Losing weight

So here's the thing: I want--arguably need--to lose some weight. Quite a bit of weight, actually--I'm about 5'5" and 215 pounds.

The problem is, I have a lot of issues that make that difficult.

• I stress-eat and boredom-eat. Food is pretty much my go-to thing when I'm feeling even remotely down, or when I just have nothing else to do.
• I have an extremely high appetite in general. It's abated slightly since going back on ADHD meds, but not enough to actually help much.
• I have fibromyalgia, and as such, exercise is very, very hard. I can't walk very far without getting tired, and I have to stop a lot--and that's on a good day, since on bad days I can barely get out of bed due to the pain.
• My mom was anorexic in her youth (and I think she still has some issues in that regard, so I'm not super inclined to listen to her advice re: dieting), and I'm terrified of falling into that trap myself.

Basically...how do I go about breaking my unhealthy habits re: eating and finding a way to exercise that doesn't cause crippling pain, while also avoiding going too far in the other direction?

 

(I'm not speaking from experience but from things I've heard around so keep that in mind I guess)

Make sure you're eating three proper meals a day. Don't try to decrease your food intake by cutting out main meals. If you can replace the stress/boredom eating with say drinking water that's good but if you can't try to be aware of the types of foods that you're eating - nuts/carrots/fruit rather than more processed foods. Keeping in mind the glycaemic index of foods you're eating and satiety might also help. Here have a nifty infographic I found: https://foodtechconnect.com/2012/03/16/infographic-of-the-week-mapping-the-satiety-of-food/
Finding someone to exercise with or an exercise class of some description can be good for motivation but that might be difficult with the unpredictability of your physical ability. However, any exercise that you do manage to do is good exercise even if it's something small like knitting (If what I've been told is true knitting was included in a weight watcher's info thing so therefore it's legit)

 

Okay, so - as someone who also stress-eats and boredom-eats (...when I remember to eat) and is also working on losing weight, here's what works for me:

• find healthy stuff you can tolerate eating and which is easy to pre-prepare in large quantities. Fruits like apples and oranges require little to no prep at all (oranges only need the peel removed, which admittedly might be difficult). The key here is to look for stuff that's low-calorie, which means you're going to be looking towards stuff that's fruits and veggies more than nuts. (Nuts are...surprisingly calorie-dense, actually.) Something I like to do is just get a big bag of snap peas or green beans and then snack on those. Little grape or cherry tomatoes were a favourite too, before I removed tomatoes from my diet.
• Focus on foods that you find filling. Eating a large bowl of greens is actually helpful here, because your body goes "hey, I just ate a whole lot of stuff!" and it takes a while for your system to process.
• Don't beat yourself up for not being able to do exercise every day, or not being able to do much exercise. Focus on what you can do. Walking from one end of the hallway to the other got you out of breath and tired? That's okay, because you still walked that distance. Take as many breaks as you need. A pedometer might help here, because it'd track every single step you take; I use the Wii Fit pedometer and a fitbit (because the two...don't really communicate). If it hurts too much to get out of bed, or stand for very long, consider what doesn't hurt - can you do stretching / yoga stuff safely? Is swimming a possibility, if there's a community pool in the area?
• I use a calorie-tracking app to keep track of what I've eaten during the day and how many calories I've taken in; considering your concerns, this might not be the best choice for you? You're the best judge there, I'm just mentioning it as something that's working well for me. (It makes it easier for me to go "hey, I need to eat more, actually", for example, because I have something to show myself if I'm not eating enough; I don't have to rely on fuzzy memory.)

 

I tried a calorie-tracking app, but I found it just made me kind of miserable because I always ended up eating over my daily allotted calorie count and didn't burn enough calories even on days when I exercised. :( Apparently walking barely burns anything and that's upsetting to me because it's kind of all I can do? Like, apparently walking a mile only burns like 80 calories. :/

I can sometimes do yoga-type stuff, depending on the pain levels. I'd have to get my room clean first, though, and that's a whole 'nother story. And I don't think we have a community pool around here but I might be wrong?

