March 2010 Weight Loss Thread

Miscellaneous and Personal Stuff I Must Share
41

Starting weight in Sept.: 270 lbs.
Beginning Medifast in Oct.: 257 lbs.
Current weight: @ 226 lbs.
Goal weight: first 210, then 160 lbs.

It’s the hardest thing I’ve ever done in my life, just to keep trying, keep making the right decision, not give in or give up, and if I do, to get right back in the game. Two big things are making it possible - the first is that I know I have ADD and I can take medicine for it. The second is that I learned I am gluten intolerant, so I no longer eat wheat.

I’m still not eating healthy enough, but I’m definitely eating healthier.

I’ve got my shapely legs and butt back, that’s very nice. Things I hadn’t expected:

  • I have forehead wrinkles now. Didn’t have those before.
  • my hands have gotten slightly crepey and the skin is much looser than it used to be.
  • I can’t sleep in the same position for long periods of time. I’ve lost too much padding, and my joints start to ache.

I’m fitting into clothes I haven’t worn in 10+ years. In five more pounds, I’ll be down to my college weight. Once I’m down to 200, I’ll be in uncharted territory - I haven’t weighed that little in my entire adult life.

I am convinced, though, that sizes have gotten significantly bigger. While I’m thrilled to fit into a size 18 now, I feel like I’m cheating. I can remember wearing a size 18 when I was 20 pounds lighter. One thing that’s new since I was last wearing these sizes, you can find size 18 in normal people stores and in catalogs that don’t offer plus size clothings. That’s very, very nice.

42

YES!!! Well done!!

I haven’t posted to a weight loss thread for six months or more because I’d fallen thoroughly, totally off the wagon.

My stats - I’m 5ft 2" and in October 2008 was 175 lb- borderline obese.
By October 2009 I had gotten to 133 lb - nearish to my target of 125 lb.

Then Halloween struck and so did good food choice exhaustion. That, along with snow, Christmas, snow, Valentines Day and SNOW resulted in a weight gain over the next few months. Three weeks ago I got back on the wagon. (Still snowy though!!)

Feb 22nd I was 147 lb (sob, sob.)
Today I am 141 lb (yea!)

My goal is to be back at my October weight of 133 lb by the end of April, and to be nearer to my goal weight by the end of July. Those last ten pounds are really hard to shift though.

We have an LL Bean outlet shop in our town - one of the only shops in Japan I can get stuff to fit me. Yesterday I found a pair of jeans for ¥1000 (about ten dollars) that I can get into and get done up but are impossible to sit down in (!). I am not sure what size they are in US - maybe a ten. I want to be able to wear them comfortably by the end of April when we go on holiday.

43

Missed this early but yay for you!!

44

I saw the doctor yesterday and was down a whole half pound from 3 weeks ago. Which isn’t a lot, but considering I was up 3+ pounds earlier in the week, I’m happy with it! I’m using their weight as my official one for tracking in Sparkpeople, even though it is several pounds higher than my “starkers, 7 AM” weight at home (i.e. my true weight).

The new scale we bought gives results within about a half pound of the doc’s office, sometimes even spot-on, so I’m comfortable that I’m getting good results at home too. I know it’s best to focus on a single device and watch the change, vs. the “absolute number”, but it’s nice to have the absolute number be accurate also :slight_smile:

I’ll be seeing the doc again in about a month and hopefully I’ll have pared off a couple more pounds by then. Right now my official loss there is 22.5 pounds from last summer. Not enormous, but virtually all of that has been since December 23 so I can’t complain! Also I don’t want to keep losing at that rate - there were unusual circumstances at play and it’s unsustainable.

45

I’m trying not to be discouraged by being about half a pound over the weight I was two weeks ago. My diet has been pretty good and I’ve been continuing to to exercise 5x a week so it’s probably just water weight. Hopefully this means I get to see a fairly big loss soon (more than 1.5 lbs a week is a big loss for me). I want to be down 10 pounds by the time my sister visits me the first week in May and if I don’t continue seeing steady losses of about a pound a week I won’t make it. I think I’m a little paranoid that I’m going to stop losing weight and then I’ll give up and quickly gain back the 16 pounds I’ve lost since November.

In more positive news, I finished week 4 of couch to 5k this week. Running is a lot easier on the treadmill but I’m going to try to do some of it outside too.

