16 pounds lost 64 to go...

[Locut0s]

My max weight 2 to 3 weeks ago was 266. I'm down to 250 now. I plan to get down to about 180, maybe a little heavier. I've lost this much before so I know I can do it. Trouble is keeping it off.

[savebigbird]

1. Great job!

You've tackled one of the two hardest parts of losing weight! One is keeping the weight off and the other is getting started!

[fizzgig]

2. excellent start!

at one point i was about 60 down from my heaviest, but i felt that was too skinny and put a little bit back on.

keep up the good work!

[dixiegrrrrl]

3. Any tips?

I have been looking into low carb diets.

[Locut0s]

5. Hmm I'm not one to ask but I'll give you a few...

The proper way to lose weight is not the way I'm going about it. The best way is to find out your resting metabolism (how many calories you burn on a daily basis when not doing anything extra). This you can find you fairly easily online, there are calculators for it. Once you have that, construct a daily diet that is basically just that many calories PLUS a few hundred more. THEN add an exercise routine to this that burns those few hundred calories extra plus a few hundred more. So if your resting metabolism is say 1800 calories eat 2000 calories a day and do a 400 calorie workout. This means you would be burning a net 200 calories a day.

The reason this is the way to go is that it boosts your metabolism and makes sure you are burning fat and not muscle and keeps you in good cardio health. But it's also slow.

If you want to lose weight faster like me then just find your resting metabolism and construct a diet that's significantly less than that and keep at it every day. You can have a few splurge days here and there but for the most part stick to it. For example I'm on a 1000 to roughly 1500 calorie / day diet which is pretty drastic. I don't plan on sticking to this forever, just until I get down to my target weight. I'm also going to add exercise to the mix as I go. Once I get down to my goal weight I'll have to play around with diet and exercise will I'm at a happy equilibrium.

One thing you can do is get a calorie counting app for your smart phone. The one I'm using is called MyFitnesPal and has something like 3 million food items in its database. It will calculate your rest metabolism and then you just keep a daily food diary of everything you eat. It makes it easy to not go over and you can also track your weight loss over time.

[hunter]

4. When I'm not right I have the opposite problem. I don't eat and I lose weight.

Maybe it's not appropriate to post my own eating disorder here, but then again, maybe it's two sides of the same coin.

I've got to watch what I eat and I've got to be a little obsessive about it. Otherwise I fade away.

Whenever my mind is not right I simply don't care about food. Sometimes bad things happen, I lose weight and experience heart arrhythmias.

Good eating habits are habits I've had to very deliberately reinforce.

My diet this day probably sucks -- some cacahuate quemado (unsalted pan roasted peanuts), raw broccoli, and oranges, and that my be all I eat for the rest of the day. But I try to make a habit of eating nourishing things.

Better than Pringles and beer, right?

[Locut0s]

6. I hear you hunter. Would you believe I got down to 135 lbs once (I'm 6'1!)...

I was dangerously underweight. 135 to 260, that's quite the range! And when I'm heavy I eat any shit that I want and don't give a shit about anything. Pizza, fries, burgers, beer, I stuff it all in. I'm trying to be careful not to get too obsessive this time about my weight loss. I like seeing the number fall and I'm a perfectionist so this can get dangerous for me. When I latch onto something I go at it 110%, it's always been something I've had to watch out for. It can be good but I tend to burn out doing these things. And then when the rebound happens I get MORE depressed and the self hatred cycle starts up again.