For the record, I did not lose and regain the 100lbs in the span of a day. I dropped the 100 over the course of, oh, a year and a half or so, kept if off for another two years, then experienced unpleasant life changes that twenty years ago I would say made me depressed (nowadays you can’t say that without a diagnosis) and that caused me to fall back into terrible habits.
(Lately I’ve decided that being not-officially-depressed ain’t a good enough reason to put up with my doctor telling me it’s nigh-impossible to lose weight without learning to cook, which is bullshit, so this latest decrease is basically a pair of upraised middle fingers.)
Best of luck. Take your inspiration where you find it. I hope that I (and others) didn’t come off as “mansplaining.”
When you’re troubleshooting a problem, it makes sense to try the obvious stuff first. And, of course, it’s easy for someone having a problem–especially a weighty one (heh!)–to miss something that an observer would spot quickly. So it makes sense that you and others would try asking about the common pitfalls, if only to rule those possibilities out. Thanks for your suggestions.
I’m sorry to hear that! If you’re considering surgery, I’d recommend against the gastric balloon. I’ve had it myself, 15 years ago, and lost 3 pounds. Yes, 3. And I paid 1500 USD. Recent research also proves that a balloon is a seductive, but bad idea.
Have you considered liposuction or coolsculpting? It gets a 80 % “worth it” rating on realself.
There is also a theory, ( too late at night here to google it) that a certain amount of fat cells act like an organ that tries to keep itself in place. Removing fat cells, in that way, might trigger a change in your metabolism.
Google.nl has a curfew?
I think people’s brains have curfews. Mine certainly does. 
Thanks for the warning about the gastric balloon. I had no idea outcomes were so disappointing.
From what I understand, cool sculpting is for people who’ve already gotten to their ideal weight but have areas of flab that won’t budge. I want to get to my ideal weight, not just change the distribution of my few remaining bits of flab.
I don’t know if liposuction is for me, either. People regain the weight within a year, and that weight ends up in weird places on the body. https://hubpages.com/health/The-Recently-Discovered-Long-Term-Effects-of-Liposuction
The latest edition of Woman’s World (available at finer supermarket checkout registers) has the answer on why people gain weight - it’s them GMOs. Yes, it isn’t eating an entire can of Pringle’s* at one sitting, it’s the evil GMOs that pack on the lard. Apparently the DNA goes right to your hips and butt.
The article quotes a Yale M.D. (who didn’t actually graduate from Yale Med School and isn’t affiliated with it, but whatever). And it’s not safe to eat fruits and vegetables, or just any fruits and vegetables. Some are chock full of nasty lectins which play havoc with your intestinal mucosa.
Best to just curl up in a corner with a bottle of preferred supplement pills.
*according to the Internet, a can of Pringle’s Original has 900 calories and nearly all of the daily fat allowance for women.