I've been saying that I would not graduate from high school fat for the last four years. Now, I've got three months left and I weigh pretty much the highest I ever have and I need help!

My goal? Go from my current 190 to 165 by June 1st. That means I have to knock off two pounds a week, which is possible, but doesn't leave much room at all for screw-ups.

I've got a plan, or at least the beginnings of one. I've been starting to eat healthier. Breakfast is either a lean cuisine and fruit or a bowl of cheerios with a banana. Lunch is a cliff bar with some fruit, but then I get home from school and everything just goes to ****. I'm going to try to kick myself in the butt and get some self control. My downfall has always been how I eat basically an entire meal between lunch and dinner when I get home from school, but I'm cutting that out and replacing it with filling veggies! So, that's the food thing.

For me, exercise is the fun part. I'm fairly out of shape, even though I play varsity lacrosse, so I'm trying to add additional running to my four practices or games a week. I've been running an extra mile after practices and I've gone on a couple two mile runs on non-practice days. I'm just going to ramp up the extra running and hopefully it'll help!

So, I have a plan, but planning is so much easier than carrying it out! I'm out of delay time. I don't want to go off to college and meet new people the way I look now. Sure, I've got the summer, but ideally I'll be losing another 20 pounds then.

Now, where ya'll come in. Please help me! I need support, I need cajoling, I need firm kicks in the butt, and possibly long angry lectures. So, who's got my back?

I think you could do it. Though I think need to add more protein in your diet. Protein burns slower leaving you full longer, so you don't go downhill at the end of the day.

Good luck with this, I am sure you can do it.

I always had problems with the time between school and dinner, and becoming a teacher and still working school hours did me no good. I finally found that if I planned a small (read portion controlled) snack for after school, I could hold off chow time until dinner.

I particularly enjoy oranges, artichokes with a spritz of lemon, rice crackers, and things like that. (It varies by time of year and what is available.) If I want to chew more after that, I have a glass of water and then chewing gum.

Since after school is when I exercise, I have found that going right into a workout also helps stave off the munchies. Additionally, if you can convince your family, try to get dinner served earlier. It is much easier to put off pre-dinner eating until (say) 5:30 pm than it is to wait til 7 to have dinner, which was my normal dinner time for years before I learned this trick.

I know you can do it. It'll be hard work, and take practice, but if you can get these kinds of habits down now, you will be in great shape for when you go off to college and have to make these kinds of scheduling/eating/exercising decisions on your own.

Cheers.

A few thoughts on the pigging out:

1) The biggest factor if it was me, would be that Clif bar. Having never had one, I looked them up. While they are loaded with good for you stuff, they are also loaded with sugar, which will send you into crave mode. I learned the hard way not to trust prepackaged bars.

2) I highly suspect you are eating too little at lunch, and that is what is making you want to eat so much.

3) Drink more water. We are often thirsty when we think we're hungry. It will fill you up.

4) Also, the exercise thing. Any time you feel like eating and you know you're not actually hungry, take a quick walk or jog. Studies show that physical activity can curb off cravings.

That's all I got for now. Good luck.

I would knock off the cheerios. They are not the best choice, they are full of sugar. Cliff bar also won't suffice as lunch. Are you having in between brekkie and lunch? If not, you should have. I have been unable to eliminate carbs completely from my eating but at least I try to keep them to minimum and always paired with protein. E.g. a whole wheat English muffin with an egg omelete and some turkey breast (deli cold cut).

Good ideas already! I'm definitely going to try fixing a couple of the things ya'll suggested, maybe switching up my lunches/dinners.

I started the day off really rough, but it's been under control since around eleven. I ate: BLT sandwich (roughly 600 calories), ice cream (400), and chocolate (300). Awful! But, that kept me from being hungry for a long time, but since then I've had a lot of red bell pepper and snap peas. I'm just going to have a lean cuisine for dinner and more snap peas if I get hungry, and that will keep me from going too many calories over my goal of about 1700 a day. I haven't gone running yet like I planned, but hopefully I'll go to the gym with a friend in a couple hours.

