*** Big Fat Weight Loss Thread ***

I've gone from 14st 7lbs to 13st 9lbs from the beginning of March -> Mid April by mainly counting calories and not going nuts. I'm 5'11".

I have plateaued now though, and am struggling to lose much more. A combination of Easter and family gatherings / a restaurant curry night with a mate have contributed to a slowdown.

I tend to need to do exercise just to build up enough of a calorie deficit to satiate my hunger. I couldn't maintain this weight loss just on diet alone, I don't think.

I like running around a field with a football and some cones, doing various drills, because I think less about how knackered I'm getting, and really enjoy sport, so will usually do that once a week, play competitive 7-a-side once a week, and go to the gym at least 2, maybe 3 times a week, where I do mainly strength exercises. My hamstrings tend to turn to jelly unless I'm deadlifting / leg curling regularly since I hit middle age, so maintaining strength in my legs and core has become more important than the cardio in some ways. Some weights have gone down since I started losing weight, but some haven't gone down at all, and it's not as significant as I thought it would be, considering I've cut down hugely on protein intake as well as other food groups.

I'm a creature of habit, so the exercise days tend to stay the same, (exercise pretty much every single week day, weekends off), and I try to be careful with food Mon - Fri, and then let my hair down a little bit more on the weekends.

Breakfast: Try to put this off till 9.30am or so. 60g porridge oats, 230ml semi skimmed (can't stand water in porridge), a few frozen raspberries and half a teaspoon of honey
Snack: Banana
Gym
Lunch: 1 piece of bread with tin of sardines in tomato sauce on with some salad, or a half a sandwich with some salad.
Snack: Apple
Dinner: Whatever gets made for the family, try to exercise portion control.

If I'm hungry by the time I go to bed, I won't be able to sleep hungry, so would have 1 Weetabix with enough semi skimmed on top to make it NOT as dry as Tutankhamun's arse, but try to avoid this.

GALLONS of water. Coffee and tea throughout the day. Probably 8 cups or more. Can't cut that out as well :(

I've definitely noticed I don't mind eating as much, and the portion sizes have gone down, but there's still a bite of hunger that I'm still struggling to get used to even after a month.

My goal weight, at least at first, was to hit 13st 7lbs, knock a stone off and see how I felt. When I hit that goal weight, my BMI is still too high, and my waist to height ratio is still going to be above what it should be. I think realistically I'd have to get down to 13st to get those figures to a sensible level.

To get my BMI to the absolute edge of 'healthy' I need to get to 12st 11lbs, which I have only managed to reach once, about 11 years ago, and I was doing circuit training 3 times a week + football 3 times a week!
 
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Solid start @Karl when you say you are tracking calories, are you tracking everything, all the milk in your teas and coffees for example? all condiments with dinner etc? that all adds up very quickly and if you don't factor it in you will naturally plateau. 8 cups of tea/cofffe with 50ml milk per is 200 cals for example and thats only if its semi skimmed!

Weight loss really is simple when you break it down, calories in vs calories out. If you are not losing weight then you have equal calories in vs out. To loss weight then you would either need to move more, or eat less.

Also that doesn't sound like very much protein in the diet, and not a lot of cheap calorie bulkers such as veg etc.
 
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Karl said:
there's still a bite of hunger that I'm still struggling to get used to even after a month.
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I hate to break it to you, but after 5 years I'm not 'used to it'. I still spend reasonable amounts of the day feeling hungry :( I'm jealous of those people that somehow don't feel hunger. "Oh no, I forgot to have breakfast!", "F off you b stard!" :cry: "I'm pleased I managed to only have two breakfasts today..."

For me, I'm back on track after two trips away where I've eaten more than I should. Thankfully I cycled a lot, so after a week or so, it has balanced itself out.
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These are average weights for the month, so the blip in January is from Christmas and the blip in April is from my two trips, but my weight yesterday was 14st 12, so lower than March average already.
 
Syla5 said:
Solid start @Karl when you say you are tracking calories, are you tracking everything, all the milk in your teas and coffees for example? all condiments with dinner etc? that all adds up very quickly and if you don't factor it in you will naturally plateau. 8 cups of tea/cofffe with 50ml milk per is 200 cals for example and thats only if its semi skimmed!

Weight loss really is simple when you break it down, calories in vs calories out. If you are not losing weight then you have equal calories in vs out. To loss weight then you would either need to move more, or eat less.

