How do we succeed in this game of weight loss and maintenance?

How do we succeed in this game of weight loss and maintenance? I have been thinking about this for a long time, and I have been practicing and working at it even longer. Weight loss and weight maintenance is like everything in life it is what you make of it. We all have our wins and failures. We celebrate the wins, and we learn from our failures and keep trying, at least that is the way I was raised. I see so many these days that love to win but never seem to be able to except a failure without giving up. Folks we never learn from our wins we only learn from the failures, but we must be able to analyze the data that was created by that failure, and the win for that matter.  What am I saying? I also was raised to keep a journal of my life, to write it all down. Somedays that is just a quick note not even a full sentence, sometimes that could be a page of information. So, for me the habit of journaling has made it easy for me to log everything I eat. But for too many that is a chore that they do not want to take the time to do. I have learned over the years that my journal is my history, it has saved me from getting unneeded medical care, it has prevented me for getting in to trouble with the law and most of all as a child it kept me out of trouble with my parents and grandparents. If we would all get in the habit of recording our lives, we would learn so much about ourselves. And who knows that could even lead to a best seller someday.

Now to my next point of succeeding at weight loss, never ever give up. We all have the ups and downs. We have our wins and losses. We can learn from both if we log and keep a journal but if we do not then we do not really know what we did wrong. Loseit offers us a lot of great tools if we only use them. We get weekly and even daily reports. The daily logs go into databases that we can view and download. We can use a spreadsheet to look at the day and even create our own charts.

So, take advantage of these tools and make the best of your weight loss and maintenance. This is all part of your life style change that you must commit to.

Health and fitness

I have been eating below my BMR for some time, not really because I was trying but just because it has been all I felt like eating. There are days that I will eat well above my BMR but only once a week or so. But I have been trying to eat more and at least get to eating 125 calories on average above my BMR. I am not there yet. But I am slowly getting there. I know I must be careful and not get to the point of gaining weight. I am still between 8 and about 18 pounds above what I need to weigh. My goal and the thinking of my dietitian and myself is that of easing my way to the weight I need to be at, and not be at a point of eating that much more to prevent weight loss once I get to my goal. I have my goal set for 195 that is a weight that I managed to maintain from the summer of 2012 to Christmas of 2013. And now, I am at a weight that I managed to be at or below from February of 2012 until early February of 2014.  My goal of 195 will become my maximum that I want to be at, and I am going to try to go as much as 10 pounds below that.

This coming Thursday I will have my lab work for my physical that is on the Monday after my lab work. I will also be getting another BMR test to see where I am at, as well as retested for any food allergies. I am wanting to be able to eat a wide verity of foods, which is the way I was raised. As of now I am not eating bread, except cornbread. I do eat wild, and brown rice, and potatoes once or twice a week without any issues. I also eat cheerios and a high protein Nature Valley cereal. I am back to eating the fruits that I love without issues. Wheat still gives me some issues but not bad if I do not over do it. I try to stay away from as much processed foods as possible and I do not eat fast foods, well I do cheat if I am on the road traveling but that is not that often. I have come to find out I can cheat at times and enjoy it if I do not make it a habit. And I also believe that I should never completely deprive myself of the foods I enjoy and were raised to eat, I just must learn to limit them.

I do not recommend eating below the BMR it is just something I feel into by mistake and I am now trying to correct it. I also recommend getting tested to find out what your real BMR is. The calculators that are used to determine BMR, using sex, age and weight, are only averages like the calculators for BMI they are not that great. If you really want your weight loss to stick and you want to be healthy and fit do yourself the favor and get the test. It will pay off down the road.