I keep getting screwed up because my parents left me all sorts of dessert that we usually never keep in the house for the weekend since they're out of town. I have ice cream and chocolate and it's killing me! I did go buy myself some healthy stuff - I really like red bell pepper, snap peas, and pears! - but I've just messed my day up with the unhealthy stuff. Oh well, just forward motion!

Can you pack a lunch? Filling up better at lunch might help carry you better into the afternoon. I don't know Clif bars specifically but when I ate little bars for lunch they worked for like an hour and then I was hungrier than before. Or those SlimFast shakes! OMG I was always starving when I tried those.

I bring lunch every day in a locking plastic tupperware (I think it's a Lock n' Lock knockoff) and 2/3 of it is filled with at least 3 bulky veggies and fruit: carrot sticks, snow peas, cucumber and tomato chunks, grapes, cut up pears or apples depending on the day.

The other 1/3 is a carb/protein combination: half a sandwich, mini quiche (baked egg with mushrooms or veggies), Rykrisp crackers or a lo-cal wrap with cheese or tuna or peanut butter, bean salad, etc. I found that adding a protein in every meal helped me.

I get a lot of ideas from bento web sites. Nothing fancy with faces or whatever; just a colorful arrangement of 4-5 different things in the box. Having lots of bright little things also seems more filling and special to me than a sandwich of the same calories. "The eyes eat too."

If packing lunch won't work maybe try looking for a high fiber bar. In general fiber is your friend. Cheerios are better than Froot Loops for breakfast, but a bran cereal or steel cut oats with a few nuts or milk might carry you longer.

Also this might be a weird thing that only works for me ... but my after school (before workout) snack is prepared on a plate, which is my special snack plate, and eaten sitting at the table. It's like, OK, this is a proper nice snack that I made specially for me -- not just "grazing around in the kitchen", which makes it easier for me to go back for more. Also, big honking glass of water, and a little coffee (homemade, not the Starbux etc) if I need extra motivation.

Sometimes there are lunch veggies left over in the lunchbox and I eat those first. They're free! Because I already counted those calories for lunch, mwa ha ha ha.

Are you looking at calories at all, BTW?

Can you just throw out the ice cream and chocolate that they left behind? Having that stuff lying around is a sure-fired way for me to fail!

Viatre,

My daughter is in high school and has put on about ten pounds this year. We were talking yesterday, and I noticed her eating pattern is a lot like yours-- she runs late a skips breakfast entirely, barely eats, or skips lunch, and then inhales food when she gets home from school, which sometimes is late due to sports practice...

I'm a terrible mom because I usually serve dinner around seven.

We are trying to come up with a strategy that will work for her-- the key to the plan is a much bigger breakfast and lunch, a planned snack, and an earlier dinner.

Is your mom the type that you can enlist to help? If so, she might be able to help you to arrange things to work a little more in your favor.

Thanks guys for the support! I weighed in at 187.5 this morning, which is definite downward motion and that is wonderful since yesterday was a little iffy.

As for the sweets, I guess I have a slightly different attitude than most of you. I feel that I need to have them around and I need to be able to say no. I don't want to cut myself off completely from foods I like. I want to limit them but not just say no outright, because that does not help me move forward, that makes me throw a little temper tantrum.

I'm going to start improving my first two meals, at least a little. I've started packing a lot of veggies for lunch, big bags of peas and bell pepper, but maybe I'll up the quantity. For me, however, being hungry isn't the main issue. If it's just simple hunger I am quite capable to making myself wait until my planned meal or snack in a little while, it's all a mental game for me. It's when it gets into my head that I'm depriving myself or that I shouldn't have to do this, that's when I go crazy and eat things I shouldn't. I don't know if all that makes sense. I've been trying on and off to lose weight for the last six years and cutting out anything completely is the easiest way to send me back beyond square one.

