Like many of us, I've attempted to lose weight many times, some times more successfully than others, but ultimately I've gained it back and then some. What I've come to learn is that aside from the obvious of eating less and moving more, there are also a lot of psychological factors at play.
The main one for me has been my all-or-nothing thinking, pass/fail, win/lose. So I decided that this time around I was going to focus on some very small goals to begin with, then increase them incrementally.
For January, my only goal was to track my eating, using MFP. I wasn't going to actually censor my eating too much, it was more that I wanted to develop the habit of tracking, and I also just wanted to be more aware of what I was eating.
The results were interesting. Just the act of tracking had an influence on what I ate. I noticed after only about a week that just tracking made me want to eat less. It wasn't difficult. It was just the effect of noticing what I was eating more. I'll admit it was difficult at first to actually log the two huge homemade cheesecake brownies I ate late one night. But I did it, and I didn't cheat on logging them (750 cal!). But the next day I went straight back to logging, and ate a reasonable amount of calories.
I was successful in that I did log every single day in January. I didn't make an effort to exercise, really. As of this morning, I have lost 5 lb just by tracking. It's not super impressive for a month, but I am super happy because it really was painless.
So my goal for February is to continue tracking, but to actually try to stick to under my caloric goal of 1600 cals per day, and to track more carefully by using my food scale more. I am also going to wear my activity tracker and really make an effort to get my 10,000 steps in daily ( I have a desk job so this has been challenging some days). That's it. Then, at the beginning of March, I'll reassess based on where I am.
There's nothing earth shattering in what I've done, I just wanted to share the observation that it is ok to go slow, and make changes incrementally. I feel that my small success has been super motivating for me, and maybe it could be for someone else out there :)
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from loseit - Lose the Fat http://bit.ly/2Tm285O
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