Today for lunch I had a peanut butter and banana sandwich on sugar free wheat bread, with a cup of 2% milk. (And no, I did not fry the sandwich in a pan of butter..) This was an okay meal, really. It’s filling, it tastes decent, and health wise it’s a much better choice than I typically make.
I’m trying to eat healthier now. I need to lose a bunch of weight for health reasons. I also want to lose weight for vanity reasons, I won’t lie. But now that my health is being affected by my weight, I’m more inspired to do something. (And no, I don’t have diabetes or high blood pressure or any of the standard things docs say you will get if you are overweight. There’s apparently some correlation between fat cells and estrogen levels, and I’m one of those lucky women whose body actually had adverse reactions to estrogen, so…)
But I hate the term “dieting.” Dieting implies that you are restricting yourself from certain things. And I am most definitely the type of person who craves food more when you tell me I can’t have it. (Except for honey. I’m allergic to it, so I choose life.)
I do like to say that I am trying to “eat healthier.” Mostly because this means I can still have the horrible, junky foods that I love, only occasionally, and ideally in smaller portions. It means that I try to eat more “good” foods throughout the day, so that if I do grab a snack to quell a chocolate craving, I will only eat, say, a handful of M&Ms instead of the whole bag.
My biggest challenge, I think, is that I have low blood sugar. Add to that the fact that I don’t always remember to eat right (example: today I woke up at 5am, I didn’t eat anything until 10am, whoops), and I crash quite often. Little Debbie has become my friend over the years. If my sugar bottoms out, I just scarf down a couple of snack cakes. But with their high sugar content also comes high fat content. So I need to figure out something better.
I know I can do this; last year over about 8 months I lost 30 pounds. But then I quit smoking, and gained it all back over the next three months. I ended up smoking again anyways 
akaKody 
Exactly! If you eat for nutrients (not for simply food groups, grams or calories) it’ll be easier to reach your goal. Don’t deny yourself anything, eat in moderation and do discover WHY you crave or eat the way you do. I know you’ll be successful and if I can cheer you along, please simply ask. Blessings,
The problem isn’t with the word itself, but rather with the misuse of it. It means the foods you regularly eat. You can have a diet consisting of nothing but friends foods and candy, one consisting of health foods only, one consisting of pastas with some meat, whatever. At some point this noun was turned into a verb and both were used to indicate eating less to lose weight, whether or not in a healthy way.
I’ve gone through a lot of weight loss. More than I want to openly admit on the internet, enough that I’m currently planning for surgery to remove some excess skin that’s been causing medical issues every summer for years (I read this post while on hold with the insurance company). I’ve done every fad out there and have found that the only thing that works for weight loss AND MAINTAINING IT is eating healthier and LIMITING, rather than eliminating, foods you like. The fatal flaws with weight loss or health improvement (even thin people can often benefit from healthier eating) are cutting foods altogether until you go haywire and overindulge later, and going back to eating the way you did before losing the weight. Limiting unhealthy foods is part of a lifestyle and diet CHANGE that is absolutely necessary to keep your better health.
My suggestion is to determine what foods you want to eat, watch your portions, and cut back a few hundred calories a day combined with some exercise. Even sit-ups during commercials add up. Cutting a few hundreds calories a day is as easy as switching from full-fat milk to fat-free (60 calories fewer per cup) and picking an apple over chips with lunch and using less jelly on toast. Even if you do nothing else, this should result in a pound lost every 12 days. Adding in some exercise will make that faster.
Once you reach the weight and health level you want, don’t stop. The exercise is good for you no matter your size, though you may need to increase your eating slightly to keep from losing more weight ,though not always. It takes fewer calories to keep a lighter body going, just like it generally takes less gas to keep lighter cars going.
Also don’t think that plateaus, where you lose nothing, means you’re doing something wrong. Everyone losing weight goes through it. And don’t think that not losing means you’re not losing. Fat can be replaced by muscle, so the scale can go up while your fat level goes down. Both of these can be discouraging if you’re only paying attention to the scale.
Whatever you do, don’t think of dieting as something you do for a while to lose weight. Improving health isn’t only about changing your weight, and for some people, it’s not at all about losing or gaining pounds. Altering your diet (as opposed to “dieting”) is only one part of the overall process, and it needs to be permanent.
If you weren’t looking for advice or anything, I apologize. I decided to go and post this in case it could help someone to learn from someone who lost as much as the typical pro football player weighs.
