I'm patooyee's brother, down about 13-14 lbs so far this year (267 to 253), pretty steady at 1.5 per week. After about 60 days I got kind of burnt out and took a 2 week break and ate healthy but did not put food into the app and didn't gain but didn't lose. Couple things that have been working for me...
- Eating beans as a replacement for white carbs. I eat beans with breakfast and as a side with dinner. They make me feel full longer. In general I feel like white starchy carbs take a lot to fill me up, leave me hungry an hour or two later.
- Eating way more vegetables. Sometimes with dinner I have a huge bowl of frozen vegetables with some butter on them. Takes forever to eat, fills me up. I like sugar snap peas the best.
- Drinking lots of water, have cut out diet sodas even. I feel like diet sodas make me hungry for some reason. Instead when I drink water I feel better.
- Getting more sleep. I do so much better when I am well rested. Much easier to make good decisions. This is probably the hardest thing for me, I can't shut everything off/put the book down and go to sleep, tend to want to stay up to 11-12 need to make that 10.
- Exercise. Seems like it is way easier for me to eat more net calories and burn some off then it is to just stay under my calorie goal with food alone. On weekends I like to get lots of exercise and then eat a bunch. Saturday I had a normal/light) breakfast and lunch but I biked with my son, ran stairs for 20 minutes, jogged 2 miles, biked 3 more miles fast by myself and going into dinner had like 2100 calories left for the day. I grilled big juicy cheeseburgers (90/10 ground) and had two big burgers, hash browns, and sugar snap peas. Ate until I was about to pop and still was under my calorie goal by a good bit. Felt great to be stuffed but also did not feel guilty because I got tons of exercise, probably built some muscle, and still ended well under my net calorie goal. So sort of felt like a cheat day but without the guilt of being way over on calories.
- Vegetarian days. Not for the sake of becoming a vegetarian...for the sake of challenging myself to think outside the box on food. It feels very weird at first but then I think it has helped me get used to the idea that a meal does not have to be 80% a big hunk of meat and gravy. Challenges me to put more effort into finding receipts and cooking good veggies and sides instead of always focusing on the meat and the sides are just an after thought. Eventually I would like to have some healthy vegetable receipts that are the focus of the meal.
- Finding/replacing high calorie foods that you eat every week with alternatives. Example, bread. We were eating normal whole wheat bread, 110 calories a slice. We found some high fiber whole wheat bread that is 50 calories a slice. So now if I have a sandwich the bread is 100 calories instead of 220. More chicken instead of ground meat...like taco night is chicken breast slow cooked now instead of ground beef. Egg whites with one egg for flavor, mustard instead of mayo or miracle whip, stuff like that.
- Snacking on good snacks helps me a lot. Apples, carrots and hummus, piece of fruit, etc. I try to keep that next to me at work so when I get hungry I don't end up in the break room eating whatever cake, cupcake, or cookies is in there. I find if I have a healthy snack I can easily resist but if I have nothing but that it's very tough to resist and I end up eating crap I don't even really like (not big on sweets).
Probably can think of some more but those are what stand out.