46

I wish I could post my weight loss graph for those of you disheartened by non-steady weight loss - it looks like a drunk staggering home from the pub, but I’m down 18 pounds from where I started eight months ago, and I haven’t felt deprived of anything. I was actually thinking about maintenance eating today, which would be about 500 calories more per day than I’m eating now, and it occurred to me that I eat as much as I want now - where would 500 more calories come from?

47

Seconding Cat Whisperer’s remarks. There WILL be ups and downs, no two ways about it. It took me two months to lose my most recent 5 pounds; I was doing everything right, and still it was up, down, up, down, up, down. But just keep soldiering on, and the general trend will continue to be down.

Also, sometimes, the body gets “stuck” at a weight and you need to keep hammering at it to get it to start losing again. It can help to shake things up a bit. Get more fruits/veggies/fiber into your diet. Try a new exercise routine. Make sure you’re getting plenty of water, and cut out those diet sodas. And so on.

Yup, there should be one of those eventually.

A few thoughts here:

It’s good to have goals, but also to “forgive” yourself if you don’t make them. This particular one may be a little ambitious, especially with your recent plateau, so if you don’t get to a particular number, don’t beat yourself up, or worse, quit!

When you get discouraged and start thinking of quitting, think of this: You may be stuck in a rut now, but if you keep on plan, eventually the scale will move again. But if you quit, you’ll DEFINITELY gain back! Which is better?

It’s not all about the scale, but about changing habits and mindsets, and that takes time, and it will also have ups and downs. You just have to tell yourself, “Oh, well, guess I’m on one of those downs, but eventually things will turn around again.”

When I’m stuck, I like to look back at my weight graph and see how far I’ve come. Or try on the fattest pair of pants that I saved. Or get out the tape measure and set it where it was when I started (yes, I took measurements at my fattest) and look at how far out it goes. I’ve lost 10 inches at my navel, 9 inches off my hips, and 8 inches off my waist. Now when I was at my plateau a few weeks ago, why would I want to quit and give that up?

For you, 16 pounds since November is an AWESOME start. Don’t give up!

Scarlett
Start 220 / Now 158 / Goal 150

48

Nuts are very calorie-dense and good for you if you need extra calories.

49

Meant to add: My friend who’s lost 80+ pounds has a great strategy for dealing with gains. Say she lost 3 pounds last week (yay!) but gained a pound this week (boo!). She just combines them and says that she’s lost 2 pounds overall. You can go back as far as needed to calculate a net loss. :smiley:

As long as the TREND is down, you’re golden!

Just thought of another one for dealing with slips where you go on binges or whatever: Our WW leader says, if you stub your toe, do you say to yourself, “OMG, might as well go all the way and throw myself down the stairs?” Or if you break a dish, do you start pulling the rest of them out of the cupboard and throwing them on the floor? Of course not! So why do we do this when we have setbacks while losing weight? Shows just how dumb that sort of thinking is. Just acknowledge the mistake and get back on the wagon.

She also says that you can be off the wagon at 10:00 and back on it at 10:01. Every minute of every day is an opportunity for a “do-over.” So when you catch yourself with your head in the cookie jar, PULL IT OUT! :smiley: You don’t have to keep going until you hit the bottom of the jar. You can stop right now and get your act together. It’s OK. It happens to all of us. The important thing is that you’re paying attention, you stopped the “bad” behavior, and you moved on.

50

Thanks for the advice and encouragement, Scarlett67 and Cat Whisperer. You’re right and I’ve done pretty well these last 5 months. I shouldn’t let a couple weeks of not seeing much of a change discourage me. It’s mostly psychological because I saw 159 on the scale a couple weeks ago even though I cheated by weighing myself post exercise. I was 160.2 before I had exercised. This week I’m at 160.2 again (before breakfast and any exercise) after being at 160.8 last week. So I put on some water weight, which I need to remember is definitely not unusual and it will come back off in time.

You’re right about 10 pounds by May being a little too lofty a goal considering I don’t tend to lose much from week to week. But it would be nice to be below 150. However, I will be satisfied if I’m in the low 150s. That reminds me, when I first started I saw a decrease of 2 lbs for the first 2 weeks and I was hoping it would continue so that I’d lose 10 pounds by Christmas. I didn’t end up hitting that goal until the end of January. Ha, that’s what I get for hoping for results too quickly.