Good advice is always welcome! And I’m pretty much trying everything you mention. I’m done with trying to completely cut out certain foods. That never ends well with me… I’ve got to lose about 80 lbs total to get back in my healthy range, and was well on track last year until *blah!*
My biggest problem is the ability to exercise. Childcare is an issue, so most of my exercise is limited to what I can do at home. Which is still fine. I have a little exercise bike, and a self-powered treadmill (which is actually more difficult than an electric one, somehow), and my husband has his total-gym type thing and a weight bench. So between all of that, I have the potential to get in a good work out.
I just have to be careful and work out a little at a time. I have scoliosis, and I have to moderate all upper body workouts. There are some I can’t even do, such as push ups (the muscles between my shoulder blades fail and I go splat). Add to that the fact that I can’t do crunches or sit ups. I had a c-section nearly 3 years ago, and the scarred area is still tender. Then there are other issues that came about after the surgery that cause further abdominal pain. It’s hinders me to the point that I can’t even get out of bed unless I roll to the side and kind of push/shimmy my way upright.
Then also I’m trying to write, and blog, and tutor, and homeschool, and help out with the occasional edit, and my days get kind of full. Plus there’s laundry and dishes and cooking, etc… for a family of five. But I have been making an effort to devote at least 30 mins everyday to exercise. I’m hoping the “a little is better than none” adage holds true.
And I’m trying baby steps. I’m not saying “I have to lose 80 pounds right now!” I’m trying to set smaller goals, like: I want to lose 10 pounds by the end of April. (Which is doable for me, usually when I try to lose weight the first month is a faster loss and then it levels out.) After that, I will reevaluate and set a goal for May.
Losing weight is INCREDIBLY hard. I’ve been trying for years and only managed to not gain weight… When I was in high school, and had a ton more free time, I would play DDR for hours every day and/or go for looooong walks and it was awesome, and I was at my thinnest in my adult life, but then life took a turn for the poor, I ate crap food that most poor university students eat, and had no time or energy for exercise and spent 99% of my time sitting. I gained a bunch of weight and then no matter how hard I tried to go back to my old ways it was just never enough. And life would keep making it nearly impossible for me to keep up any kind of consistency. Money would be too tight for the ‘better’ food, time would be too short for exercise, depression would make me not care enough about either…
I tried calorie counting once. It was just incredibly depressing… ‘what do you mean one slice of bread is nearly 150 calories?! OMG the bagels!’ basically everything I loved to eat made me feel guilty and depressed, and my depression made me stop trying. Tried just outright denying myself things, and that obviously went exactly as badly as it sounds. I tried replacing things with ‘healthier’ or lower calorie options but costs were just too much and since being poor for a few years made me cheap, feeling like I was getting less food for more money just flipped an angry switch in my brain. I resented it. And every time I went to the grocery store I would feel cheated. It was not a good way for me to go about things. Though learning to cook food myself instead of needing all my food to come from a box helped for a while till my situation changed again.
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/health/healthnews/9069276/Chocolate-cake-breakfast-could-help-you-lose-weight.html I found this article recently though, and while my current situation makes it literally impossible to be on a calorie restricted diet (I work 12 hours a day, 6 days a week in a camp setting where they provide the food and I have no control over anything except how much of what they give me that I actually eat, and considering I can’t eat most of what they serve, I end up eating probably too much of what I can for fear that the next day there will be nothing I can eat at all. Which has happened), I *have* found that having a cookie in the morning makes me significantly less likely to raid the junk food later, and that’s obviously a good start. I find the whole theory behind it as being helpful and pretty believable (I’ve taken psychology and nutrition courses, so I’m not just buying into it ‘cuz I like cake. Though that is obviously a present bias 😛 ). You are still controlling your intake of everything, but you’re setting yourself up to have more energy and fewer cravings which seems a good recipe for success to me, and judging by the results mentioned in the article (I give them a little more suspension of disbelief because they’re not selling anything) it seems to work for at least some people. And hey, as kids didn’t we all want our parents to tell us we could have cake for breakfast?
I hope you find something that works for you and that you lose the weight you need. I wish you all the luck ❤
Recommendation: thestonesoup.com – she does five-ingredient recipes, most of them pretty quick as well, and they’ve almost all been really tasty. She’s sort of paleo-ish, which mostly means there’s lots of vegetables and legumes and things. We’ve found her site really helpful.