Weight Loss Motivation

I am about to get back into intermittent fasting again. It makes a lot of sense and there is credible research that indicates IF and calorie restriction can turn on one's immune system, and that humans aren't meant to eat all day and night.

I generally follow the rule of letting 12 hours pass between when I eat dinner and when I eat (usually lunch) the next day. If you can do 16 hours more that is even better.

IF was pretty easy when I was going in to an office. I would drink coffee only when I woke up, head in to work, and I was busy until noon or later. COVID and full time telework and being near food all the time blew that all to Hell.

On the days when I let 16 hours pass, I feel better. I have also realized that although I like breakfast food like cereal, I am not really all that hungry in the morning and food tastes better during the hours of 12-8 p.m. I think I can live with eating lunch and dinner and really enjoying it rather than eating a bunch of smaller meals a day, which is conventional diet wisdom, but never worked for me. There is a lot of brainwashing about "breakfast is the most healthy meal of the day," probably promulgated by cereal companies.

Now that I am retiring, the key is to drink coffee only and go to the pool 3-4 days a week in the morning. Or plan another morning errand to get out of the house and keep my mind off food.

Another key for me is finding things I like to drink as opposed to eating. If I am going to fast, I want to be sipping on something tasty. I drink decaf flavored coffee with lots of almond milk and stevia or iced decaf tea with stevia. The Republic of Tea's Decaf Vanilla Almond and Decaf Ginger Peach teas are to die for.

Ohh yes, there is no better spice than hunger! Everything tastes so much better when I haven't eaten in 9-10 hours. I did make it to Aldi yesterday and I only got some things off my grocery list, but the keto ice cream wasn't great. I got the peanut butter fudge one and it actually had more of a coffee taste and I barely tasted peanut butter, which is weird because peanut butter is a very overpowering flavor. Halo Top is better in terms of taste and calories and they have far more flavors. I also bought some chicken sausage and tofu that I've seen on multiple low-carb Aldi shopping lists.

I drink so much every single day. I pee at work more than all my coworkers combined because I'm always chugging something. I'm not thirsty most of the time, I think I just have an oral fixation or something. I've found that carbonated things are great for keeping my appetite down because they make me feel fuller and more bloated.

Coffee (iced or hot), tea (iced or hot), seltzer water mixed with Mio or pureed fruit, flavored sparkling water (Walmart has really awesome large bottles called Clear American for like 70 cents - the strawberries & cream, orange & cream and vanilla cream are my faves), diet Powerade or Propel water with No-Salt mixed in for potassium, diet soda and just plain water are all my go-to diet drinks. Also protein shakes made with almond milk if you count those as a drink.

I still want to try bulletproof coffee sometime, but the idea of buttery coffee kinda makes me gag a little. I love coffee and I love butter, I just don't know if I will love them together. Those decaf teas sound really good too!

Thanks for the tip about Aldi. One just opened close to where I live and I'm going to check it out.

I tried some more of my Aldi diet haul. Bought the pizza flavored Parmesan cheese crisps and they taste good... if you like straight Parmesan cheese, which I do. There's a jalapeno flavor too with no carbs at all (the pizza ones are 2g carbs per serving). But at $5 a (small) bag, these aren't all that worth it, in my opinion.

The pre-cooked chicken sausages tasted reeeeally familiar to me, but I could not place what I've eaten before that had that flavor. Anyway, these were good!

Got something called beef bitlong, which is like thinner, drier beef jerky. I like jerky, but I didn't care for this stuff personally. I got the teriyaki flavor one, which didn't taste great to me.

Bought several drinks too. The Fit & Active lemonades have about 5 carbs per bottle, so not super great if you're watching your carb intake, but still really good for a diet drink. The sparkling waters I picked up are not sweetened in any way, so they're kinda bitter and gross. Very similar to Bubly if you've ever had that. Meanwhile, the sugar-free energy drinks (Red Thunder, I think) were really good and I'll definitely get those again.

I also finally got to try some Lily's peanut butter cups (made with stevia-sweetened chocolate) and they're... okay. They taste kinda funny from having no real sugar in them, but they weren't awful. They're all right for diet chocolate, but they cost $8 for a small bag, so I won't be buying them again.

Congrats Cambion on your weight loss! 90 pounds down is awesome.

I agree with the talk here about riced cauliflower. Breads and rice make me bloaty lately so having a rice substitute that is also low calorie and a veg serving is great.

I got into running a couple of years ago and it has helped me tremendously with weight loss and mood. I did Couch to 5K and it took me doing some of the weeks repeatedly but I finished it. I was never a runner before, in fact I couldn't run for one minute without getting winded but now have done a couple half marathons and lots of shorter races (COVID has pretty much screwed the race industry this year unfortunately, not great for my motivation!). I'm down 27 pounds and my weight has stabilized. Working from home for a few months and being cooped up inside really sucked though. I haven't been running as much as I did last year and I am constantly trying to maintain the habit so I don't lose what I've gained in terms of my pace and physical benefits.

My goal is now to firm up and lose body fat. I feel like I'm getting flabby and hate it.

Thanks, Ketchup! Sometimes it doesn't feel like I've lost that much because it comes off so slow that it seems like it's not coming off at all.

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I gave up on eating low carb, partly because I wasn't seeing any weight loss from it and partly because it was just getting annoying again not being "allowed" to eat so many things. I love carbs too damn much to give them up and I'm not doing low carb ever again.

So now I'm trying intermittent fasting again (16 hours of fasting, 8 hour nom window), first without strict calorie restriction to see what happens and if I don't see some progress in two weeks, I will go back to calorie cutting along with it. I'm starting to run out of options here - by all logic, eating fewer calories than I burn should result in weight loss, only it's not anymore. I was literally eating less than what my body needed to sustain its most basic functions (basal metabolic rate) and I still wasn't losing weight!

If I can't get below 200 pounds with a few weeks of IF, I'm going to a doctor because this is bullshit. My next options are to quit eating entirely (which I've done before) or to give myself a tapeworm.

Cambion, congrats on your achievement! I've lost a few pounds because I've been more physically active.

I tried bulletproof coffee, but it gave me a horrible gut ache. True I didn't eat, but that's because I felt like heaving all day.

Congrats on the weight loss, mum! Haha I bought a jump rope in the hopes of moving around a little more myself, but my mother's house is so goddamn cluttered that I literally have nowhere in the house with enough space to use it and it's too damn cold outside. I'd like to go back to playing DDR, but I think my dance mat is all fucked up.

I hated making bulletproof coffee because apparently blenders and hot liquids don't get along and I'd wind up cleaning a puddle of greasy coffee off the counter when the blender lid would inevitably get blown off. Tasted fine to me - not delicious, but fine - but it wasn't worth the mess. I'm a carboholic, so no sense fighting it.

I'm starting to get pissed at this point. I've cut down to 1000 calories a day and I dropped like 7 pounds in a week, then my weight came to a screeching halt yet again. I don't know why I keep stalling at the same weight. I figure this week's gonna be a bust because it's Thanksgiving and there's no way I can figure out how many calories are in what I'm going to eat, but I don't get why it only worked for a week either. I can't be that fuel efficient.