I don't understand me, and I am begging, begging for help. I look at you all, and read all your posts, and admire you all. And I have been coming here every day, several times a day, but I've been feeling to embarassed to post.

So firstly, I want you all to know that even though I haven't been posting, I share all your triumphs and feel for you when you're down.

And if you have the time, I could use some advice.

How do I lose weight?

As I have posted from time to time, I have done OA, been inspired, and dropped it. I start exercising, then stop. Done South Beach, WW, etc., but never get far.

I am 100 pounds overweight, a single parent, my kids worry about my health, friends and family comment (in a good way, usually). I'm on blood pressure medication which recently my doctor had to add to because I needed a higher dosage.

What will it take to get me to just do it? I'm afraid to find out what it will take.

Any help out there?

I think the problem is you're depending on outside motivation. But you have to find it inside of you. That can happen right now, without any health disasters having to happen first.

You have to give some real thought to why you want to lose weight, what works and doesn't work for you, what obstacles do you know you come up against and how can you plan for them? Even think about what you gain from not losing weight. And what you might lose or find scary when you are successful at losing weight.

But in the end, you have to find it inside of you, that feeling that you are worth it, that your health is worth the cost to you.

Why did you quit? Why did you end up dropping OA? Why did you end up stopping the exercise?

We have to be honest with ourselves to move past this point. So many of us have started only to stop sometime after. When we can figure out why we stopped, it makes it a little easier to change the behavior and move past it.

Are you expecting too much of yourself from the beginning? Do you believe you need to be 100% all the time? I'm going to say something next that my college English essay professor would beat me with a ruler over. NO ONE ON 3FC IS 100% ALL THE TIME. No one. We stop, we stall, we stutter. But, we also pick up and move forward. It begins by accepting that we aren't perfect. The OA, did you have a slip-up and not go back? The exercise, did you begin too much too fast? My leader at a meeting recently said, it was better for us to begin to committing to 5 minutes of walking 3 times a week and sticking with it week after week than to take only one 30 minute walk. The point is to slowly build a habit over our lifetime.

Want to do this? Not try, but really do this? Then change one thing. One. For one day, focus on that one thing. For one week, get that one thing that you've changed done each day. Don't even wait until tomorrow! Dinner tonight, drink water instead of the usual drink. Or have steamed vegetables to compliment your meal.

Don't be afraid of what it will take. Because whatever it takes, I promise you losing weight gives back more!

Don't be afraid to post about the hard times, and don't be afraid to immediately jump back to the right track. Even if you start by drinking water today, but then tonight have a soda. That's not a failure. It means that today you succeeded in drinking mostly water.

Commitment, and habit building.

And the analogy that you've probably read a million times before on 3FC... weight management can be like paying bills. We don't always want to do it, in fact, given the choice if nothing bad happened by not paying our bills most people probably wouldn't! But, we have to, it's part of being an adult and taking care of things that need to be taken care of.

Just always remember that you can do this. It is 100% possible. Keep taking steps forward.

Honestly and truly the only thing that will make it happen is when YOU decide that you are ready to commit to it. For some people that just happens when they one day decide they're tired of being fat. For some people it takes a health issue. For some people it takes more. YOU have to decide for yourself what it will take.

I will tell you that one thing that has helped for me (and I say this *all* the darned time and I'm sure people get sick of hearing me say it! ) is this:

I finally realized that my life is full of things I don't really want to do, but that I do anyway because that's what a responsible adult does. I get up every morning and go to work. I pay my bills. I do laundry. I wash the dishes. I change the litter box. All of those things are things that I'd rather not do, given my druthers. Given my druthers, I'd lounge in bed most of the day, surf the internet, and spend my money on FUN things, rather than the electric bill and so forth.

And given my druthers I'd eat whatever I want, whenever I want, and never exercise.

But part of being a responsible adult is doing things I don't necessarily want to do, so I watch what I eat and I exercise. Not because I want to, not because it's fun, not because I'm motivated. Just because it's part of life.

That doesn't mean it can't be fun. I really enjoy my job, most of the time. I actually don't loathe paying bills most of the time. But every now and then I think "why can't I just not." And the answer is ... because you can't.

I think most people have to hit a point somewhat like that - where they say "this is the way it is" instead of trying to convince themselves why they should do it every day.

I hope that makes sense. It came out more rambling than it was in my head.

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I agree with Julie... weight loss requires three main things, imo and in my experience:

1. A sense of value in yourself, a sense that you deserve to be healthy and to make a commitment to yourself to change your weight.

