Hi all. I'm new, though I've browsed around some of the threads a while today. I've been frustrated with my fitness/weight loss journey for a while now, and this seemed like a good place to post for some advice. This turned out longer than I thought, so I'm not sure anyone will actually read it all!
I've lost 32 pounds or so in the past year, the majority of it in the past 7 months. The hard part of it has not been the changes to what I eat. Sure, some days I wish I could snarf down cupcakes with impunity, but I've also learned how much I love a lot of healthy foods. Exercise is harder, and I've got a ways to go with that. But the really hard part for me is turning out to be mental/emotional.
I started at 292 pounds (I'm 5'5", female, 42). I guess I'm a rare fat person in that I haven't really dieted in the past. I constantly see testimonials from people who've lost 100 or more pounds in 12 to 18 months. Usually the story goes something like the person one day decided to stop junk food and within a few months dropped a bunch of pounds, so they decided to improve their diet and/or add exercise then fast forward to a year later and they're jumping into one pant leg to show how much smaller they are. I'm not trying to minimize what people who have achieved that have done, I know it took hard work.
Maybe the problem is I didn't start with a fast food overload. I've been a vegetarian for 20 years. I was eating far too many snacks, and eating out at non-fast food restaurants a lot, and barely moving, so even though my meal portion size was reasonable, I know how I got to 292. My first step was to start eating more fruits and veg, more fiber, fewer snacks, and trying to be better about portion size. That was good for a whole 7 pounds in the first month, and there I stayed for 6 months. Then I was diagnosed with mild osteo-arthritis along my entire spine and hips, and I did physiotherapy 3 times a week for 3 months. It included short bouts of cardio and targeted resistence exercises. I bought a recumbent bike and started doing more cardio at home. I lost more weight, but with a real up-and-down pattern to the scale - I'll hit a low, then bounce back up several pounds and not get back to that low for weeks or more.
In November I started tracking calories. But I was on a forum where people were pretty adamant about the starvation response, and I think I let it give me license to eat more. Well, that and the holidays. :-> So November and December were pretty static. In January I got more serious about counting the calories, both in the sense of measuing and weighing and in trying to come in under my calorie goal. (Currently 1881, but I'm trying to get 100-300 below that when I can, but I have 'cheat' meals or days when I eat out and have to guess calories.) It's been a month since I started doing that, and I've gone from 264 to 260 (I've been as low as 258, but as usual that didn't seem to stick.) The past week I started at 258 and spent the rest of at 260.
My food log is at
I don't consider the calories burned for exercise on there to be at all accurate, I just keep track to have a record of whether and how I've exercised.
I know slow and steady is better, making sustainable lifestyle choices is better. But sometimes I just get so frustrated that it feels like every pound is a struggle. If it's this hard when I'm seriously obese, what happens when I'm finally down under 200 and I have to eat far fewer calories to maintain a big deficit and it starts getting even harder. Knowing that this would take a year or two was hard, doing that math and seeing that at my present rate it'll take 4-5 years is upsetting.
I also know that everyone says don't go by the scale, go by measurements, how clothes fit, how you feel, etc. I'm pretty big, the scale number has to drop, or I'm not really accomplishing anything. And that number kind of feels like all I have. My two favourite pairs of pants are too loose, but that's probably as much from wearing them to do all my physio in and stretching them out. My other clothes fit fine. I went shopping last month and tried on the same old size as always. I saw numerous people I hadn't seen for a year over Christmas, and not one of them said a thing about me looking any different. Nor has anyone else other than my husband, who is probably just trying to make me feel better. I still have to take heartburn pills twice a day. I still feel tired, down and unable to concentrate most of the time. Basically I feel like I'm not really accomplishing much. The really hard part about this is that I feel like a failure most of the time. I don't look much better, I don't feel much better, and I spend way, way too much time planning what to eat, reading advice and obsessing about why and how much I suck at this, so I'm accomplishing much less in the rest of my life. (Including not spending enough time getting my exercise routine back on track.)
The advice of the forum that I'm on is dominated by a high protein, low carb, small deficit diet philosophy, with many people advocating a macro split of 40 protein, 40 carb and 20 fat. (The less atheletic aim for 40/30/30).
I don't feel like I can do that. As a vegetarian, any protein source I add is going to come with either more carbs or more fat. I've strugged to get my protein up to 70-80 grams a day, which is around 20% of my calories. I could get up to 90-100 if I consign myself to switching my evening snack over to protein powder. (I usually try to have something healthy but that I also enjoy, like an apple and cheese.) I don't see any way to get up to 40% that I could live with. It's not even so much wanting to eat carbs as just not liking protein enough to eat only that.
The dominant exercise recommendation is to do HIIT and heavy lifting. I'm not sure I can, or should be doing those things at this stage. I bought the much recommended New Rules of Lifting for Women, and the weight/height chart in there only goes up to 200 pounds or so, which seems to suggest it's not for the obese. Exercise and some targeted resistence training has been very helpful for my arthritis, but the kind of movements involved in HIIT and full body lifting don't seem joint friendly. (I do plan to ask my doctor and physiotherapist about this some time, but I don't have the money to make a lot of appointments right now.)
There's also a lot of focus on eating much less salt, drinking a ton more water, and eating clean. Basically to me it sounds like what they're saying is if you eat and work out like an elite athlete, you'll lose weight. Well duh, I'd hope so. But not only do I not think I can do that, I don't really want to do that. I want to be fit, but in the context of my life, not as the only thing I do or think about in my life. Is there another way? Are there reasons my weight loss seems so much slower than a lot of obese people's that I'm just not thinking of? Or is there a way for me to just accept that's how it works for me and put it in context so I can stop feeling like I am such a failure and get back to having a rest of my life?
