All true stuff. Those are good reminders. There isn't much low hanging fruit except alcohol. I'm gong to try to totally abstain for the next few days. Saturday I have a social function I probably will have a few drinks to I guess I need to bank a good deficit beforehand. I eat NO refined carbs already, bread, muffins, cake. NO SUGAR. I feel as though maybe I haven't been as careful with Macros interms of total calories. I'm guessing the blue cheese dressing, chicken salad (3 gm carbs) would be ok but I might not be a mindful of portion control as I shold have.
Not eating certain food groups is not the same as eating a calorie restricted diet. It doesn't matter how many grams of sugar there are in a meal if there's 40g of fat.
Low hanging fruit doesn't just mean "bad foods".
I actually started losing weight a lot faster once I switched away from a low carb diet. I was eating a lot of fats before and found it hard to cut more calories.
It's also important to know that eating well for your body is not the same as eating to lose weight quickly.
Eating a sustainable, healthy diet won't make you lose weight unless you have a lot of excess weight to lose. Unless you are a weight that requires a huge amount of calories to sustain, you will lose very very slowly because you will only run a small daily deficit by eating well.
When I was obese, I could lose weight just by contemplating eating less. Now that I'm a low-healthy BMI, I have to be very proactive to lose even 5lbs.
You obviously have a portion control problem because you've been eating enough to sustain your current weight, unless you drink enough alcohol to make up the calories needed to maintain what you've got.
I must say though, I don't quite understand the rationale of eating low carb if you drink alcohol...??? A dish of quinoa and beans with veggies will have a lot less calories than the same volume of meat and fatty sauce. The carb grams just don't matter unless you are aiming for ketosis, which you obviously aren't if you are drinking alcohol regularly.
The margins between a small deficit and a small overage are extremely extremely narrow. That's like living a nice, middle class life with a 5-10% savings rate. You'll reach FI eventually, but it will take decades, and if you aren't careful, just a few mishaps along the way will throw you into debt.
To run a major deficit, its more like ERE style where you analyze EVERYTHING, and cut every single spending corner possible.
If you are seriously trying to cut over 700 calories a day, not only will you have to look at portions of everything, you also can't afford "a few drinks" with friends. A few drinks is easily several hundred calories, which means that you not only need to cut 750 from each day of the week before that, you need to cut an additional ~100 each day to compensate for just the alcohol, and that's assuming you eat nothing at this event.
Just like ERE style frugality, more extreme calorie restriction also involves fitting in less socially with people, as a lot of socializing involves both spending and consuming calories.
You only have two choices, either hunker down and be extremely serious about calorie restriction, or choose a more moderate approach and accept a more moderate timeline.
There is no magic diet that will make this faster or easier. Losing weight can either be slow, comfortable and easy, or it can be fast and require incredible discipline.
Just like cutting spending.