2. MAKING that committment to yourself. YOU are worth all the trouble of eating good foods, making time to exercise, and you will do these things come **** or high water, come rain or shine, cold or hot, busy or bored, etc. That doesn't mean perfection, but it DOES mean that that committment to yourself is a priority in your life, as much as showering, brushing your teeth, paying your bills, etc. are.

2. Self-knowledge... figuring out what works for you, what doesn't work, what foods will help you towards your goal, which will derail your attempts, and using thet self-knowledge to further your committment.

That doesn't mean you will never screw up, and that doesn't even mean that even if you're virtually perfect, your body will always cooperate (I've been stuck in a plateau for years... sigh...) but these are the three elements that, in my experience, lead to lasting weight loss.

The point is, no one here can tell you how to lose weight; there are a zillion diets out there, all of which could potentially work for you, but step numbers 1 - 3 are what I wrote above, at least imo, and that stuff can only come from YOU to YOU.

Heh. Faerie beat me to it!

And another thing that I want to add that the brilliant kaplods says all the time about the whole giving up thing:

If you trip on the top stair, do you just throw yourself down the rest of the staircase in defeat? Or do you regain your balance and go on?

If you start something and mess up: Say you eat chips one day. Or you skip going to the gym. Or you give in to temptation and have 2 pieces of cake. Do you use that as an excuse to just quit? Or do you say "whoops, that was a mistake" and pick yourself up and go on?

It's a HUGE mindset change for many of us who feel that we have to be "all or nothing".



.

Ha! Photo, from whom do you think I first picked that tidbit up?

And an "Amen" to that stairs bit Kaplods is known to say as well!

Only you know what it will take for you.
For me it was a combination of my own health scare and a long stretch of watching people I love die too young. It really got me thinking about my life, my mortality. I knew that I wanted to make a change, a lasting change this time.
But I had to find a way to do it that I could live with and that wouldn't set me up for failure. And then I had to decide and believe it that I'm worth the change. I'm worth the hard work.
I have a long way to go but I truly believe that this time it's for life. I'm more educated than I've ever been about health and about my body and I have more love for myself than I've ever had. It's not about perfection but about increasing the healthy choices so that they far outweigh the unhealthy ones.
Really getting my head around the mental piece of healthy living is the difference for me this time.
I will do this because it's about the quality of my life in the years to come and I deserve to have a great life.
So do you!

So much wisdom shared already.

I agree you might want to look at why you stopped your other efforts. For me and my previous "stoppages", I was very into the perfectionist mentality. I slipped, put on a few, had a few meals off plan, a few days off exercise, thought why bother and reverted to old habits. What is different this time is that I know I control my next behavior and I get back on plan. You don't have to be perfect....consistency and "mostly" is actually good enough for most of us. I know you can do this. The readiness piece in important and that can only come from your own inner desire to change. You really do have the power to change.

I'd echo what the others said about it being the responsible adult thing to do. For years I felt sorry for myself because so many of my friends can eat what they want and not gain an ounce. I had to face the fact that I can't get away with that. It's really not that awful to be more careful about what I put in my mouth and how much. The rewards of losing the weight are so much better than abusing my body by overloading it with too much or junk food.
As for the type of program, you really have to figure out what works for you. I get too intimidated by diet plans. I have read a lot of books and tried so many different diets but they intimidate the heck out of me. I finally just decided to count calories. I work a lot and we have to grab meals quick. I have the calorie king book and Eat this, Not that. These help in figuring out what I can have at restaurants and fast food places. I know a lot of people don't eat out but I can't do it without that option. Taco Bell has the fresco menu. Jack in the Box has the chicken fajita pita. Subway has the lowfat sandwich menu. Grocery stores have grilled chickens and salad mixes. Applebees has the weight watchers menu. Mexican restaurants have fajitas. I eat all these things a lot. I eat the same breakfast every day, oatmeal with fat free milk and raisins. Lunches are weight watchers frozen meals. I pick up the grilled chicken strips at Costco and salad mixes. When I have time I use the crock pot too. You can do a lot of things that are low cal in the crock pot. I decided that I had to do what works for me, not what works for others. I also do the treadmill for 30 minutes five days a week. I push myself by upping the incline and speed on it so it's always a good workout. I hate exercise but I just do it, don't think about it even being an option not to. I try to get a walk outside with the family on the weekend too.
I have a friend who is doing the Trudeau diet. I'm not sure what all is involved with it, but from what I understand it's extremely low cal and organic. She doesn't exercise at all. She's lost 75 pounds. It works for her.
Sorry for the huge post, I hope it help you. Keep posting and reading here, it's so helpful!