I've lost 32 pounds or so in the past year, the majority of it in the past 7 months. The hard part of it has not been the changes to what I eat. Sure, some days I wish I could snarf down cupcakes with impunity, but I've also learned how much I love a lot of healthy foods. Exercise is harder, and I've got a ways to go with that. But the really hard part for me is turning out to be mental/emotional.
I started at 292 pounds (I'm 5'5", female, 42). I guess I'm a rare fat person in that I haven't really dieted in the past. I constantly see testimonials from people who've lost 100 or more pounds in 12 to 18 months. Usually the story goes something like the person one day decided to stop junk food and within a few months dropped a bunch of pounds, so they decided to improve their diet and/or add exercise then fast forward to a year later and they're jumping into one pant leg to show how much smaller they are. I'm not trying to minimize what people who have achieved that have done, I know it took hard work.
Maybe the problem is I didn't start with a fast food overload. I've been a vegetarian for 20 years. I was eating far too many snacks, and eating out at non-fast food restaurants a lot, and barely moving, so even though my meal portion size was reasonable, I know how I got to 292. My first step was to start eating more fruits and veg, more fiber, fewer snacks, and trying to be better about portion size. That was good for a whole 7 pounds in the first month, and there I stayed for 6 months. Then I was diagnosed with mild osteo-arthritis along my entire spine and hips, and I did physiotherapy 3 times a week for 3 months. It included short bouts of cardio and targeted resistence exercises. I bought a recumbent bike and started doing more cardio at home. I lost more weight, but with a real up-and-down pattern to the scale - I'll hit a low, then bounce back up several pounds and not get back to that low for weeks or more.
In November I started tracking calories. But I was on a forum where people were pretty adamant about the starvation response, and I think I let it give me license to eat more. Well, that and the holidays. :-> So November and December were pretty static. In January I got more serious about counting the calories, both in the sense of measuing and weighing and in trying to come in under my calorie goal. (Currently 1881, but I'm trying to get 100-300 below that when I can, but I have 'cheat' meals or days when I eat out and have to guess calories.) It's been a month since I started doing that, and I've gone from 264 to 260 (I've been as low as 258, but as usual that didn't seem to stick.) The past week I started at 258 and spent the rest of at 260.
My food log is at
I don't consider the calories burned for exercise on there to be at all accurate, I just keep track to have a record of whether and how I've exercised.
I know slow and steady is better, making sustainable lifestyle choices is better. But sometimes I just get so frustrated that it feels like every pound is a struggle. If it's this hard when I'm seriously obese, what happens when I'm finally down under 200 and I have to eat far fewer calories to maintain a big deficit and it starts getting even harder. Knowing that this would take a year or two was hard, doing that math and seeing that at my present rate it'll take 4-5 years is upsetting.
I also know that everyone says don't go by the scale, go by measurements, how clothes fit, how you feel, etc. I'm pretty big, the scale number has to drop, or I'm not really accomplishing anything. And that number kind of feels like all I have. My two favourite pairs of pants are too loose, but that's probably as much from wearing them to do all my physio in and stretching them out. My other clothes fit fine. I went shopping last month and tried on the same old size as always. I saw numerous people I hadn't seen for a year over Christmas, and not one of them said a thing about me looking any different. Nor has anyone else other than my husband, who is probably just trying to make me feel better. I still have to take heartburn pills twice a day. I still feel tired, down and unable to concentrate most of the time. Basically I feel like I'm not really accomplishing much. The really hard part about this is that I feel like a failure most of the time. I don't look much better, I don't feel much better, and I spend way, way too much time planning what to eat, reading advice and obsessing about why and how much I suck at this, so I'm accomplishing much less in the rest of my life. (Including not spending enough time getting my exercise routine back on track.)
The advice of the forum that I'm on is dominated by a high protein, low carb, small deficit diet philosophy, with many people advocating a macro split of 40 protein, 40 carb and 20 fat. (The less atheletic aim for 40/30/30).
I don't feel like I can do that. As a vegetarian, any protein source I add is going to come with either more carbs or more fat. I've strugged to get my protein up to 70-80 grams a day, which is around 20% of my calories. I could get up to 90-100 if I consign myself to switching my evening snack over to protein powder. (I usually try to have something healthy but that I also enjoy, like an apple and cheese.) I don't see any way to get up to 40% that I could live with. It's not even so much wanting to eat carbs as just not liking protein enough to eat only that.
The dominant exercise recommendation is to do HIIT and heavy lifting. I'm not sure I can, or should be doing those things at this stage. I bought the much recommended New Rules of Lifting for Women, and the weight/height chart in there only goes up to 200 pounds or so, which seems to suggest it's not for the obese. Exercise and some targeted resistence training has been very helpful for my arthritis, but the kind of movements involved in HIIT and full body lifting don't seem joint friendly. (I do plan to ask my doctor and physiotherapist about this some time, but I don't have the money to make a lot of appointments right now.)
There's also a lot of focus on eating much less salt, drinking a ton more water, and eating clean. Basically to me it sounds like what they're saying is if you eat and work out like an elite athlete, you'll lose weight. Well duh, I'd hope so. But not only do I not think I can do that, I don't really want to do that. I want to be fit, but in the context of my life, not as the only thing I do or think about in my life. Is there another way? Are there reasons my weight loss seems so much slower than a lot of obese people's that I'm just not thinking of? Or is there a way for me to just accept that's how it works for me and put it in context so I can stop feeling like I am such a failure and get back to having a rest of my life?
Just a thought!