Weight loss & maintenance - tips

Someone asked me to start a thread to share my tips for losing weight. I lost 60-65lbs between 1/1/10 and 9/30/10 and I've kept it off since.

A little background: I changed jobs at the end of Sept 2009. I had been commuting 45min each way to a very high stress job before changing to my new job with a new company, working from home. Before I would leave home at 7:30am and feel good when I got home by 7:30pm. I decided that the change meant an opportunity to change my habits. So I started working out (as in exercise) every morning before work. Over the holidays, I started slipping and decided that if I wanted to garden pain free, I had to get serious. (Bad back - was always in some pain and had spasms multiple times a day).

So... my new years resolution was to focus on strengthening my core. I researched exercises targeting abs and back and alternated the strength training / core training with time on our treadmill (every other day). The focus on my body led me to start counting calories. It was a struggle to get under 1800cal/day at first.

I have a spreadsheet that to this day I use. I fill in what I eat in the comments for breakfast, lunch, dinner & snacks. I use an on-line calorie counter to calculate each meal's calories. And then I enter the exercise I did in the comments field for exercise and how long I exercised. I looked up on another calculator how many calories I burned and entered this as a negative value. Then I tally calories in (as raw calories) and then deduct calories burned (as net). The final column is my weight first thing in the morning.

So that's the back ground. I'll start entering tips next. Pls share what you've found helps to lose weight or to keep it off.

Thanks
Tam

This message was edited Nov 19, 2011 6:10 PM