A year and a half ago, I was exactly where you are now, just a little shorter. I weighed 150 pounds, wore a size 14 and was quickly headed to size 16. Losing weight felt completely impossible. But you are off to a great start.
What you are doing--exercising and counting calories--is exactly what I did to lose weight and it absolutely works (I'm now down to 118 pounds--115 in the morning--and wear a size 2/4
). It was slow going in the beginning, so give yourself some time. If you keep at it, I'm sure you'll start to see a difference.
I made a lot of mistakes in the beginning around food choices--on limited calories and with added exercise, you do have to make smart choices or you will end up being hungry. A couple of suggestions:
- Eat a high fiber, high protein, low sugar cereal for breakfast with skim milk or unsweetened soy milk. Or try oatmeal. Or a protein shake. The canned fruit you are eating is really high in sugar without much else to fill you up. If you want to eat fruit for breakfast, I think you would be way better off with fresh fruit.
- Salads can be your best friend. I eat a BIG salad every day with my lunch and again with dinner. A cup of lettuce has only 5-10 calories, so you can eat a lot of it without blowing your calorie budget. Find some low-calorie dressings that you like or try salads with balsamic vinegar, fresh lemon juice, or salsa instead of dressing (but not all three at once, that would be bad ). Add veggies like tomatoes, cucumbers, radishes, celery, peppers, carrots, etc. to make the salads more interesting. My lunch salad is tomato, cucumbers, raspberries, basil, sea salt, pepper, and balsamic vinegar (I actually eat it with a spoon to get every last drop of vinegar).
- Bulk up recipes with veggies. I double or triple the veggies in just about everything I make--it increases the amount of food I'm eating without significantly increasing the calories.
- As others have suggested, don't drink beverages with calories. Try water, iced or hot tea or coffee (unsweetened, artificially sweetened, or with just a little sugar), diet soda, Crystal Light or similar drinks.
- Try to work some lean protein or fiber into your lunch. Some great ideas are brown rice; beans; canned tuna, salmon or chicken; lean lunch meats like turkey or fat free ham on low-calorie whole wheat bread (I shoot for bread that is 90 calories or less per slice--there are a lot of excellent choices out there). Soup for lunch always leaves me hungry, esp. canned soup which tends to have a lot of broth and not a lot of actual food. Instead of 2 cups of soup, try one cup of soup over one serving of brown rice (look for pre-cooked frozen brown rice that you can just pop in the microwave or cook up a big batch on the weekend and freeze it in individual servings).
The longer you do this, the better you'll get at it. You'll eventually figure out what to eat to stay within your calorie budget without being hungry. For most of the time I was dieting, my calories were limited to 1200 to 1400 per day and so long as I made smart choices, I wasn't hungry all the time.
As I said, it was pretty slow going for me in the beginning and I definitely felt the same level of discouragement you are feeling. I had carried around my extra 30 pounds for so long I wasn't convinced I really could lose it. I seriously worried that I had somehow screwed up my metabolism and wouldn't be able to lose weight. What really helped me was to set a long term goal. I started counting calories on Nov 7, 2005 and I told myself I would give it until the end of February 06 (when I had a trip to Mexico planned). If I didn't see any progress by the end of February, I would try something else. I'm not sure what else I would have tried but it never came to that anyway--by the time February rolled around, I had made noticeable progress. In fact, by the end of December I was down about 5 pounds and from that point on the pounds came off pretty steadily until I got down to about 125. But having that long-term goal in the beginning really helped me get past the short-term lack of progress.