Hi - I lost about 50 pounds in 12 months and I put this substantially down to walking to work and back, seven miles or so round trip burning off 400-500 calories. That’s over a days worth of food. Obviously I dieted as well but 10 pounds - you could walk that off without substantially changing your diet.
Agreed though - the summer heat may be a problem but dealable with and listening to music or a talking book turns it into entertainment rather than a struggle.
I have lost 12 pounds since March 1st.
Extremely low fat diet, less than 10 grams a day but usually keep it under 5 grams.
I drink a gallon of water every day and walk at least 3 miles a day but usually 5 or 6.
Works really good fer me. Started at 250 trying to get down to 220.
On the plus side (ha), you only want to lose 10 pounds and consider that your “ideal weight”, and also mention that you gained this 10 pounds over the winter, which implies that you were at this ideal weight not long ago. It’s much easier to get back into the kind of shape you used to be in than it is to get into “the best shape of one’s life”, and the more recently you were in that shape, the easier.
Your six-month timeline, generally good eating habits and relatively modest fat loss goal are also good indicators for your success. (Though I would say “low meat consumption” is not necessarily a plus, unless you mean “compared to the average American who eats 1 lb. of red meat or more a day”).
Your best long term solution is to change your mindset regarding one of these statements of yours from the OP:
I’ve never been a dieter – I feel it’s better to eat your fill of good, healthful food than to starve yourself or count calories.
Yes, yes, yes, and no! You are right that you should not starve yourself. You are also right that you should “eat your fill” of good, healthful food. The question is, what do you define as “your fill”? Pleasantly stuffed, or just “not hungry”? The best habits will have you eating smallish portions (relative to what’s typically given in the USA) 4-5 times a day, to the point where you’re not hungry but without that “full feeling”. You should not feel sleepy after a meal, and you should feel hungry again in 3-4 hours.
Also, for least for a period of a month or two, you should track your food and tabulate (yes, count) your calories. You gain weight by eating more food than you need to maintain your present weight. You lose weight by eating less and burning more calories. You stabilize/stay even by eating a maintenance level of calories. How will you know if you’re over or under if you don’t do the math? You don’t need to do this forever, but you do need to develop an intuition for approximately how “expensive” different foods are.
This really isn’t a big burden. Most people’s diet boils down to having the same menu options in different combinations, especially during the work week.
-I really, REALLY hate exercise. I hate getting up early, since I don’t sleep well anyway. I also resent giving up precious evenings to do something boring, painful, and sweaty.
The good news is, you can lose weight without increasing your exercise level too much. It’ll come off slower, and regular exercise is good for you in other ways, but if you count calories, that’ll do the bulk of the work.
On the other hand, you seem to think of exercise as a chore. I won’t try to convince you otherwise, about how once you get “into”, say, running, you get a high afterwards that makes it something you look forward to (though that is true). I will suggest instead to make it a non-optional part of your daily routine, something you do every morning (not evening – get it out of the way).
Make it a rule, for example, that you cannot take a shower, EVER, without doing as many consecutive good-form push-ups as you can manage without collapsing, followed by a pause of a couple of minutes, then doing as many crunches as you can without spasming. Your morning routine gets extended by 10 minutes or so at most: instead of brushing your teeth, undressing and hopping in the shower, first you do the push-ups, then you undress, then you do nekkid crunches, THEN you brush your teeth, THEN you hop in the shower. You can give yourself a break on weekends and just do this Mon-Fri, or on alternate days, but at least 4 times a week.
Keep track of how many your do to make sure you’re not coasting. You should be gradually doing more and more push-ups and crunches. You might start out only able to do 5 or 10 push-ups and 10-15 crunches. Give it 4 weeks and you’ll be doing 25 push-ups. It really does become easier, it doesn’t take long, you get a nice feeling of accomplishment watching the numbers go up.
That works for my wife; she’s done that every year for the last 3-4 years.
As you can infer from that statement, she goes off Atkins every year, gains it back, lather, rinse, repeat, etc. It’s Yo-Yo City. For some reason she’s OK with that.
