Hey

In the last year I've lost 45lbs. Slowly my weight loss had become loss-gain-loss-gain and now after my vacation this summer, I'm up 10lbs. I was so desperately close to the 130s but I couldn't hold onto it. I'm in the 150s again.

The thing is, it's like my mind was in a total daze and the weight seemed to just fly away without me thinking about it. Then it decided to start coming back. It's like just now I'm waking up, realizing, "Wait a minute, wait a minute. This isn't where I want to be heading."

I'm going into 12th grade in two weeks, living at home, and my dad cooks healthy food for me. I'm in charge of my own eating, though, and I find myself doing a lot of social eating lately. Its like now that I'm thinner I have more confidence to make friends, but with more friends comes more activities in groups which usually leads to food. It's like it was easier to lose weight when I was lonely because I didn't ever go out and do anything fun, so I would eat at home all the time.

I feel like my activity level is standard. I'm active frequently but it's not always very strenuous, so I'm not terribly unfit but I wouldn't consider myself fit either.

I'm at my last 25lbs. I just want to get it off, because I know how to maintain my weight and I just want to get right into maintenance. I don't have much patience, but if it takes a year, that's fine. Can someone just tell me how to make a plan? I think my fatal weight loss flaw is that I don't plan to lose weight. It used to just kind of happen, but now I think I have to really stick my nose in and get'r'done.

How do you plan? How should I? I'm sure I could look for other planning threads but I want one that's personal to me so I can figure a plan for ME. Please help?

I apologize for the length of my ranting... thanks for reading.

You want to lose weight because you want to look better. Thus you should stop worrying about losing weight and start worrying about lifting weights.

Lifting weights will do more for your body composition than any other activity.

As for losing fat - calories matter. Since you're not in charge of your own food counting calories will be very tough thus the only thing I can suggest is to eat lots of protein and do not eat many (any) carbs that are not fruits and vegtables. Drop the bread, pasta, potaotes, rice etc.

Drop the carbs and lift weights.

I'm not a fan of crossfit except that they lift weights and combined with diet you can see the effect is has on women

I think making your own plan is a terrific idea. It's then one you can own and change as needed. I write down my food plan at night for the next day -- that way I can take into account things like "oh, I'll probably be invited to go out to pizza tomorrow." I can decide whether I'm going to say 'yes' or 'no' to that and decide whether I can handle one piece or two and, gee, maybe one piece and a big salad would be perfect. Going in with that already in my head makes it much easier!

My plan, now, is based on tons of experience of trying different things. Since I prefer omnivore plans, I started with the information at the USDA. They even have some cool tools for planning: http://www.choosemyplate.gov/

Lots of folks have good luck with calorie counting and getting calorie counts in your head is a pretty good life skill so you might want to try that for awhile just for the experience. There are all kinds of tools for finding the calories in foods online or on your phone or in a booklet.

You might find it useful to use something like SparkPeople (http://www.sparkpeople.com/) or LiveStrong (http://www.livestrong.com/) where you can type in what you ate (or what you plan to eat tomorrow) and see how it stacks up for calories and nutrition.