First time posting here. Just wanted to say thank you to the /r/loseit community. Flipping through posts here has always given me a lot of motivation to keep going, and some good ideas on how to get to where I want to be. I thought I'd share a bit of my own journey in getting here and thoughts I've had along the way:
Post 2019 holidays I realized I needed to drop some weight, so I had hit the gym 3x per week, was eating well using CICO, and managed to lose weight fairly rapidly, about 10 pounds in a little over a month putting me at 198... still 18 pounds off my TW, but good progress. I was excited for the progress, but about a month later there was this virus which was extremely contagious, and many people in the world started working from home and not going out much :)
Gym was dropped, lifestyle became extremely sedentary. Combine that with my wife giving birth to our first child in summer 2020 and there was little motivation to do anything active. I weighed in rarely, but my weight crept back up- 204 in fall, then I stopped measuring for months. My clothes got tighter, I felt slower and less strong. I finally forced myself to step on the scale and weighed in about 212 in July. Not quite into "new clothes" territory, but I was headed that way fast.
I've been doing CICO since July of this year, but I made the choice to set my TW of 180 (I'm a 6'0 man) way in the future and chip away at it gradually but persistently. It's taken three months, but I'm down 12 pounds and back under 200 as of this morning. Here are a few thoughts I've had along the way:
1) I had to choose to not listen to folks that said I did not need to lose weight. I live in the American south, so there is a bit of a culture here around eating and making sure people eat plenty of less-than-healthy food. I appreciate hospitality, I love southern cooking, and good food has its place- but there is a high % of the population that is overweight here. I could have chosen keep hovering in the low 200s or maybe keep creeping up, but I had to choose to start getting the scale to move in the other direction and stick with it, even though the cultural pressure would say keep eating or don't worry about it.
2) Slower loss has been helpful for where I'm at. My calorie budget is 2,381 to target about a pound a week. This allows for the occasional heavier meal as long as I'm not snacking, which I still enjoy. In the past when I've tried to do 2-3 pounds a week, I've had to cut out a lot of foods I enjoy, and when eating at a friend's house or at a restaurant with others, I've either had to eat a very small portion of rich food or blow my budget for the day which was discouraging. A larger budget and slower loss has been very helpful to stay on track and still enjoy food. Also, I think that doing a longer CICO diet closer to weight maintenance has helped and will help with forcing me to realize what are higher calorie items and avoid them in the future. I hope to not have to consciously log CICO every day once I hit TW and just keep an eye on weight, so I think doing a long, slow diet will help with that.
That said,
3) I have had to be honest with myself about the budget. Eating near the budget on restaurant food with no calorie information and just guestimating has often led to under-reporting. I suspect that there have been some weeks where I'm in surplus just because I had not really reported accurately. With a narrow deficit, it becomes much easier to accidentally wipe it out.
4) That said, I turned off "add exercise back into calorie budget" while still trying to maintain a consistent exercise routine. I started with ~2 mile walks during lunch and have recently added in a 6 mile bike ride to work. I've also been doing bodyweight strength training which has been great to add strength. I was previously adding those calories back into my food budget, but of course, it seems like the workout apps don't do a good job of estimating calories. I turned that off, still logged the exercise, and just treated it as a buffer to help pad the deficit- I just didn't let myself see that in my app (MyNetDiary) as part of the actual budget.
So- onwards I go! Trying to get down to 180 by March 1st. It's been a slow road to get here, but with 3 months down I'm so glad I kept with it. The graph sometimes goes up, sometimes plateaus, but it's been trending along that line that I started in July, so I'm trusting that if I keep at CICO it'll still head downwards. Thanks for reading!
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from loseit - Lose the Fat https://www.reddit.com/r/loseit/comments/pyj10v/first_time_under_200_since_covid_thank_you/
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