I know of 10-12 people who have “done” Atkins, and not one of them has kept off the weight they lost, even though in most cases the loss was dramatic and relatively quick. Oh sure, there’s a “maintenance phase” as part of the plan, but in my observation, they all just go back to their former eating habits sooner or later.
The key to long-term weight loss isn’t in transforming what you eat but how much. As one fat loss guide I relied upon read, food is one of life’s great pleasures, and abstinence from what you love is not wise and counterproductive.
Totally agree about the food thing, robardin. I don’t believe in dieting. I try to eat healthy but feel there is a time and place for everything in moderation. I personally use a free online calorie counter so I can log what I eat every day. This helps me keep my eating in check but also helps me to “budget” calories on those days when I really want pizza for dinner or if I’m going to a birthday party and want a piece of cake. If anyone is interested in the site, let me know.
None of those alternate activities sound fun to me either to tell you the truth! But have you considered horseback riding? golf? co-ed baseball? tae kwon do? boxing? kayaking? rock wall climbing? roller skating? tennis? There’s got to be something interesting to you! Good luck, I despise exercise too, but love riding my horse - that is the only exercise I get and it seems to do the trick.
Well, I scouted out a different route to work today along some residential roads. I think summer will still be a problem, in that I’ll have to drive just to keep from shriveling up like a little raisin. But I do enjoy biking and I may have found a way to do it safely without taking too much time out of the day. I’m going to drive the new route for a couple of days to get the feel of traffic that time of day, and if seems safe, then biking to work, here I come! (Drivers here are very inconsiderate to bikers, and I’d rather not get run over if at all possible)
Don’t have a dog, but I do have a “Come with Me Kitty” harness. I could try taking the cat for a drag every day. 
Several people commented on keeping the mind occupied with music, TV, or whatever, and I think the concept is starting to sink in. I gave it some thought last night, and it’s true that whenever I do try any exercise, the whole time I’m thinking “I hate this. But it’s good for me so I have to. This is boring. How much longer till I’m done? I’m tired. Whine whine whine.” Knocking out that distraction would be, if not motivational, at least not demotivational.
robardin–Thanks for the extremely thoughtful reply! I understand your point about food. I do typically eat just until I’m satisfied and am ready for meals at regular times. However, it’s true I do sometimes stuff myself on a particularly delicious dinner and I often eat late. Since I eat mostly unprocessed foods, lots of beans, grains, fresh veggies, etc., I guess I never thought that eating a lot would be a problem. It’s worked for me so far, and it’s all good for you, right?
With the calorie counting, you make a fair point about it being simple math–how do you know if you’re burning enough calories if you don’t know what you’re taking in? Similar to the pedometer, I like how quantifiable that is, and if it’s only a month I think I can handle that. But how difficult would it be to put in my typical (atypical?) meals? I don’t do the “chicken leg and potato” type dinners. One of my favorite meals is a garbanzo bean salad with veggies and a lemon/herb dressing. How the heck do you calculate that?
yellowval–please do share the site you use!
My meat comment was just to indicate that I think my meals are pretty well-balanced. I eat very little red meat, and when I do eat meat it’s usually chicken or turkey. Rarely is meat the main course–I tend to use meat more as flavoring or “bonus” ingredient rather than the meat/veggie/starch meals I was brought up on.
However, I’m leery about the advice to “just make exercise a habit.” That’s my whole problem, you know? I’ve tried to make it a habit, set very modest goals, but then I wake up late, or I don’t feel like it, or I “deserve” a day off, and then that’s the end of that. I think I need some major help in this area, at least through the crucial habit-building period, or until I learn to appreciate the benefits. Curves seems like they have an interesting approach to fitness–does anyone have any experience with them? Maybe 6 months with a club and I’d be ready to strike out on my own?
Thanks so much to everyone–I really appreciate all the help!
Sorry, samm, missed your post:
You’d really think that there would be something I like, wouldn’t you? And yet here I am, the big ol’ activity hater. I think part of the problem is that I’m bad at physical things–I’m uncoordinated, inexperienced, and klutzy–and because I’m bad at this stuff I don’t like it. But it’s also that I haven’t found anything that can keep my interest long-term. I’ll try something, do it for a couple months, then get bored and quit.
