[Donald_S]

I may not be saying anything original here, but I had a revelation about the process of losing weight. I did what most people do, diet for awhile, lose weight, then get the pounds back. Then I learned something that in all the diet and exercise stuff was never really explained to me.

(The numbers I'm using here are general, but the idea is the key).

If you weight 200 lbs, you need roughly 2000 Calories a day to maintain that weight. So say you cut that to 1800 Calories and you drop 20 lbs over the course of a year or so. Guess what? You will lose no more weight. At 180lb you need 1800 Calories to maintain. And you if you go back to your old ways, you'll be back up to 200 lb. There are many calculators on the web that will give you a rough idea of the Calories you need to reduce to get to the weight you want.

The trick about weight loss that I never really got is that you HAVE TO MAKE PERMANENT CHANGES to your Calorie intake.

If you make those changes, you'll lose weight and keep it off, so a diet doesn't matter. If you diet but then don't make those changes, you'll gain all of the weight back, and so the diet doesn't matter.

It can actually be kind of depressing that if you used to be able to have dessert every day, you may have to permanently give it up in order to drop your weight and keep it off.

So the process is completely different than dieting. You have to figure out how to permanently reduce your Calorie intake. Portion control is the easiest way. It's not a matter of suffering for a few weeks or months. It's about lifestyle changes. Learn how to be satisfied on fewer Calories per day.

This forum of course will have a 1000 great ideas about how to do that. Just remember it's not about sacrifice, it's about changing. It's a low calorie salad dressing *all the time*, a small fries instead of a medium *all the time*, etc, etc. Do that and you will lose weight, and not have to suffer and not have to diet. The weight will come off. Not fast, but it will. And most importantly, it will stay off.

Donald

[carolr3639]

Amen.

[EagleRiverDee]

Originally Posted by Donald_S

The trick about weight loss that I never really got is that you HAVE TO MAKE PERMANENT CHANGES to your Calorie intake.

Bingo. There's a lot of paths to achieve that, though, and it doesn't have to be painful. For me I really like a combined paleo + IF approach. I can still eat amazing tasting food and if I want I can use IF to save up my calories for one main meal and have a major feast.

[LittleBlueCat]

Excellent point!