Right, this is the point I’m trying to drive home. I’m not trying to be difficult, but this just means you haven’t really been consistent for the last two months. Do you know how many calories you’re eating with the cheat food?
Purely speculating here, and maybe projecting a bit lol, but I get the vibe that you’re being vague when talking about “on and off” or “sometimes” or “now and then,” or using words like “moderation” because you know deep down what the issue is. Making a big lifestyle change is not easy, and taking this first step of being consistent is the hardest but most crucial. I mean absolute consistency, not just “healthy” relative to your friends or your old habits.
i can only roughly gauge but its not accurate though. i won’t say i will happily spam all these foods but i will just have some when compared to the past i will just eat without even thinking. well these two months i have been quite strict with myself. it’s before the aug that although i do track but i am not strict
yeah i get what you mean but don’t you have days where you are out with friends and have to eat? thats those days where you can’t really track am i right? i mean i will still roughly gauge but it can’t be accurate.
It’s genuinely an arbitrary number, but I’d still find a number and maintain it. If that’s 8k, or 6k, or 10k doesn’t really matter.
During the pandemic?
Uhm, maybe that’s one meal that you can’t track but you should still be able to make choices that perhaps while more calorie dense than what you’d normally have while dieting brings you to say a maintenance level of calories for that day.
So then, maybe, while you work to attain your goals you don’t really have room for fries, pizza, and fried chicken.
Touché. I typically tend to tell folks the metabolic damage card is way overplayed too. For some reason I overlooked the more likely scenario here. Maybe I saw “eating 1200C since August” and panicked; who knows. Anyway, 99% of the time - this is the real answer.
OP, I think @jskrabac is on it. I can tell you in my own experience (I’ve gotten relatively lean a couple times, but never as lean as a contest bodybuilder), I’m always disappointed both by how low my calories have to go and for how long and how little food those calories feel like. I would never be able to feel it out at a restaurant and still be within targets.
I do think there is a place for living your life and going out with friends, and you don’t need to be the weirdo bringing Tupperware with chicken and broccoli, if we aren’t trying to get to the stage. Some foods are going to be a lot harder to control than others, though. I know your palate is still going to want them. I’d suggest substitutions in those cases: eat a Turkey burger with a side salad instead of a cheeseburger and fries and skip carbs at an earlier meal to account for the bun, as an example.
Anyway, you’re starting to get a ton of advice. It’s all good and from smart people that have walked it and proven it on this site. I would pick something and go with it. The only mistake you can make at this point is to try to implement everything: that’s where folks get messed up.
Whatever you do, grinding, monotonous consistency, unfortunately, is the only secret.
Deficits are rough. They are rough on the body, and rough on the psyche. They demand discipline, and if one stays disciplined it will get uncomfortable. It’ll also work, but the body doesn’t care much about how you look. It cares that it is starving, and have been for quite some time.
If a person is somewhat happy with how they look, but they aren’t at their goal, they don’t have to concede defeat. They can return to maintenance for a bit and afterwards follow the tips shared in the thread above, or if they are someone that’s not an all-or-nothing kind of person they could stay at maintenance for draining days and run a deficit on off-days.
It’ll take longer to see changes, but it also won’t suck as bad. Still demands some discipline, but it takes far less care to stay at maintenance some days and be in a deficit on others than it does to remain another day in a deficit after it has been sustained for several weeks. This is really nice if one is mentally attached to their performance in the gym.
For some people, depending on how active they are, they don’t even have to track calories to do this. Just cutting carbs on off-days can be adequate. As an aside, tracking calories to lose weight is never mandatory, one could just resign to “I’m hungry? Good” rather than “I’m hungry? Better eat something”.
From where you are coming from -I totally agree.
Not going in lengthy thing as this person only here 2 seconds on this site and doesnt look like murdering heavy lifts sooo …IMO will be fine.
sorry this is meant as a joke.