The site I use is www.my-calorie-counter.com. You can not only enter what you eat every day, but also put in the activities you do. You can even do custom entries if there are recipes or meals you eat often, or foods that they don’t have listed. There are some great tools, too. If you’re wondering about how many calories you should be eating, they have a BMR calculator so you can enter in your weight, height, age, gender, and level of activity and it will tell you how many calories you would need to stay at your current weight. The general rule if you’re going to cut calories is to then subtract ~500 and eat that many calories to lose a pound a week. So, for instance, when I enter in my info and activity level, it tells me I’d need to eat over 2700 calories to stay at my current weight. I try to eat 2000 or fewer. It’s not recommended for women to eat under 1200 calories a day.
I’ve never been very overweight but I’ve always struggled with chubbiness and I weigh less now at 41 than I did when I started high school.
I do exercise a lot but I find diet makes the biggest difference in my weight. I play a sport with a weight class and every year I find myself 6-8 pounds over. My method is to eat 1/3 to 1/2 pound of vegetables before lunch and dinner and then eat my lean protein, not worrying too much about the amount. I don’t worry too much about how the vegetables are cooked, as long as they’re not slathered with cheese. I generally cut out starches, they’re mostly just filler calories anyway and I eat fruit for sweets. (sounds like you’re doing a lot of this anyway)
The other component is portion control, like others have mentioned. I often find that I’m satisfied with half of what I would normally order. Plus, dont’ be afraid of being hungry between meals. I firmly believe that there is no such thing as a diet that you never feel hungry on. If you’re losing weight, you’re going to be hungry. Don’t take it to extremems and startve yourself or anything; just realize being a little hungry between meals is a good thing and means you’re eating an appropriate amount.
As far as the exercise thing, I was fairly non athletic when I was younger. Then I got into weight lifting and what kept me motivated was reading about it and researching new things to try. Same thing when I started running; I’d read about new workouts. Now I row which keeps me honest as I’m on a team and have to show up. Anyway, if something seems remotely interesting to you, do some research and maybe you’ll get excited about it.
Addressing some points you raised, Fuffle:
-Involve your SO. Do something fun and physically active together. Physically active does not have to mean mountain climbing, it’s just anything where you’re moving around and having a good time. Sex would be a great example. It’s as vigorous as you like, low impact, fun and you won’t have any problems getting him interested!
-I’m sure that your friends can come up with all kinds of excuses for why you don’t need to exercise and why they don’t want to join in. For the record, “overweight” does not necessarily imply “out of shape” and “thin” doesn’t mean “healthy”. The point is not to focus on losing X pounds but to get moving, break a healthy sweat and enjoy knowing that you are getting healthier.
-There’s no way to force yourself to enjoy exercise; you have to try doing a bunch of stuff and you will find things that you get into. Maybe you’ll try a gym for a month and it will suddenly click for you, or you’ll be swimming one day and realize that you’ve got a “swimmer’s high”. Just try different things - you will discover what you enjoy and at some point along the way you’ll realize that all those things you tried for a week at a time over the last three months means that you have been exercising for three months. Jack Lalanne (still a little dynamo in his 90s) is a big proponent of changing your routine every couple of weeks so you don’t get bored - the best exercise is the kind that you actually do.
-It sounds like you eat pretty well. Personally I am not a big fan of “name brand” diets or anything that involves lots of bookkeeping or bizarre changes to what you eat. The fact that some author met a very healthy Eskimo doesn’t mean that we should all suddenly go onto the blubber & blueberry diet. If you’ve got any doubts talk to someone who is qualified to discuss it - your doctor for instance.
