I suppose a stumbling block is when I was on Medifast I was losing 4-6 lbs a week doing nothing ... and so when I hear 1-2 pounds a week I'm like WTF this is going to take forever. At 4-6 pounds the number was big enough that it was easier to stick to. If I didn't get cavities I probably would have stuck with it.
I know man it's hard when your baseline is lots of weight dropped fast. I talked with my doctor before I started losing and he told me losing more than 2 pounds/week (consistently) or eating any less than 1400 calories a day would absolutely be unhealthy. I was 6', 245lbs for reference. Your minimum amount of calories that you should be consuming is based on your height/weight/daily lifestyle. 850 calories a day seems real scary to me. The other issue you're going to run in to by losing 4-6 pounds a week consistently is loose skin. Google it, it's not pretty. I'd recommend you talk to a doc before doing anything. Sorry if this is blunt, but you need a lifestyle change, not another crash diet. Most people gain the weight right back because they never deal with the problem which is a bad relationship with food.
Your plans so far are solid - I'm rooting for you!
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245lbs-190lbs over the course of 7 or 8 months. 85% diet, 15% exercise (lose weight in the kitchen, get fit in the gym). I have no one to blame but myself for getting fat, but I really wish someone would have stressed just how important diet is. Unless you are young or an athlete, you are never going to out-exercise a bad diet. In retrospect I feel like I could have lost all of the weight with diet alone, the exercise was just to allow me to eat more calories. I have kept it off for over a year and am currently back to losing weight with a goal of 180lbs. Here is what I did that worked:
1: Set a long term & short term goal. Short term = 1-2lbs lost/week. Long term: 50lbs lost, be able to do 10 consecutive pullups, 35 consecutive pushups, run a sub 9 minute mile.
2: Changed my relationship with food. Pizza & wings (and pastries) are treats, they are not an everyday dinner. Stopped eating out & drinking alcohol entirely (maybe a beer once in awhile IF I had a surplus of calories). Cooked all my own meals. Did a large food prep on the weekends so I couldn't make excuses to eat out). Shop only the perimeter of the grocery store (meat & produce). Substituted: popcorn for chips, Fruit or 35 calorie popsicles for ice cream, edamame for tv dinners, diet stuff/mio/crystal light for soda/beer/juice, etc. To this day I have an awful sweet tooth so I have to make a conscious effort to not even walk down the cookie aisle.
This is a pretty tough process at the beginning, but once you lose those first few pounds you realize really ****ing quick that it's not that hard and that you can do it.
These subreddits helped tremendously in terms of learning about healthy food & eating low calorie food period:
https://www.reddit.com/r/1200isplenty/
https://www.reddit.com/r/fitmeals
https://www.reddit.com/r/MealPrepSunday/
https://www.reddit.com/r/loseit/
3: Myfitnesspal.com. The real brains behind the operation. I plugged in my measurements, lifestyle (sedentary), told it how much I wanted to lose per week.The site told me if I ate 1640 calories per day that I would lose 1.5 pounds by the end of the week. If I burned 200 calories exercising I could eat those calories back. I logged all of my meals which is about a 20-30 minute process at the very beginning, it now takes me about 5 minutes a day maximum. I lost 0 pounds the first week because I didn't log in my meals strictly & lied about the portions. The second week I logged everything strictly and weighed my food. I lost 5 pounds. Nowadays it's like balancing a checkbook - I prelog my meals at the beginning of the day and if someone brings donuts in to work, I can easily say no because that would put me over my calorie budget.
MFP is free, has an app and can be an excellent support system because you can add friends and build a network of people that can teach & motivate you. I'd be sincerely happy to be your friend on MFP. Add me, that goes for anyone on GH.
4. Exercise! Again, not absolutely necessary to lose weight but I'd recommend at least a little bit for overall health, so you can eat more food or to lose weight a bit faster. At the time I didn't have access to a gym so I did a bodyweight routine at home called simplefit which is 20 minutes of pullups, pushups, squats every other day. I can understand when people say they don't have time to go to the gym, but I literally couldn't talk myself out of 20 minutes of exercise that I could do at home. I threw in a long walk once a week and eventually transitioned that in to a run. Walking itself is seriously underrated, don't feel the pressure to run. It's bad for your knees anyways when you're big.
I hope I don't sound vain but I just turned 30 and am in the best shape of my life since high school. I love talking about weight loss so if you have any specific questions about my process/experience, just ask.
Thanks so much for sharing all of this.
Hope it helps!