I Went thought the same thing for so many years and i am only 25. Finally I decided i cant wish i would lose it or just complain about it i have to WANT to do it and that is that.

I got back on my diet this past week and i have already lost 8 pounds.

You mentally have to tell your self that you will do this because this is what YOU WANT. I know it is hard trust me i have been there but i know you can do it and everyone else here feels the same way.

I wish you all the best in the world.

Shannon

I knew my ears were burning for a reason, but seriously I have to remind MYSELF about those darn stairs pretty often myself.

I really think part of it is the "culture of dieting." Most of us try to lose weight according to "rules" we don't even know we believe, let alone have internalized. To illustrate, how much of this sounds familiar.

If you slip and eat something you feel you shouldn't do you.

A. eat what you want for the rest of the day, and start again tomorrow.
B. eat what you want for the rest of the week, and start again Monday.
C. give up completely, because this diet just isn't working for you
D. get right back on track.


If you lose 1/4 of a pound do you

A. give up this is just too hard
B. get discouraged, and berate yourself for not losing more
C. decide not to eat anything but water and vegetables this week
D. Celebrate the success



Learning to break cliche'd "diet habits" is very hard. It's still hard for me to accept mistakes and slow progress. It goes against everything I learned about dieting, by watching my mother, grandmother, and by reading every woman's magazine I'd ever read. Much of it I didn't even know when or how or even that I had learned it.

Literally in my family the rule was diets are started on a Monday, and if you slipped in your food plan on a Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday you ate like a hog the rest of the day, and got back on the diet the following morning. However, if you slipped later in the week, then you ate hog-wild through the weekend and started back on Monday.

It doesn't make sense. It never did make sense, but it's the pattern that I learned to follow - it was "how it was done." And when I went to Weight Watcher's meetings (my first at 8 years old) hearing the other ladies talk, I didn't unlearn those rules, rather they were reinforced.

To truly succeed in weight loss, I really believe many people have to unlearn most of what they think they know about weight loss.

Aside from the mental aspects of dieting, which are very important, I can't dismiss the physical either. Because changing my birth control and finding carb reduction, has been a miracle tool for me. I'm not sure that I could have sustained this journey so long, if I hadn't. Carbs, especially but not exclusively refined carbs, tend to make me extremely hungry - the kind of hunger that is very difficult to battle.

I feel I have to mention that, because I don't want anyone to think that this is always an exclusively mental battle. It can, and often is a physical, physiological one one as well.

It could take years, even decades for a person to master this, and you've got to be ready to put in whatever time it takes. It takes 10 years to become a sushi chef in Japan, some things take a very long time to master, and people keep working because they see the value in it. Weight loss is much the same. There may be prodigees, but there are also people who just keep practicing until they get it right (I'm definitely in the latter group).

Amen. Also, you mentioned what sounds like yo-yo dieting. In my experience it has to be a whole lifestyle change, because just "dieting" doesn't work.

Carinna has a point.

Because these are changes you're going to have to live with for the rest of your life, they must be changes you can live with FOR THE REST OF YOUR LIFE. In order to lose weight you will have to get outside your comfort zone, but rather than jumping with both feet out of that zone, you'll get much further just taking *one* step, then holding fast there for a while, until that new step has become part of your comfort zone, then taking another step, waiting for that to become familiar and comfortable before taking another. Rinse, repeat.

and repeat. and repeat.

In other words, don't look at it as something that you'll be doing for X months, years, etc. In fact, don't even look at it as something you'll be doing forever (because the thought of forever can be really overwhelming.)

Just look at it as something you're doing right now, today. And when the sun rises tomorrow, look at it that way again.

Avi,

You have to want to change what you are doing now. For me, I gave up all the diets, I can't tolerate going "off plan" and I am too much a black/white person, so I would be incredibly successful and then fall off the wagon in a huge way.

Now I am doing "mindful eating". I don't count calories. I just think about eating healthy, taking maximum pleasure in my food, and being aware of whatever I put in my mouth. It has helped enormously to become aware of being full, and to become aware of being hungry. (I never recognized hunger before.) I think a lot about "would a thin person eat this?" If the answer is yes, a thin person going to this special restaurant would have dessert, then I do it!

While I have a posted goal, I don't know if that will be my real stopping point, I may stop much beforehand.

I do know that a year ago I bought Beck and wouldn't read it because I didn't want to change my behavior. Not addressing the issue let me avoid it.

Only you can decide if you really want to change this enough to make it happen, or you just believe you should want to change.

Good luck whatever you decide.