OK, I'm feeling much better so I think it's time to come with a plan.
I hate counting calories and hate being hungry so I'm trying to do something other than that.
So I'm thinking the following:
- 3 meals in reasonable portions. No snacks (that's going to be hard!). Continue with no sugar/no alcohol.
- 30 minutes of exercise 3 times a week (on days that I'm not walking much)
Will try this through the end of next week and reassess.
As someone who has lost a lot of weight and kept it off, this is basically what I did. Although, I always give a new plan at least 6 weeks.
I measured my progress for years because I lost steadily, but veeery slowly, and interestingly, I found that the scale actually reflected the way I had eaten a full two weeks prior.
So if I adjusted my eating according to what the scale said that week, it would be chaos. It took me a solid 6 weeks of data to really assess what a new eating pattern was doing.
The other major benefit of that is it takes about 6 weeks for a behaviour to become a habit. So say I cut sugar and after 6 weeks it had a very, very minor benefit for my weight, at least the no-sugar habit was formed and it was then easy to make another incremental,.permanent change.
But yeah, I went from obese to very lean without counting calories or feeling restricted, and I never had to change my diet for maintenance. I started with maintenance.
My aim from the beginning was to eat the maintenance diet for a lean weight, which obviously cannot maintain an obese weight. I expected to lose weight, but had no idea where it would end.
I decided to accept whatever weight a healthy maintenance diet for a lean person would produce. I expected to probably end up at the top end of a "healthy range" BMI or maybe just a bit above that, and I would have been THRILLED with that at the time. In fact, had I been doing a restrictive diet, that would have been my "goal weight" and I would have transitioned to "maintenance" once I hit it.
Never in a million years did I expect to end up leaner than I was *before* I gained weight in the first place.
But it turned out that slow, systematic, permanent changes over a longer period of time produced slow, permanent changes in my weight.
I did regain a bit, but that's because my legs stopped working, I became radically more sedentary, I was on multiple drugs that cause weight gain (including prednisone) and I was still drinking alcohol at the time, and more than was ideal. Even then, because my eating patterns were so entrenched, I only gained up to about the top of the "healthy range" BMI.
I've since quit alcohol and switched to intermittent fasting, but that's more about repairing my sluggish metabolism. Being so bed ridden, my metabolism was in the toilet and IF repaired it and I've stuck with it since, for the past few years, although I've alternated through many different patterns.
That's my personal experience, maybe some of it will be helpful to you. The 6-week rule alone has helped a lot of people I know be much more successful with losing weight.
IMO, patience is your best friend when losing weight. It's not about being disciplined and restrictive, it's about figuring out the best way to eat for your body so that you can feel satisfied and achieve and maintain an optimal weight, whatever that weight is for you.
But once you figure that routine out and it's easy, the weight just disappears passively on its own. I only ever lost 2lbs/mo, which sounds painfully slow for a lot of people, but when you are enjoying how you are eating and not feeling at all deprived, and just living your life, then time does the heavy lifting for you. You basically don't have to do *anything* and weight loss just happens in the background while you're busy doing other things.
I just ate well, enjoyed my very busy life, and every few months my pants were too big.
FTR, I'm currently on a 6 months break from sugar. I spent half of last year on opioids, which make me crave sugar like crazy, and I developed way too much of a sugar habit while my femur was broken. So I'm currently at week 4, and giving a new habit this long allows me to really keenly observe how my body changes over time to a new habit, and how my brain changes as well. Observing my brain go from expecting sugar, to seeking sugar, to gradually accepting that there is no sugar is always fascinating every time I do it.
