lose weight

This is what has been working for me, and has worked for me in the past.

1. Eating less but frequently. 3 main meals (about 400 kcals each) and 3 snacks (about 200 kcals each).
2. Eating enough. Every time I’ve tried eating less than 1000 kcals a day, I lose 4-5 pounds in the first week then its stops. Not to mention feeling weak, exhausted, and irritable. I also usually put it back on.
3. No bread, and refined carbohydrates, no pasta, no rice. Just oats, vegetables, salad, and fruit. Any meat or fish, about 6 ounces a piece.
4. Protein shakes. As snacks these taste like milkshakes, and keep me filled up, and they are low calories and low fat. 2 scoops can make a pint, and it will be 200 calories, filling, and delicious, they even come in chocolate flavour!
5. Exercise for 30 mins a day, and more if I feel like it. Aerobic, or weight training. It gets rid of all my stress! It helps with the weight loss too!!

Does anyone else feel that you mind is actually not helping you?

You set out each morning thinking I’ll eat healthily all day, and you do pretty well until you get home from work, then you get the little thoughts popping up. Wouldn’t it be nice if I had some….you get the idea.

So how do we stop this? What works for me is to take a step back and say ‘hey, I don’t want to eat that.’, or ‘I no longer like that because it’s stopping me from losing weight.’

It feels as if my mind is offering suggestions based on past experience. I eat this in the evenings, why not have it this evening? Maybe repeatedly telling our minds what we don’t want to eat when it suggests something to eat will break the link between us thinking it and eating it. Over time, as we eat less of the thing we dont want to eat, the mind won’t suggest it as something to eat.

It kind of makes sense to me. When I quit smoking about eight years ago, I went through the same process of wanting a cigarette with a coffee, or a beer, or after a meal. I no longer crave a cigarette. The thought doesn’t even pop into my mind.

I’d be grateful for just one pound a week, and that’s all I’m aiming for, that would be 52 a year which would be way too much. Anyway more than one pound a week and I’ll start to lose muscle, and seeing that muscle helps me burn more calories, losing muscle means I’ll be burning less and less calories, and lose weight slower, and I’d have to eat even less to lose the same amount of weight. Plus muscle looks more attractive, I’d rather not be just a thinner version of me.

So hopefully I’ll have lost 7 pounds by Christmas. I’m 200 pounds and my goal is to get to 180.

Good luck everyone!