 

have you tried cooking? if you make some of your own food then it's both a possibly relaxing activity (for stress) and A Thing To Do (for boredom) that results in food.

there's lower spoon cooking like those boxed desert mixes or like pasta + canned sauce, and there's also stuff like bringing a chair into the kitchhen so you can cook while siting down (i do this)

a lot of greens taste really good with minimal prep, just put in the oven for ~20 minutes with olive oil, salt, and pepper.

 

That's definitely something I could keep in mind! I might ask my folks if I can make dinner once a week or something...probably no more than that because they both love to cook, but yeah!

 

So, between eating disorder recovery and a strong bent towards harm reduction and body positivity, I have lots of Strong Feelings about this which hopefully will be useful :P even if you feel very strongly that you need to lose weight for your own health, then it's incredibly important to keep a forgiving and nonjudgemental attitude towards yourself. There's this idea that holding onto at least some body-negative/ascetic values (especially feelings of guilt) is a good thing or even a necessary thing for weight loss, in order to encourage you to stick to your intended behaviours, but this is just plain counterproductive.

A lot of people are afraid that letting go of feelings of guilt or self-punishment or judgement will sabotage their weight loss by taking away the incentive, but this is not true; holding on to those feelings is what sabotages you, because it drags down your self-image and your mood and this will push you back towards emotional eating. It also puts you at risk of fatalistically giving up on your plans - if you feel shitty about yourself for struggling (which is normal and expected and not a sign of inferiority or moral failure), then you're more likely to think "fuck it, what's the point, might as well quit".

The most important thing you can do to support your own weight loss goals is to improve your self-esteem. Feeling good about yourself isn't some kind of reward you get for first changing your body; reserving it for later, "I'm allowed to feel good about myself after my body reaches this point", is not only unnecessary but actively harmful.

Focus on developing a healthy relationship with food and not on restricting how much you eat. Practice being fully aware whenever you eat - concentrate on what you're feeling physically and emotionally, identify what feels good or bad; when I was recovering from bulimia, I learned to decouple the feelings of pleasure from eating something for its own sake (which is not in itself a bad thing!) from the sensations of discomfort that came from bingeing. Remember that eating for pleasure is not morally wrong, and it's not bad or weak to want to do something purely for the sake of enjoyment.

I don't know much about fibromyalgia, so I don't know what to recommend for fitness with fibro, but in general, it's best to find a type of exercise that you enjoy. Presumably different types of exercise affect your pain differently, so maybe trying out a range of things you haven't necessarily done before (pacing yourself and being kind and gentle to yourself, of course) might help you find something that works for you?

 

I can't second everything @Elph said hard enough.

re: exercise - I've found it depressing and counterproductive to keep track of how much calories it burns. Unless you're doing hard physical labor most of the day, it won't be the biggest source of energy burned, which in my case led me to feel like I should be exercising hours a day and that's not healthy. It's still very worth doing because it has all sorts of other health benefits, and definitely helps with losing weight. Doing what you can, no matter how little, and doing it as consistently as you can helps enormously with stamina, strength, posture, and balance, among other things.

I've seen in passing some interesting studies about how huge a contributor incidental exercise (or some term like that) is to health and weight loss. That's things like fidgeting, standing up and sitting down, standing while doing things, walking from room to room - little things that people normally don't even think about. I didn't know if I really believed that, but then I remembered the last time I visited my mom - she lives in a condo that's at least three times the size of my tiny apartment, so just going to the kitchen or the bathroom from the living room meant I was moving around a lot more than at home, where everything is less than ten steps away. Even though I got very little actual exercise on the two-week trip aside from two days of walking around NYC, I returned home with my clothes looser. It was very wtf at the time, but considering how much more moving around I was doing just to do regular day to day stuff, it makes a lot of sense in retrospect.