OK, I’ll bite (mainly because it made me snort out loud in the office). Did you make this up, or was there really ever such a book? 'Cause I fully believe therecould be a B&B Eskimo Diet, which in some sense means there should be such a diet… 
I don’t know about a book, but there is much talk about the traditional diet of the Inuit, Cree and Dogrib peoples, and how their modern diet brings on problems with diabetes, obesity, heart trouble and cancer. I found this article in the first 10 pages of a Google search, and it seems to reinforce something that I heard on the CBC’s World at Six news program in the last couple of weeks. Much has been made of the similarity between a traditional hunter’s diet and the Atkins diet, though I haven’t heard much talk about the incredibly high level of physical activity involved in the traditional way of life.
I’ve lost ~70lb through a combination of portion control, high-calorie snack avoidance, and lots of walking. It started as a five-minute walk and grew from there once I realized what a mountain I had to climb.
Seconded. I have used this site since last July and it has made a WORLD of difference in my diet.
Think of your calorie counting in the same way you approach financial budgeting. You DO budget your money, right? Well do the same thing with your calories.
I am eating +/-1700 a day (48 y/o female with a fairly vigorous 6 day work out schedule), and it’s really been easy and painfree.
Oh and you might end up finding out a few surprises about food you thought was good for you or misconceptions you had about yourself.
I would have told you last June I don’t have a sweet tooth because I rarely eat candy or chocolate. But boy I do like my food sweet. That was a big eye opener ::hugs Splenda tightly::
I was being a little facetious although I had a friend present this basic line of reasoning to me. He went on a high protein/high fat/not much else diet for a while and lost a bunch of weight. I was skeptical and he said something like “Eskimos eat like this” (I’ve never heard of Eskimos eating lots of chicken, pork and cheese but maybe that’s just me. And Eskimos are not generally regarded as models of sveltness. And they’ve got a few thousand years of adaptation to a different climate than most of us live in). Anyhow he dropped some weight and within a few months put it all back on. I’ve seen many friends try and fail with a variety of what seem like to me goofy diet ideas and they all came out of some very quackish-sounding book or therapist - you have to eat some incredibly limited range of foods, or nothing but avocados on Thursdays, that kind of thing. One of my friends, an incredibly intelligent guy, was “tested” by his accupuncturist (using applied kinesiology, look it up if you must) who pronounced him “allergic” to vitamin C. And “radiation”. And proscribed an eating plan based on this.
I’m not an authority by any means but it kinda bothers me when I see my friends ignoring decades of research and mountains of evidence on what constitutes a generally healthy diet in favor of the Secret Magic Food That The Man Doesn’t Want You To Know About!!!
I understand the thought process to some extent - if you ask your doctor what you should be eating and he says “Cut down on pizza and fast food and eat more salads, and while you’re at it quit smoking and take a walk every day” it’s not glamorous or exciting but I think it’s what most people are expecting to hear, consciously or otherwise. But they’re really hoping that their doctor will tell them about some amazing new study that says that if they just eat this one special thing then everything else will take care of itself. It’d be so much easier and they wouldn’t have to feel like they are depriving themselves of anything. And that, I think, is why diet plans promising some astounding new breakthrough are so popular (until they repeatedly fail to work).
Maybe this makes me kinda stodgy. I just feel that there’s a pretty clear consensus as to how we can stay healthy - sure the details will vary but the basic ideas are very consistent. I made what are in the grand scheme of things relatively minor changes to my life a few years ago and the results have been great and easy to maintain.
OK, that was kind of the economy size tangent But there’s your answer.
So you’re saying there’s a new secret miracle diet that’s guaranteed to work? Why didn’t you say that in the first place? Sheesh!
Five pounds of raw cabbage each day. The pounds will drop off. So will all of your friends.
I have a very weird relationship with exercise - for the most part, the only activity I really, really enjoy isn’t aerobic and is horrible for weight loss and is often associated with eating disorders.
So that’s really no good. For me, on the exercise front, what has worked is goal-oriented exercise. A friend (or some friends) and I sign up (and pay) for a big event months in advance. The only way to possibly complete the event and not be horribly miserable is to actually train for it - so we have to get together at least once a week and exercise, and we have to exercise on our own in the middle of the week.
There is something called El Tour de Tucson this November for which you’ll have to bike 109 miles. 109 miles isn’t that hard - if you’ve built up to it.
Ballet? Regurgitating stuff?