To my great surprise I lost 20 lbs. due to my hospitalization and surgery after the car/bike crash. I have gained back about 5. But it’s still a much better weight for me. Something has changed, and I have been eating less. Lost 2 inches in the waist.

I miss exercise though. I think my leg is strong enough to get back on the bike. I missed 12 months of riding.

I was doing alternate fasting when the shutdown hit. I was doing real well but it’s really tough to do - a total mind game. Depressing, actually, but reading all of the success stories kept me going. After the initial lockdown I abandoned the program - there was enough depressing stuff going on. Not only that, but I abandoned the websites. Dr. Fung started looking like Jim Jones.

And so I gained, but I got through lockdown by enjoying cooking again and tending my garden. Now that I’m vaccinated I need to start going to a gym again. Living the rest of my life in this condition must not happen.

I think I lost it all before the pandemic, but I’m down 40 pounds from where I was two years ago. I’ve been maintaining for a while. Gotta take the next step. 20-30 to go.

I did ok until June, then started creeping up. A total of 5 lbs by January. Thankfully, I´ve reversed that and have lost 2 1/2 since then.

And of course that´s all on top of the 15 to 20
I´ve needed to lose for a few years now.

I am up about 40 from my leanest when I was riding the bike a lot. I started out about a week ago and weighed in at 245. ugh. 38" pants were becoming too tight to be comfortable. ugh again.

I have been doing the 16 hour per day fast routine and I must say it is easier than I thought it would be. I have cut 99% of added sugar from my diet, trying to take it easy on the processed carbs, which is hard to do when you love baking bread and homemade pizza crust, etc.

I am not going near a scale until I have done this for 30 days.

I already feel better.

The one meal a day fast routine was pretty easy for me but it stopped working after about 10 pounds. One meal every 36 hours also worked for a while but it was very difficult and didn't work after a while either.

Exercise is going to be the key, here.

I’ve done all of my eating in about a five or six hour window every day for a bit over three years now. I actually lost the weight I wanted to before that, by counting calories. I have found this schedule to be a comparatively pleasant way to stay at this weight.

I find that I enjoy eating fewer, reasonably sized meals, rather than more tiny meals. I’ve also found that my body has gotten used to the schedule and I’m simply not hungry for most of the rest of the day. Oddly, I have followed the schedule more rigorously in the last year, because I am always willing to make exceptions for social events. A complete absence of a social life has been a real boon here.

Truthfully you have to eat fewer calories than you burn in a day, over a period of time, to lose weight. Exercise is good, but really upping the exercise just makes you more hungry and makes dieting harder. It helps to change your mindset about food (only eat when you are hungry, not for a variety of other reasons that we eat) but You absolutely have to know what you are taking in each day (meaning you have to weigh/measure and write down everything that goes in your mouth for a little while to get the hang of what portion control and a certain number of calories a day looks like (it makes you realize that the small handful of nuts, for example, is actually a huge number of calories. Yes you can make better food type choices, yes you can fast, and those things can help, but bottom line is, if you don’t maintain a calorie deficit, you are not going to lose weight.

I think one problem I had during Covid is that all of my exercise options cratered simultaneously.

I had been doing my morning bootcamp for decades, but once we were in lockdown it didn't work. First, it was suspended for a time. Then the instructor had Covid precautions that sucked the fun out of it, and there was no good reason to wake up at 5 am when work didn't start until 9. And my gym closed. And there was no tennis.

So I wasn't getting enough exercise, and one underappreciated benefit of frequent exercise is you can't eat while you're doing it. All of the not-exercising time, I discovered, could be filled with cookies, alcohol, and popcorn.

Another benefit of having lots of different exercise options is you can avoid overuse injuries. Sure enough, once my only exercise options was running, I developed an overuse injury, which made the weight problem worse.

Spring is here, and if I don't get after it I am not sure I will ever regain a decent level of fitness.

What a depressing thread. Is it bad that I'm taking solace in knowing that I'm not the only one?

I don't weigh myself, but I know I've gained weight. (I have nothing against weighing myself, I just don't have a reliable scale.) Like everyone else, I think the biggest contributing factor was sitting around near food all the time, and losing my "hidden" exercise, like all the walking one does when at work, walking to/from the bus, walking to meetings, stairs, etc.

It also didn't help that at the beginning of the shutdown I instantly developed a party mentality. My daughter came over (this was when we thought it would be a few weeks, ha!) and we started having wine, brownies, pasta, popcorn, you name it. After about a month of this I realized I needed to get a grip, but I didn't actually start gripping until a few months after that.

What I've noticed with age (aside from the more typical things) is how little food I actually require. To lose weight, I basically eat one small meal a day, and snack on things like veggies and fruit. Once you get onto it, it becomes a habit like everything else. But the whole "three square meals a day" thing for me is out the window.

Yes, Nina! If I want to have any sort of interesting meal out at all, I have to eat almost nothing their rest of the day or the pounds go back on! I can’t eat nearly the amount I used to be able to eat.

Nina and Jodi, if there is a famine, the three of us will be the sole survivors.

I don't seem to need food. That doesn't stop me from eating.

Cindy -- who forced herself into a pair of jeans today and may have severed her spleen

Oh, and I have a moustache and formidable beard.

I know that I have to wear a mask everywhere, so I have done nothing about what one might consider Unwanted Facial Hair.

It's kind of interesting to see what a beard looks like on me. I'm afraid it's not a look I can pull off.

Cindy, you crack me up. The beauty of wearing glasses my whole life is that I ‘m always in soft focus when I put my makeup on. So I never actually see the extra hair or wrinkles.

quote:

Originally posted by Cindysphinx:
Nina and Jodi, if there is a famine, the three of us will be the sole survivors.

I don't seem to need food. That doesn't stop me from eating.

Cindy -- who forced herself into a pair of jeans today and may have severed her spleen

No, there will be four of us. I really think I must have developed the capacity to operate my body on the water vapor in the air I breathe.