Hi gang.
I’m not really back, but I have come to report:
I’ve lost 29 lbs since May 30th.
They want me to loose another 30.
I doubt that my method will become popular. 
I’m glad to see you all are still losing! Keep up the good work and be well!
Today finds me at 215. I think it was about this time last year that I was at 250.
I did finally lose my vacation pounds from March and start making a little progress, but then a very busy social weekend had me up at 223 about a week ago. I assume most of that was water weight, because it came back down very quickly.
I’m about six weeks into working with a personal trainer at my gym. We did baseline measurements and then re-took them after one month. I’d only lost four pounds, but 29.25 inches! Mostly from my thighs. Pants that I bought just a few months ago now feel very loose, and I can grab handfuls of fabric from the backs of my legs. Whoop! A couple of months ago I bought some new jeans from Lane Bryant, a size 4 after having been a size 5. My size 4s are starting to feel a little baggy.
I’m getting lots of “you look great!” comments. The scale is not telling the whole truth, I think, because I’m definitely starting to notice a difference even in the last few weeks of what seems to be a plateau of numbers.
Don’t worry about it. Everyone has plateaus. I just dropped 2 kg of fat after being the same weight for about three months. If you’re exercising in addition to diet changes (and you should be) then pay more attention to your performance than your weight. I wasn’t worried about staying the same weight because I knew that sooner or later my body was going to have to get rid of some excess baggage. It couldn’t possibly keep the remaining pudge with the regimen I put it through, especially when I was still making gains in how much or how many times I can lift weights, run, or do other exercises. Just keep improving and it’ll happen eventually.
Khadaji, good to see that you’re up to posting a bit, even if you’re not really back for good. My dad said basically the same thing about his losing 80 lbs. through the miracle of esophagus cancer. Getting his guts rearranged a couple of years ago, and doing six months of chemo, followed by a lasting change in appetite has him back to within 15 lbs. of what he was when he got out of the Army after Vietnam, when he was still a skinny little punk. The good part about it is that within this last year he’s able to be more active than he probably has been in 20 years. Hopefully, when you’re recovered from this latest round of intestine tug o’ war, you’ll be able to get back to your more-active lifestyle too. Wishing you a swift and complete recovery.
Yeah, I’ve stayed out of these threads for quite some time for a variety of reasons:
I lost a bunch from, say Oct 07-June07, and was about to break below the 200 line for the first time in …a long, long time.
Then I quit smoking and moved cross country for a new job. These combined kicked in my stress eating and I didn’t control it, and then proceeded to ignore what I knew was going on.
So, I’m back in the groove. Having let myself get so far back out of shape, it’s taking a while, but I’ve started with the Wii Fit - I’ve had it since May 21, and until the last week when I was at a conference, have worked out every day for ~ an hour, 40 minutes being a variety of aerobic, and about 20 being yoga/strength. Eventually I know I’ll move beyond the wii fit, but for now, it’s something I can do inside - which in the AZ summer is important.
This is where I am: I’m starting to see some changes in my body shape again, and unlike previous times, I’m seeing them in my midsection first - which is great, because it’s the belly fat I really need to lose. But damn if that weight’s going nowhere. I started this process at almost (gulp)245, and am now consistently around 238. I’ll get as low as 237, then pop back up to 240, up and down. Bah. I’ll get there - I just need to find a way to make workouts more intense or adjust calories some, but I’ll lose the weight and get back to where I was (and less) pre-move.
Last night my mom noticed that I look like I’ve lost weight. This is encouraging to me. Also, the scale this morning read 196.5, which means I’m officially at the lowest weight I’ve been since I had Whatsit the Youngest, 13 months ago. I am very excited about this and am going to celebrate by having Splenda-sweetened coffee and a big salad.
Weigh-in today, because I couldn’t wait.
I now weigh 145. That’s down 17 lbs since I started SparkPeople, and only 10 lbs away from my goal weight!
That and cancer-free boobies! What a wonderful day!
I’m not allowed to weigh myself until tomorrow, since I got obsessive about it and needed to cut down to once a week. So I can’t prove that I’ve lost weight – but I have literally felt myself shrinking in the past week. I look thinner in photos than I ever have before and I can officially pull my pants off without unbuttoning them (though they aren’t quiiiite ready for a downsize.) I imagine I’m going to weigh in tomorrow somewhere between 167-169lbs, down from the 180s in February of this year, way down from 215 at my heaviest 2 years ago.
I was really getting frustrated with not dropping weight but I actually switched up my running program, and I think until this week I’d really been doing things anaerobically by pushing myself too hard every day. There has been so much going on lately, in preparation for an out-of-state permanent relocation to New Jersey in one month, that it’s been difficult to prevent myself from stress-eating.
My weight and eating habits were becoming a bludgeoning tool to make myself feel bad and I realized it didn’t need to be that way… so I just decided to focus on my running performance and overall cardiovascular fitness.
