I don't know how I did it some months ago starting to lose weight. I was doing so good and I was proud of myself, but now I'm right back at the beginning, gained the weight back and much more. I'm at my heaviest. I actually hit over 300lbs. I don't know how I got started, but I really need some help. It always the first 2 weeks that's the hardest. Any advice please?

to you, first of all. I'm so glad you posted this because I've had times when I was so off plan that I actually avoided this wonderful source of support.

My advice would be to just take it one day at a time. Start and make a commitment to stay on plan for an entire day. Visualize how you'll feel when you wake up the next morning knowing you have managed to stay on plan!

Get rid of all temptations from your home too. Once you finish one day, you'll do another and another and so on.

Do you have a plan that you can follow? I love calorie counting. When I first started, I just ate things that I knew the calories of and then as I became more confident, I was able to eat more and more foods. Now, it's a part of my life.

Please don't give up! Keep posting and keep trying and you will find yourself feeling so much better a year from now if you do!

How do you plan to lose weight? It's not good to leave it "to chance"--it works better to have a specific plan in place. Doesn't have to be inflexible, but it does help to have it there.

If what you tried before doesn't work well for you now, consider trying something else, some other reasonable program. If you did Weight Watchers, consider South Beach. If cooking isn't your thing, check out food delivery programs. You have lots of options.

Choose your plan, set a start date, and go with it. Don't second guess yourself. Don't put it off "one more day."

Jay

I agree with Jay about trying something new. It took me five long years to get started. Finally, I decided to try something more radical (17-day diet), which had limited food choices. I know it seems strange, but at that point, strict limits on what I could and could not eat helped me. It make it simpler to start and just stock my refridgerator with the "allowed" foods. I only stayed on that one week, but it gave me the kickstart I needed to start calorie counting again. That was June, and you can see from my ticker that I've been doing pretty well. Sometimes, I still cannot believe that I actually did it---I actually DID get started with a plan after five years of being unable to.

Start now. You'll be glad you did in a couple of months.

I remember you! Welcome back. Glad you found your way back home!

The thing that has helped me recently is going back and re-reading all of my old posts from the very beginning of when I started this journey. I read about my struggles, my joys, my failures and my successess. It has really helped remotivate me.

Maybe the same will happen for you?

You can do this, stasiagurl.

When I was first getting started, it helped me to sit down and take a look at the behaviors that had gotten me fat and were keeping me fat, and think about which behaviors I could manage changing right then. I didn't try to change everything at once. A nice thing about being very overweight is that it usually doesn't take major drastic changes to start seeing results - you can add more drastic changes later on once the ball gets rolling.

After I analyzed my behaviors and chose some non-drastic changes to make, I then set up a little reward system where I gave myself "points" each time I made a good food or exercise choice. I tallied up the points and redeemed them every week or so buy buying myself some new music.

I can't tell you what non-drastic changes you need to make, because your behaviors are likely different from mine. But for me, in the beginning (I mean the first couple of months of my process), all I had to do was "not be a pig" (that's really how I put it to myself) - reasonable portions of the food I was already eating, not taking seconds, not having a drink every night, not eating dessert or cookies or treats every single time I had the opportunity to do it.

Later on, I got more rigorous with calorie counting and planning and other choices. And I didn't use the "points" reward system for very long either - after a couple of months, the continued success was its own reward for me. But in the beginning, just to get started, when I was >100 pounds overweight those more manageable changes were enough to get the ball rolling.

Good luck and good strength!

Thank you all! I started exercising again and am working on the hardest part, my diet. I love how supporting everyone is on here. I missed it