OK, I’ll stop.
You’re a real beast on Fitocracy, Angel Of The Lord 
When I quit smoking I gained a little weight, and then a little more, and a little more. My doctor said he’d gladly trade a little weight for quitting smoking. The end result: I had gained 100 pounds. My goal is to lose all that weight which should take about 13 months at a healthy rate (using the weight loss tools I’ve found online).
Going to my first weight watchers meeting tonight in.
Good luck to everyone else in their efforts this year!
Can I add my two cents? The other thing I hear is the impression that all of us fatties are eating potato chips by the handful. Even otherwise sensible people think this, and that we never eat fruit.
What i had to eat today: breakfast was an English muffin, with yogurt butter, and a tall glass of 2% milk, with my vitamins and allergy pills.
Lunch was a subway sandwich, 6", with a 24 oz bottle of water and apple chips
Afternoon snack: I bought some cantaloupe and ate about half of it - the rest is for tomorrow
The thing is, some of that is healthy and some, not so much. And I’m not always this healthy, granted - sometimes I’ll eat a cookie or two, or something equally unhealthy. But I don’t just shovel things in. I never eat potato chips - can’t stand them - and almost never drink soda.
I just like the good life, is all, so I eat rich foods. Not a lot of them, but you don’t really need a lot do you? And I have a sedentary lifestyle. I just need to change my lifestyle.
Anyway off my high horse, but I wanted to bitch about that for a long time.
The other side of that is that we all just sit around all day long.
From my experience, exercising a lot does not necessarily lead to weight loss. I know that for some people, a half hour walk/day is all they need. I know that for me, exercise doesn’t do anything (it does help my mental state. But nothing as far as pounds or inches or fat percentage).
The only thing that does work for me is very strict calorie monitoring and restriction. So, that’s what I’m starting again.
Congratulations for joining WW. I’ve lost 76 lbs. and change since I joined about a year ago. I’ve got a ways to go yet since all the easy weight is off and I’ve got to work for what I do lose. (Of course, the holiday goodies didn’t help much.) But I know what I need to do, and I’m doing it.
I want to lose a pound. I used to weigh 154 but then I shot up to 159. Now I’m back down to 156. I’ll be happy with 155 by Christmas.
Milk is sneaky. I don’t know what you count as tall, but there’s potentially 300 calories in there. It’s made to fatten up babies, after all. Switch to skim or water and you’ll have a 15% cushion on your daily intake to fill in however you please.
That seems to be where I’m at too. Exercising my butt off to no avail.
But like you it definitely helps my mood, so I’m going to stick with it. Well I HAVE stuck with it!
I also am pretty cool about the calorie/carb counting since I’ve now got this great exercise foundation. It’s like…freeing to think that if I just start eating better I should have no problems with calories in/calories out.
Zyanthia I quit smoking earlier this year and before I quit I had lost, oh, 10 lbs. I have gained 20 lbs since then. Not cool!
Good luck and congrats to everyone on Weight Watchers. I have a friend who just lost 30 lbs using it and looks great!
I eat everything that moves slower than I do, but I still lost 30 pounds. Someone who sees me chowing down on a Big Mac doesn’t see the three hours of walking I did that day to make up for it. That I would say is the biggest change I’ve made - I’m getting a much better sense of eating and consequences. If I want to lie around all day in bed, fine, but that day isn’t going to be a McDonald’s day, then.
This is not directly addressing what you said, but that’s true in an odd way. The calories that you burn during exercise won’t help you lose much weight. But the calories that you burn during rest will. It’s just that a well-exercised person will burn those rest calories faster than a sedentary person. And a good mix of aerobic and strength will get you the best results for that.
This is week 6 for me of Weight Watchers online. Weeks 1-4 I lost 9 pounds, but then shot back up last week. (Can’t tell if it’s scale error or what - I weigh in at the same time on Thursday mornings and try to keep all the variables alike, so I dunno.) I’m sick now so it’s harder. Mostly I’ve learned how much Id been in the habit of snacking in the office - keeping 1 point rice cakes around for that urge has I think been a real help.
I keep telling myself that the more weight I lose the less my wedding dress alterations are going to cost.
Good for you for being so consistent with your workouts, ZJJ. You can be really proud of yourself for that, and for how much good you are doing for yourself and your body with these workouts.
It’s still a mystery, why different bodies respond so very differently to external factors like food and exercise. There’s still more research to be done. A recent article in the NYTImes Well section explored just how difficult it is to lose weight, but don’t look it up if you are easily discouraged.
Just take one day at a time.
I’m currently tracking calories using a simple spreadsheet on Google docs (accessible anywhere via the web). I may have to try myfitnesspal.
The thing that annoys me about most calorie tracking software is the total inability to make a simple entry like “lunch, 580 calories.” Sometimes I know exactly what I’ve eaten (or very close) and I don’t want spend time trying to look up entries for each freakin’ piece of food.
Fantastic!
I totally let it go over the holiday - but that was planned. My Dad is just an amazing chef, and I wanted to eat, dang it!
But I’m back on the bandwagon now, and eager to get home tonight and see if I’m losing.