Also that doesn't sound like very much protein in the diet, and not a lot of cheap calorie bulkers such as veg etc.
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Cheers for the input. I've attached a screenshot of what my cals look so far today to the bottom of this post so you can see roughly what I'm constituting as 'salad', and dinner will have things like broccoli, green beans, skin-on new potatoes, etc.

I'm tracking pretty much every calorie I can, even when I know it's a bad day, so I can see how far over I've gone!

AndyCr15 said:
I hate to break it to you, but after 5 years I'm not 'used to it'. I still spend reasonable amounts of the day feeling hungry :( I'm jealous of those people that somehow don't feel hunger. "Oh no, I forgot to have breakfast!", "F off you b stard!" :cry: "I'm pleased I managed to only have two breakfasts today..."
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So true. It gets easier, but it doesn't really go away. I just seem to live with it a bit more. Weirdly, I've started to feel a bit guilty when I've gone off the plan and eaten a bit too much, and I'm trying to remind myself that I'm still on track, and one big meal isn't going to see me back at square one. I think I'm too invested to throw it all away anyway tbh. My problem comes when I try to maintain the weight I reach. It tends to creep up when I'm not looking. :(

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The tracking is the key, I'm not sure how you take your tea but 15ml is almost no milk at all, even a splash is easy to hit anywhere 30ml+. I'm sad enough to know as i measure out my milk even! A new feature to MFP shows you how long you've been tracking and I'm up to 853 days in a row, and my weight loss and weight gain has moved in accordance to what I've eaten. I know i shouldn't have been but i was a little surprised by how close to the science my numbers have been.
 
Syla5 said:
The tracking is the key, I'm not sure how you take your tea but 15ml is almost no milk at all, even a splash is easy to hit anywhere 30ml+. I'm sad enough to know as i measure out my milk even! A new feature to MFP shows you how long you've been tracking and I'm up to 853 days in a row, and my weight loss and weight gain has moved in accordance to what I've eaten. I know i shouldn't have been but i was a little surprised by how close to the science my numbers have been.
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A splash is my measurement, yep, and no sugar. I can't stand milky tea!

I've had high cholesterol in a blood test a few months ago, so cut out whole milk as much as possible, lowered butter intake, etc, and will see how that affects the next test.
 
Karl said:
Cheers for the input. I've attached a screenshot of what my cals look so far today to the bottom of this post so you can see roughly what I'm constituting as 'salad', and dinner will have things like broccoli, green beans, skin-on new potatoes, etc.

I'm tracking pretty much every calorie I can, even when I know it's a bad day, so I can see how far over I've gone!


So true. It gets easier, but it doesn't really go away. I just seem to live with it a bit more. Weirdly, I've started to feel a bit guilty when I've gone off the plan and eaten a bit too much, and I'm trying to remind myself that I'm still on track, and one big meal isn't going to see me back at square one. I think I'm too invested to throw it all away anyway tbh. My problem comes when I try to maintain the weight I reach. It tends to creep up when I'm not looking. :(

L7wJGmG.png
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Play a sport like 5 or 8 a side football for an hour and you will lose around 500 calories.

Do some hiit training for 30mins followed by 10min abs and stretch after and that's another 400 plus calories burned
 
Syla5 said:
The tracking is the key, I'm not sure how you take your tea but 15ml is almost no milk at all, even a splash is easy to hit anywhere 30ml+. I'm sad enough to know as i measure out my milk even! A new feature to MFP shows you how long you've been tracking and I'm up to 853 days in a row, and my weight loss and weight gain has moved in accordance to what I've eaten. I know i shouldn't have been but i was a little surprised by how close to the science my numbers have been.
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100% this. While I didn’t go quite as far as measuring milk in my hot drinks (switched from latte to americano which knocked that on the head), I properly weighed out my carbs and over the course of six months completely reset my idea of portion size. As @AndyCr15 has said, you soon get a good eye for it! I worry I’ve had a bit of creep recently.

Logged on Noom for the first time in a while today. Have had a reasonably sensible few weeks and it’s time to get back on it and be really honest with myself. Need to get to 40 in the best shape of my life!
 