We'll see how today goes, just taking it one day at a time.

Goals for today:
- Drink at least 6 big glasses of water
- Try to eat different foods for more protein
- Run at least 1 mi in addition to lacrosse practice
- Avoid sweets until evening, then I can have some ONLY if I am under my calories for the day
- Rough calorie goal: 1700

I think I'm going to keep my daily calories at 1700 for now because its a very easy, comfortable number to attain but I'm still losing weight, at least initially. Whenever it stops working I'll start lowering it slowly.

Thanks guys!

Your goal is basically my goal, and your weight mine (I'm 5'6). Of course, you're 17 or 18, and I'm 38, so there's a metabolic difference there, and I've already lost 70 pounds, so there's another metabolic difference, but the issue remains that we're on roughly the same footing.

If you want to have a fairly drastic weight loss of 2 pounds per week (including toning, because you will be building muscle as well), you need to be soooo careful not to blow most of your calories (1300) at lunch time. I see you've picked 1700 as your "max" per day, you need to further budget that out during the rest of the day, like this...

Your instinct of having "another" meal at snack time isn't wrong, you may want to have something like this:

Breakfast 300 calories
Lunch 400 calories
Snack 300 calories
Dinner 400 calories
1400 total calories, gives you 300 free calories to allocate wherever you want (or a bedtime snack)

Now, it's just like money. You keep track. If you only "Spend" 200 calories on breakfast, 300 calories on lunch, and 200 calories on snack, you have 300 extra calories that you can put toward dinner (and if you use your bonus calories you could spend a total of 1000 calories, maybe you wanted to go out for pizza with your friends and you knew how many calories it was for what you wanted).

I realize it's not fun. But if you don't learn the way it works now, you'll end up with a lot more than 25 pounds to lose. Take it from me, you don't want to learn the hard way.

You shouldn't be hungry at all...that's bad for your weight loss (I know it doesn't make sense, but it's true!) You should be able to munch your peas and peppers whenever you want, it's good that you like them.

Having treats in moderation (as long as you count them in your budget of calories and leave room for the food you need) is fine.

It sounds like you are making good decisions.

It's good that your are starting to change your habits. I am all for gradual change - this is probably very personal, some people are capable of doing it in one big gigantic leap, myself, not so much. Over time, I changed my eating habits but it still doesn't mean that I don't stumble (or, errr, fall flat on my mouth) here and there.

Without looking up the nutritional info of green peas, I think peas are very starchy, so you may want to check that out and perhaps think of less peas but adding another veggie. I make myself a huge salad each day (typically it consists of baby spinach, chopped up red pepper, some grated carrot and chopped up cucumber. (I know that cucumber doesn't do much for me but I just love the taste). Often, I add either some chicken breast or canned tuna to have some protein.
I am fortunate that I eat (and like) lots of different veggies - the hard part is to be disciplined and have everything prepped up and packaged the night before. I don't have a problem eating raw beets - I actually love the taste - and I found out that raw red cabbage (maybe I was a rabbit in previous life? ) is a wonderful snack that's also very filling. (I am making sure I am eating my rainbow of veggies).

Sugar Snap Peas

Nutrition Facts
Serving Size: 3/4 cup
Amount per Serving
Calories 35 Calories from Fat 0
% Daily Value *
Total Fat 0g 0%
Saturated Fat 0g 0%
Sodium 140mg 6%
Total Carbohydrate 6g 2%
Dietary Fiber 2g 8%
Sugars 3g
Protein 2.0g 4%

Green Bell Pepper:
Nutrition Facts
Serving Size: 1 large bell pepper (164g)
Amount per Serving
Calories 33Calories from Fat 3
% Daily Value *
Total Fat 0.3g0%
Saturated Fat 0g0%
Trans Fat 0g
Sodium 4.9mg0%
Potassium 287mg8%
Total Carbohydrate 7.6g3%
Dietary Fiber 2.8g11%
Sugars 3.9g
Protein 1.4g3%