For Zipper, and any others who are having trouble finding the right combination of exercise and food I can’t recommend Ketone testing strips enough. It is so great to get that imemdiate feedback at the end of each day “I was burning fat today” or “I was not buring fat today.” It’s so much easier to make connections and tweak your plan when you’re not waiting a week or more to find out if what you’ve done is working.
For females, it’s even harder because some days we’re burning fat but retaining water so the weight just doesn’t tell the story. For someone like me, who can go too far in the wrong direction, it also gives feedback on how high the ketone levels are, and whether I am straying into the starvation zone. Mind you, it’s not an exact science - a fatty meal or a strong workout right before testing will skew the results - but I’ve found it enormously useful.
My goal is to keep it right around 1-2 pounds per week. I don’t want it to come off too fast.
ZipperJJ, are you me? I feel the exact same way (and my story is very similar) and low carb is great for me, too. I’m resuming after a vacation-and-holiday break I shouldn’t probably have taken, and I find that I actually rather missed it. I totally get the wanting to feel normal and just not have to worry about it, but on the bright side I appreciate that this is finally a diet I don’t feel totally drained doing.
I know it’s hard talking weight loss with people who aren’t used to low carb because it just seems so counterintuitive (I used to find it laughable, too, but someone from the SDMB set me straight). I found that the Reddit keto community has been a great place to hang because people are on board with the program and pragmatically optimistic, without some of the saccharine, love-and-huggzzzzz, soccer mom atmosphere I find on most of the low carb forums.
If you ever want to chat with someone going through a pretty similar deal, shoot me a PM.
I believe that the actual scientific research shows that exercising generally will not cause you to lose weight. It can be a supportive strategy, and there is some evidence that it will help you not gain, but IIRC, when you exercise, you naturally pad out your eating a bit to make up the calories you burn. So without pretty detailed calorie tracking, exercise won’t help you shed pounds. Of course that’s generally speaking.
I know that it’s very easy for me to overeat, regardless of what I’m eating. I eat too many calories of healthy food almost as easily as I eat too many calories of junk food. On my current plan, I proved yesterday that I can stay in my range despite eating at Red Robin and ordering pizza on the same day. But you know what I have to keep out of my house because it’s surefire calorie overload? Grape Nuts. You know, that healthy, low-fat, high-fiber cereal with hardly any added sugar. I can easily sit down and eat 700 calories in 15 minutes if I have access to Grape Nuts.
This is why it’s so helpful to actually track calories. Most of us know junk food is bad, but there are stealth calories that might surprise you in your “healthy” diet. And of course there’s portion size creep. Measuring at least periodically helps nip that in the bud. It’s very very easy to verge into calorie excess for the day with just a couple extra ounces of food here and there.
Of course, paying attention to calories may not be enough for everyone. I say, ZipperJJ, if you’ve found an approach that works for you, stick with it. From what I’ve seen, low carb can be very healthy, and although they haven’t figured out why it’s heart-healthy, it seems to be!
Low-carb worked well for me last year, for a while. I lost 20 pounds in two months, than wham! No more weight loss, though I kept on with my diet and exercise. Then, when it got dark in the fall, a few more carbs crept in my diet, and I went out to exercise a little less, and a few pounds crept back on. For the most part, I kept to healthy carbs, at least.
Now I’m back to being strict, and all the Christmas pounds and bloat dropped off. I turn 60 (eek) this summer, and I want to drop 32 pounds by my birthday. I’m continuing to do low-carb shading into paleo, a mix of cardio and weight training, tai chi and qigong, and will add in some self-hypnosis to reinforce healthy behaviors.
I do way better when I record everything, too, so I carry around a little notebook in which I record food, exercise, meditation, weight, and measurements. It keeps me accountable.
There one thing that it does that I think is very cool. If you have an iPhone (4G, I think?), you can take a picture of a bar code on a package of food, and MFP will show you the nutrition label. You can then change the portion size that you ate and MFP will adjust the calories accordingly.
I’ll join you guys, if you don’t mind. I’ve never participated in one of these thread on SDMB before, but it’s nice to have accountability and advice.
I’m 5’7" and about 165 (haven’t weighed since before Christmas).
ETA: Oh, my goal! About 140 should be good, but I’m more interested in how I look, tbh.
I’m generally very active when I can keep up my motivation but tend to be a cardio queen. I’d rather run for an hour outside then do 30 minutes of weights. So, just before Christmas, I started going to the noon classes my workplace gym offers so I get the weights in. I really enjoyed TRX, and the total body workout classes are killer! They don’t start again until next week, but I have full intentions of going two or three times a week.
I also cycle (road) and spent six month last winter training indoors with one of our local race teams and really enjoyed it. I didn’t go to this past fall class, but am starting up again next week for three months. It’s a Tuesday/Thursday 6 am (ugh) and usually lasts 75 - 90 minutes.
So, exercise isn’t my problem. It’s my eating. I know what to eat, I just don’t have the willpower. Add to that my history of eating disorders and I have to be very careful. I am also in the process of purging all the ‘bad’ foods from my diet, including caffeine, over the next month or so in preparation for IVF in March/April.
I’m here for willpower! I hope to absorb it through the internetz from you guys!
Today, I am starving and tired. But it’s only day two.
Good luck everyone!