I couldn't be bothered to measure the milk in my tea and coffee so I just cut it out and added a little zero calorie coffee syrup until I got used to drinking them black.
 
jonneymendoza said:
Play a sport like 5 or 8 a side football for an hour and you will lose around 500 calories.

Do some hiit training for 30mins followed by 10min abs and stretch after and that's another 400 plus calories burned
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Just played 6-a-side and Strava reckons I covered nearly 8km in the 80 mins, at 695 calories. I’ll take that with a pinch of salt, but Wednesdays are a day where I can guarantee my calorie deficit. It’s just a lot harder to be “good” on the days when I don’t exercise as much.

I weigh in for the first time in 2 weeks on Friday, and I’m hoping to drop below the last weigh in of 13st 9lbs. A good day tomorrow and I’ll hopefully stand a good chance!
 
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Karl said:
Just played 6-a-side and Strava reckons I covered nearly 8km in the 80 mins, at 695 calories. I’ll take that with a pinch of salt, but Wednesdays are a day where I can guarantee my calorie deficit. It’s just a lot harder to be “good” on the days when I don’t exercise as much.
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This is generally me too. Daily calories are fairly consistent, but whether i exercise or not is mainly the driving factor between being under/over. My theory is not focusing on day to day and working it out over the week. As some days i'll be ~1500kcal under my goal, and others 1000kcal over depending on whether i've exercised or not. Being more consistent with food seems to make most sense than having weird spikes.
 
There's 3 Boost ice creams in the freezer. They've been there for a week and they wink at me every time I open the freezer door. Halp.
 
Weighed in this morning, and in the last 2 weeks, I have gone from 13st 9lbs 2oz to 13st 9lbs 0oz :D Weirdly though, even though my weight hasn't gone down much, I've shaved half an inch off my waist measurement and gone down to 36" from 37" ( measuring just above my belly button and breathing out, as they tell me to online :p )

I didn't weigh in last Friday because I knew the previous week wasn't going to have been pretty. It wasn't over the top, but I knew I'd eaten too much to lose or maintain whatever weight I'd reached. Out of the previous 14 days, I think I'd have been significantly over my calorie goal (or even maintenance) 7 times.

I was disappointed when I first weighed in, but then I looked back at the last 14 days of food, and saw that I've had roughly 1 good week, and 1 bad week, but they were very much mixed together. I initially felt more hard done by because I've worked particularly hard to get myself back on track this week, and of course you want to see immediate results subconsciously, even though you know it's not practical. I don't weigh in more than once a week on a Friday, because I don't want to hyperfocus on what I'm weighing on a particular moment, and am trying to average food over the 7 days so that I don't feel so bad about eating a nice pizza, or going out for a curry with my mates.

We don't have any big family party buffet meals or restaurant curries with mates planned this weekend, or this week. Next Friday, we head down for a weekend away with my in-laws in Devon, and it's likely to fall apart by then, so I do really need to focus on a good week this week. I think a good weigh-in next week will put me in the right frame of mind to try to protect my goals while I'm down there. I hope!

I FEEL a lot better at this size, and I'm noticing the same benefits as @Raymond Lin in that my Watch is tapping me to tell me that my resting breathing rate and heart rate have been lower since I started losing weight at the beginning of March, but I need to work out some sort of framework for how I make this sustainable long-term, because right now I'm still very much focused at getting down to around 13st 6lbs, and not so much at how I regulate my intake to remain at that weight, despite still loving my food, and working out a technique that lets me cope with / suppress hunger, even at maintenance calories.
 
Martynt74 said:
Down to 101.6kg this morning which is about as low as i've been for a while. Slower than i'd have liked, but as said before there's a level of diet i'm clearly not willing to give up, so i'm happy as long as the general trend is downwards with a few spikes along the way.
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This is what I'm getting at with myself really, I like a beer with my food, I like a glass of wine now and again, and I love going out for curry with a mate once every few weeks. That sort of thing seems to tip me over maintenance really really easily. The weird thing is, if I just do whatever I like and don't calorie count, don't do anything to monitor what I'm eating / drinking, I hit 14st 7lbs and stay there.
 
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when i see in vairious places that some people struggle with walking 10k steps its makes my job the only thing im thankfull of from that place, a night in work plus dog walking... already today from mid night untill now from work and 1 dog walk im upto 17k steps, times hes had another 2 walks and nipping to the shops later, itll top 20k, plus what ever cardio i do in the gym
 
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