I made a couple changes to my exercise routine so my body won’t get conditioned to doing the same activity. I started couch to 5k again and I’m also doing more strength-training. I do squats and straight legged deadlifts with dumbbells on leg days and machine work on arm days. There is definitely room for improvement here. I’ve been doing some reading and I could probably handle more weight with my squats and deadlifts plus I would like to do more arm work with the dumbbells.

My diet could also use improvement. It’s gotten better since I started tracking but I still don’t get enough protein and vegetables. I need to work on cooking more so I have something healthy available when I get home from work instead of resorting to things like cereal for dinner.

In positive news, I am on the last hole in my current belt. Pretty soon I will have to poke a new hole in it. :smiley:

51

That’s a good thought - they’re very good for you, but I’ve really limited them in my diet because they are so calorie dense.

52

208½ :headdesk:

53

This had me cracking up. Also, could you incorporate alcohol into (or more into, if you’re still drinking) your diet? I’d love to have a drink every other day as is, but it’s not in the cards right now. Also…cheese. REAL cheese, in larger amounts than the romano in my pasta and the laughing cow as a snack. Nom nom nom hard cheeses.

Amen. It’s a bit of a side track, but when I was in middle school, my mom would go whatever diet was a fad of the moment (even worse, she’s a DOCTOR. Just proves that women of all stripes are crazy about weight loss.) She’d encourage me to eat what she ate - I think that’s why my metabolism is so bad compared to my people my age. Even though I was competitively swimming 2-3 hours a day (and she was doing a 15 minute workout tape a day and that was all), I was probably eating less than 1200 calories. Low fat white bread with low fat turkey and some nasty low calorie horseradish “sauce” (filled with maltodextrin and tons of disgusting filler shit I wouldn’t dream of letting near my palate these days). Nonfat (and high sugar) yogurt or string cheese if I were starving. Not nearly enough fruits and veggies, never any whole grains. Only 3 meals a day, never 5 small meals, no snacking. Weekends were spent going out to eat, eating as much and as rich of food as I/we could. I’m cringing just thinking about it all, how messed up it was. This thread is really great - some stories I’ve read, either in other threads or in past months weight loss threads have just had heartbreaking stories about how people’s perceptions of food were so shaped by their childhood, and by “diets” failing over and over again. People are often really inspiring.

54

I hit another huge milestone this morning. I started out last June at 398 pounds: today, I weighed in at 323. That’s 75 pounds. I’m having a real hard time wrapping my brain around it all. It’s actually working.

55

That is SO AMAZING! Congrats!

56

I would think that anyone (who wishes to) could incorporate reasonable alcohol into the eating plan - just allow for the calories etc.

Just for S&G I plugged “beer. regular” into sparkpeople and was surprised to see that a regular beer is “only” 139 calories for 12 ounces. Oh, and it’s got nutrients. B-12, 1.2 percent. B-6, 8.2%, Calcium 1.4%, copper .9%, Folate 5.3%, Niacin 9.1%, etc. - even protein, 1.1 grams. So drink up, everyone, beer’s good for you :D. (The same calories of whiskey, for example - MUCH less healthy).

More seriously, I expect that the problems with indulging too much are: you don’t have just one, it replaces “good” calories, you tend to munch on other unhealthy stuff while drinking, etc.

57

Excellent!!

58

My starting weight on January 4th: 258.2
Last week’s weigh-in: 232.6
My current weight today: 229.8
My goal weight by March 27th: 232.4 (10% off of stpauler)

Oops, I passed my goal. :smiley: So, I’m updating it to:
Goal weight by March 27th: 227.0

That would make my BMI 29.9 for my height meaning I’ll move from “obese” to “overweight”. And 2.8 lbs in 11 days is going to be a bit difficult, but I’m feeling really motivated.

59

Shall we bang our heads in unison, or would you prefer a syncopated rhythm? :smiley: I’m up three pounds from last week - I can guarantee you I didn’t eat 10,000 extra calories! I’m trying to take my own advice and keep focused on the big picture, but man, that sure is a kick in the pants.

60

I was expecting to be even, or a little down this week. I ended up down 4 lbs, since I was up 2.6 last week I’m 1.4 lower than my previous lowest, and approaching 30 lbs since my start. :slight_smile:

Tomorrow is my long run day, and I’ve signed up for a half marathon in June. That’s really becoming a motivator for my exercise and eating habits.