You will probably have better luck and more responses if you check out either
Buddy Up! or
General Diet Plans, but I will do my best to answer your question here.
Bluntly put, there is no one thing that works for everybody. But most diet pills don't work for anybody!
As you know, there are two basic components to losing weight: diet and exercise. Here's my advice on them:
Exercise: First off, find something you
love to do! Me? I love walking. That's everyone's first exercise, isn't it? I mean, you're a year or so old, and you get upright and you start walking and it's look out world, here you come!
So it's built in to all of us, and it's especially good for those of us who are very out-of-shape. When I started out, my two-year-old was maybe a month or two old and what I'd do was strap her to my chest and walk around the park. She got older (and heavier) and I plunked her down in a stroller and walked. Now I've got a double stroller! (And goodness, twenty-five pounds of stroller plus twenty-four pounds of toddler plus nearly twenty pounds of seven-month old gives you quite a workout, even with wheels!) I even have a treadmill that is
not used as a plant stand!
But I enjoy other things too. I like lifting weights. So I do that (I'm following Body for Life right now). I like dance-type moves. So I do Callanetics (do an Amazon search for Callan Pinckney; her stuff is old but really great). I do a sprinkling of yoga and Pilates. I love to try out new stuff. You dangle something new in front of me and I'm gonna grab for it.
Eating: My advice is to avoid any plan that over-restricts
any of the three main nutrients: carbohydrates, protein, or fat. Bottom line is, it comes down to calories in vs calories out. Sign up for
FitDay to track your calories. It's absolutely free. Sign up for a
3 Fat Chicks Journal--again, free. Keep a small spiral notebook with you for about a week, eat normally, jot everything down, and enter it all into FitDay when you can. That way, you can see how many calories you're taking in, and what nutrients. As far as specific plans, I'd recommend the South Beach Diet (there's a forum for that diet here, you can ask all sorts of questions) or SugarBusters! (also a forum here); those are the simplest to me, but South Beach gives you more guidance towards balancing your nutrients. A lot of people have also had beaucoup success on Weight Watchers.
Right now, I'm doing the Body for Life/Eating for Life program (with the assistance of eDiets for the food part; I'll bump up my eDiets info thread for you if I can find it). The basics: six small meals a day, balanced in carbohydrates and proteins and with a small amount of healthy fat, paired with six days of exercise: intense weightlifting rotating with 20 minutes of intense cardio. Seventh day is totally free, no exercise, no eating restrictions. The concept of a free day is frankly what drew me to the program, and it helps to keep me sane. (A life completely bereft of blueberry muffins is not worth living, IMO.)
Of course, diet and exercise
aren't all there is to it. Anyone who says that losing weight is a simple matter of eating less and exercising more deserves to be slapped, in my humble opinion. Diet and exercise cover the physical part of it. But you're not merely a physical body, are you? Nope, you've got a mind and you've got a heart and you've got a soul. And until you rope
those into your diet, you will never lose weight, not permanently. You have to get yourself into a losing mindset.
How? Again, it's different for everyone. For me, it was having my first daughter. She is a little miracle; I have PCOS which impairs fertility seriously (not to mention, makes it harder to lose weight!). So when I had her I knew I had to set a good example. That means not hating myself (actually, accepting your body is very important), and making sure that I give her the nutritional guidance I never had. My brother thinks I am insane, but when my daughter has a peanut-butter-and-jelly sandwich, it's natural peanut butter and sugar-free jelly on whole grain bread. Not the sugar-laden, nutritionally deficient crap
I ate as PB&J when I was a child. So she eats good food and she "ekkisizes" with Mommy (she has little 3lb weights that she carries around when I'm lifting!). And she's my motivation.
Support helps the mental part of the equation. This site is the best I know of for getting support in dieting. It's the only diet site I bother belonging to and using. I don't mess around with sites that are partisan towards one diet plan/way of eating or another. The easiest way to get confused is to bounce around from site to site trying to find your way when they're all saying their way is the One True Way.
There are other things you have to do, mentally. They all boil down to being honest with yourself. Why do you overeat? What are your triggers? Do you use food to hide from anything, even something in the past? Do you punish yourself by being fat, or use it as a way to hide? You have to be brutally honest with yourself and answer those questions in order to change your behaviors. Write it down in a journal (you can choose to have 3FC journal entries not viewable by the public, or you can buy a real one somewhere), and keep it to hand. You might need to remind yourself. I know I do.
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