 

@Mercury NEAT, non-exercise activity thermogenesis? :)

Another tip from eating disorder recovery wisdom: a pretty common rule in treatment/support groups is "no numbers". That includes calories in, calories out, weight, clothing sizes, body measurements, et cetera. This doesn't mean you can't ever keep track of those things (that rule would be bound to fail anyway), but it's a way of discouraging you from comparing yourself to others, using numbers as a challenge or a competition, and beating yourself up over minutiae - when you're insecure, whether or not you have an eating disorder, it's easy to use numbers to justify negative self-concept, no matter how inconsequential they are. (For example, telling yourself what a failure you are for stopping your workout a couple minutes early, or punishing yourself for having a slightly generous helping of dinner.) Instead, you can focus on goals like feeling better about yourself, redirecting emotional eating impulses to something different, eating to the point of satiety and not beyond it, balancing the content of your diet, feeling proud of every accomplishment (even small ones), responding calmly to setbacks, and other areas of improvement that don't allow you to obsess over numbers, because obsessing over numbers is just another way of turning your diet into a stress response or coping mechanism. It's a form of escapism that will ultimately detract from your ability to deal with challenges and take care of yourself.

 

Yes, a thousand times this! Make sure you're eating regularly - long gaps where you're not eating anything are a recipe (no pun intended) for unhappiness and setbacks.

Editing to add: if you want to swap mayo out for something less calorie-dense, relish or hummus is nice :)

 

It looks like you're getting a lot of good advice on food and eating!

I want to talk a little about viable exercise with fibro, because, yeah, that is really really hard. Last I knew, the literature is very inconclusive on what works, what doesn't, how much pushing through pain is worth doing, etc. Something to try would be non-weight-bearing exercise. Both walking and yoga are pretty weight-bearing, so you're putting stress on your bones and joints, and I think that's at least vaguely associated with fibro flare-ups? A pool would be great if you could get to it, and I'd honestly be really surprised if there isn't one somewhere nearby enough. I know in my hometown, people go to the YMCA to swim sometimes. Another good non-weight-bearing option is a stationary bicycle. You can go to a gym to use one, or get or build a stand for a regular bike.

Whatever you choose to do as far as exercise, I would strongly encourage starting slow. If you swim, don't stay in the pool until you feel exhausted the first day. Just do a little bit, maybe even just 15 minutes, and then see how you feel the next day.

The other thing I'd encourage you to do, both in terms of weight and in terms of exercise, is set functional goals. Not goals like "I want to lose x amount" but goals for what things you want to do, like, as an example, walking enough to get grocery shopping done without being exhausted, or being able to get into a yoga pose you enjoy but have trouble with.

EDIT: I can't believe I'm an idiot who made it sound like swimming was the only thing to do in a pool. Pools are great for walking in, and exercising in in general. HMU if you find a local pool and want to talk about exercises to do in the pool! If you do end up going to a YMCA or something like that, they probably have pool exercise classes at a variety of levels!

 

here's what I've found in my experience, I don't know if it's helpful:

• Food is more important than exercise. Just existing burns a lot of calories. I do a lot of walking because I find it soothing, but exercise to me is about strengthening my muscles, not losing weight.
• dieting is really overwhelming, so I stick to a few simple rules that are easy for me to remember and cut down on unhealthy foods, not get rid of them entirely (because I hate the idea of not having the option to eat something if I want to).

some general rules of thumb I've used:

• only having one carbohydrate/starch per meal. So I could have a burgers and fries kind of meal, but it was either no bun and fries, or a burger and a bun with no fries, if I had a meal like pasta or pizza which is mostly bread/starch then that would also take the carbs from a different meal. I did this though because carbs tend to make my blood sugar spike/crash and made me feel like garbage and I didn't want to feel like garbage.
• if I really want something sweet: only having one dessert-like item a day (like candy, cookie, cake, etc.), and only a small amount
• small portions in general, so instead of having 3 big meals I just eat something small once every 2-3 hours.

