The Start of My Journey
I have tinkered with My Fitness Pal in the past, I first signed up in 2011, I think I would only ever have logged in for about 10 days in a row, I would drasticly change my eating habits, guesstimate my food intake and take the MFP calorie burns as gospel even though they differed a couple of hundred from the machines.
Unsurprisingly I had little success, lost a couple of pounds of water weight and then went back to exactly what I'd been doing before and put it all back on again.
So what's changed this time? you might ask
Community Boards I have never before used the Community Boards on My Fitness Pal, there is so much useful information and so many helpful people on there. The first day I had no clue what all the acronyms meant there were BMRs, TDEEs, LCHF, IF, HIIT the list was endless. Using the forums also helps me to keep focused on the topic of weight loss.
Setting a sustainable goal Anyway I spent a couple of days educating myself between the forums and my best pal google and got a good figure for a sustainable weight loss rate, which is far above the dreaded My Fitness Pal baseline of 1200 calories. My magic number was actually between 1500-1600 net this time around which didn't seem so terrifying to someone who was in the habit of eating around 2100-2500 per day.
Accountability Buddies not one of my friends is interested in weight loss, not in a serious way, anyway and as such I had noone to talk about weight loss, food and exercise. This is where my lovely fit fam come in - I started adding people from the forums who had similar goals or similar attitudes and start my own group for weekly weigh ins as I couldn't find one to join.
Eating food I like I decided that meal planning would be the best method for me to maintain my calorie goal to the best of my abilities. I have bought a couple of 2nd hand low cal cook books and downloaded a few free kindle books. I found some great swaps for tasty comfort food that I can prep in advance. I am now a firm fan of #mealprepsunday. I haven't had to drastically change what I'm eating as a result and even fit the odd Dominos into my weekly food plan. I haven't restricted any type of food from my diet and that makes it so much easier to stick to.
Quitting the gym and doing exercise that I enjoy I haven't made proper use of a gym membership for over 10 years, and yet I have been a member of a gym for most of those years. I can never motivate myself to go out once I am in from work, particularly in the winter (80% of the year in Ireland or so it seems) the solution = don't go out to do the exercise. I now do all my workouts at home a combination of Youtube videos which includes Weight Training, Low Impact Cardio, High Intensity Interval Training, Yoga and Pilates. I do these 4-5 days per week including weekends. On a weekday it's the first thing I do when I get in from work and on a weekend it's the first thing I do in the morning.
Realised that it's a lifestyle change not a quick fix The weight I have gained didn't go on overnight, and I've come to realise that there are no quick fixes for a lifelong healthy weight loss/maintenance so it's not going to come off overnight either. I've made my peace with the fact that I will need to log accurately for at least a year or two to get down to my goal weight.
Bought a food scale I always thought of people who weigh food as obsessive to the point of eating disorder level. But now that I've seen the difference between my best guesstimate for a bowl of cereal (30g/50g), a portion of chips (100g/300g), butter (5g/12g)and the actual weight of what I was eating, I've now come to see the food scale as one of my most helpful tools.
Weighing daily I remember being told everywhere online "Don't weigh in daily" but it's actually helping me out a lot I can see how different things in my life, not just what I eat, can cause water retention and this has stopped me from freaking out when the scale dramatically goes up 1kg overnight.