In terms of fitness, I couldn’t possibly be doing better, I ran my first 5K race today and I smashed and annihilated my PR so profoundly that I almost wonder if I woke up with somebody’s else’s body this morning. I am healthier in this moment than I’ve ever been in my entire life. I’m planning on running another 5K at the end of August and a 10K in Sept-October. I figure as long as I remain committed to that and continue to eat nutritiously and prudently, the weight will take care of itself. I’m not in too much of a hurry to lose the weight – I figure the slower it comes off, the more likely it is to stay off. That’s just the way it has to be, otherwise it becomes this big cycle of pressuring myself and then tearing myself apart. That is not how I want to live my life.
So whatever I weigh on that scale tomorrow, I am going to smile and be grateful that I have two strong legs and a powerful heart.
Oh, olives, I’m so happy for you. It’s like an epiphany, isn’t it? Once you realize YOU have the power, YOU are in control, not the food, it gets so much easier. And once you learn that one big slice of cheesecake is not going to undo all your hard work, you shrug off the stumbles, instead of letting them get you down.
May I join you folks?
Six years ago today I quit smoking. I’d like to make this the anniversary of the day I also start my journey back to my pre-illness weight, as well. In order to get there, I need to lose 55 pounds.
Of course, given the fact that I fully intend to indulge in traditional 4th of July fare (hotdogs and chips), I doubt I’ll start actually losing any weight today, but I’m at least taking the first step, by publicly acknowledging my need for a swift kick in the ass so I get off of it once and for all. 
Welcome aboard! And not to be a broken record, but I put the success of my weight loss firmly at the feet of this website. (Yes, websites have feet. Humor me.)
Namely, counting my calories. Wow…I had no idea I was eating more than I should! After years of no progress I’ve lost 17 lbs since I joined in the beginning of May.
I will definitely check it out. Thanks!
I had some success a couple of years ago, working with a nutritionist and personal trainer. I lost 20 lbs just by making some modest changes to what I was eating, and some big changes to when I was eating.
For instance, I’m not really a “sweets” person or a “snacks” person. We keep no candy, cookies, ice cream or chips in the house, ever. But I still managed to get too much sugar from “hidden” places that I didn’t even realize I was getting sugar from, like milk, regardless of the fat content. So switching from cereal to plain, non-fat yogurt that I “dressed up” with frozen blueberries and a dash of stevia, cut out sugar and added protein and fruit. Also, switching from fruit juice to an actual piece of fruit was another source of lowering my sugar intake and increasing my fiber intake.
I had already switched from white rice to brown and white potatoes to yams, and was making my own salad dressings, but I thought I was cutting fat by making thousand island with low-fat mayo, vs using oil and vinegar, when what I was really doing was adding more sugars from the ketchup and the relish. :smack:
He also had me eating 5 times a day. Breakfast, a mid-morning snack of either a protein or a fruit, lunch, a mid-afternoon snack of a protein if I had fruit in the morning, or fruit if I’d had protein, and then dinner. I was definitely not eating fewer calories per se (nuts, a common protein snack, are not low calorie, after all), and I was definitely not eating less food. In fact, I was probably eating more. But because of what I was eating and how, I was metabolizing it differently, keeping my energy up throughout the day.
Plus, let’s be honest, I was exercising – hard! Unfortunately, since I stopped seeing him, I have suffered a series of injuries that have prevented me from exercising for long stretches at a time. First a lower back injury that my doctor forbade me from exercising while I was recovering from. Then I fell off my bike and injured my rotator cuff, requiring 6 months of physical therapy.
Then I had a chiropractor completely fuck up my upper spine and re-injure my shoulder in the process, making it essentially “freeze” to the point where I couldn’t lift my arm up from my side. Poor Thomas had to brush my hair and he couldn’t for the life of him figure out how to make a ponytail! That was another 6 months of physical therapy to heal the swelling and bursitis in my shoulder, and the bulging disk in my spine. You don’t realize how much you use your shoulders to even just stroll until you injure one, so even walking was out of the question until that sufficiently healed.
And just as I was turning the corner on the shoulder thing, I fell and broke my foot! Just call me Clara Klutz!
My shoulder still aches a little, but it’s not a debilitating injury anymore that would prevent exercise. And my foot will apparently continue to hurt from time to time for at least another 3 or 4 months according to my doctor. But it’s essentially healed. I have no more excuses! I just need to refocus and DO IT!
That’s where you guys come in. Now that I’ve gone public, I have a commitment to live up to or have to post shame-facedly that I’ve been a slug. Harumpf.
Oh, and congrats on your weight loss success! Congrats to everyone who’s doing this. Y’all are gonna be my inspiration!
Ok, so today was my weigh-in day. Huge improvement over last week.
I’m at 168.2 lbs, which is the lowest recorded weight I’ve been since I started this. In 1.5 months I have lost 6.2 lbs! Body fat has also decreased, by 2.2%
I’ve worked this out to a rate of losing about 1 lb a week. I think that’s pretty much where I’d like to be, though the waiting can sometimes be very frustrating…
I don’t trust in my scale 100% yet because it tends to fluctuate so much, but I hear weight loss is a gradual (and not always linear) process, and I seem to be slowly getting those numbers down.