Obviously these aren't going to work for everyone, the point is instead of trying to do everything at once to make a few changes that are easy to remember, motivated more by nutrition and how it makes your body feel than losing weight. It takes a certain amount of calories to maintain your current weight, so if you start eating better and exercising, weight loss will happen on it's own as a side effect. This is what happens to work for my specific needs. I know I personally would go batshit bonkers if I had to worry about calories, or if I wouldn't have food like ice cream in the house if I wanted it. Other people I've lived with can't have food like that in the house because they will eat all of it. If you try to work against your needs because that's healthier, then you'll end up being miserable and gaining the weight back (I've done it before, I see it happen constantly).

One thing I will recommend food wise is cutting down on sugar*/simple carbs. I only say that specifically because those foods trigger inflammation in the body and while I'm not going to say that's "the cause" of fibro (or any other chronic disease systemic inflammation is linked to) because that shit's complicated, it's probably not helping. It might make you feel a little better to reduce that, along with eating more anti-inflammatory foods.

*not counting the sugar naturally found in fruit, because fruit has fiber in it that means avoiding blood sugar spikes/crashes, and fructose in fruit is a different structure than sucrose or high fructose corn syrup, so it's the least inflammatory sugar there is. The nutritional benefits outweigh any harm the sugar could cause unless you have other health issues thrown in.

 

I started out exactly where you are right now only an inch shorter. I got down to like 150 but over the past year crept back up to 184 and I'm trying to get back down now.

The good news is weight loss can be done with good diet alone. Cooking for yourself can help a lot because you have greater control over the calories. Make a list of your favorite low calorie things and try to use those as much as you can.

I also use a calorie tracking app and at the beginning I did fall into disordered eating. But not eating stalled my metabolism. I lost far more when eating a reasonable amount than when eating almost nothing.

My brains not working too well right now and there's a bunch of stuff I want to say and try to help but I don't know how. I'll try again later?

 

Seconding trying to find non-food items to consume when you're in a boredom-eating mood. I boredom/stress-eat like a motherfucker; getting in the habit of making tea when I have a craving has cut down on my snacking a significant amount. It doesn't always work, but it works enough that I've noticed a difference. I also feel you on tracking calories burnt via exercise being super depressing.

...this wasn't a very helpful post. I mostly just wanted to express solidarity and well-wishes.

 

My sister swears by chewing gum when she wants to snack, don't know how much that'll help.

 

To help break my excessive eating, I switching to chewing ridiculous amounts of gum. If my mouth was busy, I couldn't eat with it, was my logic. It helped some, I think. I also drastically increased how much tea and coffee and water I drink. Staying hydrated really does seem to cut down on my urge to munch, too, as much as anything I think because the liquid registers as "something in stomach" (although I won't drink black tea or black coffee on a completely empty stomach first thing in the morning, it tends to make me sick).

I've pretty much, uh, gotten sick of gum at this point, though, and kinda switched to mints instead? I know candy isn't the best, but hard candies in general give me something to occupy my mouth, and mints just seem to be my jam. Plus small hard candies don't really... like... have much to them? I've read before that brushing your teeth is supposed to help you eat less because with the fresh mouth thing, you're supposed to want to not eat, so maybe the mint flavour does some of that? No idea if the toothbrushing regularly works personally, because I hate brushing my teeth with a horrid passion, but also throwing that out there as an option.

 

So, I'm on a doctor-monitored variant of a ketogenic diet, so my results are on the more extreme end, but it's been a really good way to burn weight, even with only 30 minutes of walking around a day. ( I'm.. probably at 1000 to 1200 calories a day when I'm following it strictly? I've dropped 50 pounds and.. like. 4 jean sizes since September, and that is with me cocking up for the last three months. )

Basically the diet emphasizes low carb, high fat and protein, with emphasis on veggies over fruit. Not really a super-ton of measurements that I'm doing, and I've been eyeballing things since the first two months.

Low spoons today but figured I could manage a few words.

( ...esp since this is the first time I've reliably lost weight in a decade. My self-control re: food tends to be... hard to come by. )