how did you lose weight as an adult?

My wife and I have gone on and off Keto/Low-carb diets when we start gaining weight and it works really well for both of us I ended up losing ~30lbs in the first four months. I haven’t really had to watch calories at all as the diet itself will usually naturally lower your calorie intake for the same volume of food. I don’t work out at all as I don’t have the time in my schedule between kids, work, and social obligations. I’m a programmer as well so all of my work is done sitting at a desk

If I cut out all sugar and nothing else changes, I will start to loose weight slowly.

Keto has been extremely effective for me. Highly recommend it. No carbohydrates no sugar.

For those looking for a Lemmy weight loss community, visit !loseit@discuss.tchncs.de and help us grow one!

I am doing it the real fuckin hard way.

When I started (May 7th) I weighed 270lbs. I am 5'5", so that makes me about as round as I was tall. I am in my 30s, so I was just an absolute ticking time bomb, heart on the brink of explosion. I was also having some less emergent but still very irritating physical issues such as not being able to properly clean myself (too fat to reach) and when I would lay back in my recliner I would feel my neck fat choking me. I reached a point where I had to do something right that second and no matter what it was or how "unhealthy" of a method, it's not worse than dying of a heart attack in my own living room with a tub of ice cream in my lap and a box of oreos on my end table.

So that day I basically cut to 1 very small meal per day. Less than 500 calories. I do that 6 days per week, but on Friday I eat whatever I want, a full 3 meals usually. Some weeks I've eaten 5000 calories on Friday, but my deficit is so strong it doesn't even matter. I also started walking. For the first few days it was no less than 10k steps, but I quickly jumped to 15k. After only about 3 weeks I jumped up to 25k as a goal and I achieved it most days. Eventually, and as of now, 25k is a hard and fast rule and I try to do 30k. I havnt gotten less than 25k since early June.

See the thing is, BMI tells me I need to weigh between 109 and 148. I do think that the top end of that is on the low end of what I actually think I should weigh, given my more muscular build, but regardless, I was twice that.

I only weigh on Fridays (it's a mental thing) and as of this past Friday I weighed 213.6. I am still on a very hard cut with my immediate goal being to get under 200, which I should reach before the end of August. Once I'm back in to 100s I'll reevaluate my calorie intake and the speed at which I'm losing.

Currently my estimated TDEE is around 3100 calories and I am losing 4ish pounds per week. If I dial that back to 2.5-3 lbs per week once I get under 200 then I think I can just coast on down to 165 which is what I am currently calling my "goal weight". I fully understand that when I get there I will likely want to keep going since I am guessing 150 or so is where I will be most pleased with how I look. I have not always been morbidly obese. 15 years or so ago 150 was the sweet spot so I imagine it's gonna be somewhere in that neighborhood, but we'll cross that bridge when we get to it.

diet and exercise

I’m not an expert but I have successfully lost about 100 pounds so I’ll try and give you some lessons learned. Basically, all that matters is that you eat less calories than you but .

So there’s 2 parts of the formula. What you consume and what you burn. Different types of diets can help you towards the goal of consuming less but none of them are magic, you have to eat less calories than you use. The other side is what you burn. You have a base metabolic rate which is the calories you burn just existing. You also burn calories through exercise. So you have to eat less than your base metabolic rate plus the amount burned during exercise if you want to lose weight.

There’s a saying that you lose weight in the kitchen. Basically, you’ll never workout enough to overcome a bad diet unless you’re a serious athlete. Here is a bit of back of the envelope math. Running for half an hour burns about 350 calories. If you run 7 days a week that’s 2,400 calories. A pound has about 3500 calories. So if you’re running half hour a day, you’re not even burning a pound a week. And this is probably more exercise than most people will reasonably do. Exercise has a lot of benefits and you should be doing cardio at least most days and it will boost your weight loss but alone, you’ll probably eat more and end up not losing anything.

To track calories and exercise and figure out how much you should eat, there’s apps that help. I started with my fitness pal which has become a bloated convoluted mess but still has the biggest food library and I believe is free to use. I’ve moved to Lose It which costs 20 bucks a year and is very much worth it. The food database is really good and the interface is straightforward and easy to use. Basically you type the food you ate in to the app and it shows you options.

People have a tendency to under estimate their calories so I tend to make an effort to go high to try and balance it out. Unfortunately, this isn’t an exact science. If you think you’re doing everything right and still not losing weight, dig in to whether you’re accurately entering your food (maybe you had 2 servings instead of one, maybe the database is wrong, etc) or forgetting to add things.

In terms of diet, I started with very strict keto, which is just not eating carbs, and lost a lot of weight fairly easily. Basically, you eat a diet high in fats and protein which is supposed to do magical things for fat burning. I don’t think it does anything magical. But carbs are cheap energy so your body processed them quickly and you get hungry. Fast and protein take longer to process so you feel full longer and way less. I am not a scientist or nutritionist but this is my oversimplified understanding and it matches with my experience.

I’ve abandoned strict keto for what I call lazy keto. I don’t count carbs but I do make low carb choices as often as possible. So instead of a sandwich, maybe I’ll do a wrap with a low carb tortilla. For dinner, I tend to try to just eat a simple meat with a roasted vegetable. Just be careful with sauces and you can’t really go wrong eating this way - meat item plus vegetable item meals.

I also have gotten in to intermittent fasting which helps a lot in cutting down calories. I did one meal a day for a long time which is what it sounds like. I only ate in the evening in about a 2 hour window every day. It’s not as hard as it sounds if you’re doing low carb. My doctor was skeptical it was a good idea but after doing a bunch of tests my cholesterol and triglycerides were lower than they’ve ever been. Now that I’m not trying to lose as much, I generally just don’t eat breakfast now. Some people can’t handle it but it’s a tool if you can do it.

Also, some more practical diet advice - never drink any calories. Learn to love black coffee. Quit drinking. A couple beers will destroy your diet. It’s nearly impossible to lose weight while drinking in my experience. If you do drink, vodka soda or gin and tonic type drinks are what you want. Don’t even buy unhealthy snack. Just keep chips and sweets out of your house. If you need to snack, eat vegetables. Air popped popcorn is low calorie. Cheese sticks can get you in trouble but are a good snack if you don’t over do it.

This all very hard to make yourself do. You should get in to the mindset that you’re changing your lifestyle and weight loss is secondary. You want to adjust your habits to be healthier so you can live a healthy life sustainably long term. But it’s a marathon not a sprint (cliches exist for a reason.) You will have days or weeks or months where you just fail hard and that’s okay. Just never stop trying and eventually you’ll get there.

For exercise, I highly recommend finding a physical activity you enjoy doing. Running on a treadmill or sitting on an elliptical is mind numbingly boring. I got really in to cycling and it’s fun. Currently I’m planning a 200 mile bike trip. If you liked roller blading as a kid, I see a lot more people on the trail on roller blades these days. Or maybe find a way to get back in to sports.

Hopefully something in there was helpful, happy to talk more about it.

Im pretty happy with body weight training. Short & easy but really try to do at least a little every single day to keep the habit up.

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A good routine if you don't have any equipment is to do some push-ups (you can do different types of push ups), do some push ups (also do different types), and some squats. If you manage to make a 100 of each that should get you in moderate shape IMO, maybe if you have fat in a specific part of the body and you want to get rid of that you should do some specific exercise in that area, but I think that's a workout plan that does not require that much time. Also don't try to do 100 push ups one after the other, you should try and do 10, then 20, and so on, and doing everything slowly is better than doing it fast.