How I lost 32 lbs and kept it off.

Here is me before and after, I went from 176.8 lbs to 144.6 lbs in 100 days.

This is the story on how I lost the weight and maintain it today.

I'm not a doctor so you should consult with one before you make big changes to your diet.

When loosing weight I found that gradually increasing my efforts over time was the best method for long term success.

Last year in July I started out by walking a minimum of 3 miles a day, it was the least I could do, I did this for about a week then I thought that I could do more, I wanted to see more results, I looked up serving sizes and I bought a food scale, I started logging each meal on the "My Fitness Pal" app.

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These are the meal portion sizes I would eat.

Chicken: 80 g
Beef/pork: 65 g
Fish: 100 g
Past/Rice: 75 g
Vegetables: 75 g
Most Fruit: 150 g
most meals were two course's, one meat and one vegetable.
Theres a link at the bottom of this post where I found this information.

At first, adjusting the amount I ate was a little difficult, my stomach was used to seconds and thirds, but that was only really for the first week. It got a lot easier especially when I started doing 6 small meals a day, I also started trying to average only consuming 1500 calories a day.

What a typical day looked like.

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By the end of the first month I had quit caffeine cold turkey, and was only drinking water, I increased my step count to 10,000 steps a day, I was doing really well. I was not perfect though, there were many day's I would go over 1500 calories and hit some where close to 2000, and some days I would push a little to hard and go below 1500 calories. I found out that I can feel really satisfied if I eat exactly 1500 calories, 1500 is my limit on how low I like to go without feeling like I'm trying to starve myself.

I maintained this effort for all of month two, then I really tried to step it up to hit my goal, I introduced P90X, at first I was a little surprised because I didn't loose any more weight at a higher rate. I did start to see muscle gains and i'm guessing that is the reason.

After 1 month of P90X... should of never quit.
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I really kept it quite simple during this whole process, never adding to much at once and I ate what ever I wanted, the only adjustment I made to my food was the portion size and overall calorie intake, I ate pizza, chips, cake, cookies, I really ate what ever I wanted... There were a lot of healthy meals, but I didn't obsess over what I was eating. The best tool I would have to say was the food scale...

Some people say you shouldn't weigh yourself every day, I say do what ever works for you, I did and I found it really helped shape my expectations, based on what I ate that day I would know if I would weigh more or less the next day.

Doing all this for 3 months really trained me on how to maintain it, now I weigh myself every so often and when i'm a little up I start cutting back, I don't have to input my food into my fitness pal anymore, I can just tell what enough looks like and if I have doubts I will break out the scale, I don't actively try to maintain it everyday and a lot of that is because I kept some of the easier habits with me, like I drink more water than any other drink on a daily basis and I walk and try to stay more active.

Here is a picture of how my weight loss looks on the "myfitnesspal" app graph, and as you can see I just recently went above 150 lbs, I did have to cut back for a couple of weeks till I was back to my goal weight of 145lbs, I reached that goal in October and i've done pretty well to maintain it, the lowest I got was in December and that was 142 lbs, I was surprised by that because I really quit trying to loose weight when I hit my goal and unfortunately I quit P90X as well.

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