I’m surprisingly not very sore from my race yesterday, so I will probably go for a short run today and do some strength training exercises. I’m on a Spring Training Program that means to get me up to running 6 miles at the end of two months. That will be around the time I plan to run my 10k, so here’s hoping!
I definitely agree that learning to count calories helped with the weight loss. I counted religiously for my first month of doing this, now I’m at the point where I feel I know the approximate calorie content of most foods, and can mentally track fairly easily whether I’m overdoing it or not. My biggest weakness is still saying no–when the high-fat, refined-sugar foods are available and being offered, it’s difficult to say no. I guess my goal for the month will be figuring out how to find alternatives to eating those offered foods. Notice I avoid the word ‘‘willpower’’ – I have to figure out a way to make it not seem like a sacrifice – I have to find an alternative I actually prefer. I have to sort of cognitive-behaviorally teach myself negative associations with foods that will hinder my health, and positive associations with those that are healthy for me. Wish me luck…
Someone said once there’s no such thing as willpower. Either you’re willing to change, or you’re not.
The thing that helped me was logging my food. A lot of times I didn’t want to bother with logging in a piece of candy or something, so I didn’t eat it.
I bought a new pair of shorts today…one size down! It’s a big snug, but not too bad, and the shorts I was wearing yesterday were just ridiculously large. I figure once the last 10lbs is gone, the new shorts should fit just fine.
It’s a day early from my ‘official’ weekly weigh in, but I was just too excited to not post this. I checked myself this morning…
169.6
I have broken the 170 line!!! This is the lowest I’ve weighed in several years! This is just freaking awesome!
(I’ll take that WOOHOO! now TDN 
)
Oh, I’m so proud of everyone, especially those that have broken into the next “decade” or busted through a plataeau. I’m down .2 pound (that’s two-tenths of a pound) since last weekend, but it’s a loss despite my overeating EVERY SINGLE DAY LAST WEEK. Plus I realized I’ve lost 6 pounds since June 3rd.
Well, I still ate like crap yesterday, but man did I get a workout! It wasn’t “official” exercise, in that I didn’t go to a gym or for a run or anything like that, but I busted my ass in my garden yesterday. I think I had my heart rate up for at least a solid hour, if not longer. And then there was all the painting we did on two trellises, which felt like exercise on my injured shoulder, not to mention all the up and down into the basement to do laundry, and schlepping it up to hang in the sun. So like I said, not “official” exercise, but I was moving all afternoon.
And this morning the scale reads 1.5 pounds lighter.
Now, admittedly, I did not lose all that as fat in the last two days. I attribute most of it to water weight from having had my period all week, and, not to be too indiscreet here, but having been constipated the last couple of days.
Still, it’s nice to see a lower number on the scale, no matter how I got there!
Ok, lunch was breakfast today, as I didn’t even wake up until 11:30.
Cheerios with 1% milk (didn’t have any yogurt in the house, and this was better than eggs and hash browns by a long shot)
small bowl of grapes and blueberries
2 hard boiled egg whites sprinkled with a teeny bit of salt
Now I’m off to do some more laundry and yard work. I’ll post some pictures when we’re done later!
203.5, up 3.5, and up for the second week in a row. Last night will not have helped in the slightest, I should steer clear of social occasions with free drink and buffets. Oh well, tomorrow is another day… Still down 84.5 in total but for a short while the week before last it was looking like I might crack fourteen stone some time soon.
Le sigh.
I now weigh 11’9 (163), that’s 21lb down from where I started in January, which is good as I put on a pound after my birthday a couple of weeks ago. I also bought a pair of shorts that were 32" two weeks ago, maybe I can start to phase out the 34"s soon as I’m also down another belt notch too.
Less than a stone to go now!
Shayna I’m glad you joined! Having others to hold you accountable is really the best thing you can do for fitness goals. I think that’s why running has stuck for me – doing it with my husband everyday, we’ve been able to motivate one another through tough times.
I’m just posting about my triumph today, despite being really stressed out I did not overeat. I guess I was inspired by finally breaking the 170 mark.
Breakfast was yogurt with fresh fruit and 1 slice of whole wheat toast, mmm
Lunch was a honkin’ salad with perhaps 2 cups of various chopped vegetables thrown in, I’ve calculated it at about 350 calories total. It was YUMMY!
We went for a walk in the park together, 3 miles (today is a training rest day), and on our way we had a treat. Ladies and gentlemen, I actually went through an ice cream drive-through and resisted the temptation for ice cream – a small Italian ice instead, and it was just as delicious. It was not easy to say no to the ice cream, but I reasoned that it was just a temporary rush and what I really wanted were some long-term goals to be met.
It was hot, the walk was actually laborious, I guess I’m a little sore from my race on Friday even though we ran yesterday too–it was good to have a break, but it was hard resisting the temptation to just start running. I really am hooked.
Then for dinner I made hi-fiber/protein pasta with fresh steamed broccoli, grape tomatoes and leftover chicken I cubed up. Added some tomato sauce and voila! Healthy dinner in 10 minutes.
So I’m just really proud of myself for doing the healthy thing despite all the stress.