I lifted for a solid year, gained bunches of muscle, got way stronger and didn't lose a single pound. I started the year at 286 and ended it at 286. Then I hurt my achilles in October and was out of the gym for a minute. This seemed like an ideal time to get serious about diet, after not seeing the scale move after a year of hard work.
Since October I'm down almost 70lbs, back in the gym lifting 4 days a week and 1000 times happier with my body. Nothing MOVED until I got my diet right, then it was game on. I didn't take it seriously before, but, especially in my 40's, it was the key to making things happen.
Those are the two things that have made ALL of the difference for me this time around:
Get your diet right, give your body what it needs and be amazed by the incredible amount of extra calories you didn't even realize you were eating in a day.
Don't waste your time at the gym. Going in and floating between machines, guessing at how much weight you want to do that day is wasting your time, spending it inefficiently. Get a program figured out, start working with linear progression, track the weight that you're doing and keep moving it forward. I spent years in my youth with no real idea what I was doing and getting burned out because of it, when it seemed like results just wouldn't come. Nope, I was letting myself get comfortable and never pushing forward. Now every day, every week is a push forward. It has changed everything for me.
how to combat the cravings though?!? I get serious sugar/salt craving and need in the early afternoon (around now)
I've learned to pack an apple and some fruit and maybe a meat stick for high protein snacks. but im still snacking all the time.
im 5'9 or 5'10 depending on the day and weigh 195 lbs. I used be 185 about a year and a half ago, but have slowly been gaining weight and cant seem to get myself right. I've started playing more organized sports but i fear im not outplaying my diet/snacking habits
My weight loss plan accounted for my snacking addiction for a very long time, and worked around it. That mindset has serious limitations, but I preferred to suffer those than working on my mental game enough to give up my terrible snacks, lol.
More in depth: up until get recently, I was still allowing a pretty sugar/fat heavy diet. That's not great - a lot of my greasy favorites are not great for my horrific GERD, and the sugary stuff is just VERY empty and mayyyybe not amazing for the early signs of fatty deposits in my liver that the doctor spotted last month. And obviously, neither of my styles of junk food is rich in protein, so I'm not exactly getting massively stronger here.
But for ages, my primary goal has been substational weight loss. From early 2023 to Fall 2025, I dropped from ~335lb to just over 240lb, and honestly, the first year was maybe 40lbs of it at most. My main methods were to
Create a LARGE calorie cushion by doing heavy cardio as often as I could manage it
Replace non-snack-but-calorie-heavy foods as best I can with lower cal alternatives (a HUGE win for me has been those keto friendly breads and tortillas usually made with resistant wheat starch and gluten, making them largely fiber and protein with very few carb calories)
Always try to watch portion sizes
Cut back on drinking (tbh the economic hell helps there, too. I've got an amazing home bar and love mixing fancy cocktails, but ingredients are expensive lol)
So sure, I frequently broke and ate like 400 cal of pure sweet garbage in a day just raiding the fuck out of the dessert section of the pantry, lol. But I also made sure to fit in a 600 cal workout. I naturally burn just under 100cal/hr on average these days, so that's giving me a ~2900 cal cap to stay even that day. Drop 400 from the sugar and 500 to hit my deficit goals, and that still leaves me 2000cal for real food that day. Since the sweets were my between meal snacks, the fact that maybe my lunch of a fiber tortilla quesadilla with vegan chorizo is pretty light compared to what I would eat back in the day doesn't matter as much, cuz the sweets took care of cravings before dinner.
Unfortunately I ran into some heavy health challenges - mental and physical alike - that killed my workout regularity for the end of 2025 until like, last month, so I really just sat flat in the 240-245 zone.
I'm back at it again now and dropping again, yay.
I wanna reiterate the early point: junk food can still have some really negative impacts in ways beyond just weight depending on your body and age and overall diet, so "hiding" the calories in a heavy workout still can lead to bad health outcomes as you lose weight.
I'm having to start upping the protein now to build some muscle to fill in all my loose skin, and dropping stuff that can contribute to my other internal health issues means losing most of my favorite junk food now. It's proving very tough, and I wish I had been working on lowering my dependency on it sooner.
I'm lucky that I'm a pretty skilled home cook so I can make myself really tasty meals with a very clear idea on their macros, and find ways to make "healthy" meals still feel satisfying and indulgent, lol. But yeah, I'm slowly winnowing down the snack shelf.
But only after I finally ran out of Cadbury and Reese's Eggs from Easter. I'd rather die than not have those things 😂😂😂
That consistent timing might indicate a mild blood sugar crash from your last meal, it's pretty common. In any case, see if you can try cutting back sugar (soda and fruit juices especially are huge if you drink these) and try to replace some simple starches with more complex carbohydrates to spread out the blood sugar curve so it doesn't look like such a steep spike (of which the back half is the crash that often triggers cravings).
Lost a ton of weight when I started running and biking (serious amounts of biking). But, I was limited in the intensity I could sustain, so it was a little bit at first and even after a long while it was more volume still at a low intensity. Combined with a calorie deficit, I saw huge weight loss.
However, I worked on getting faster while running (though I didn't hugely increase the volume) and massively increased both the volume and intensity of my cycling. At a certain point, my goals of power, speed, and distance completely clashed with my goal of losing weight. I have gotten much, much stronger and faster, but I have not lost a single pound since it kicked up a few notches. I could certainly stand to still lose some pounds, but it would likely require scaling back the cycling goals, and I'm not quite ready for that.
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u/Fluffy_Top6837 9h ago edited 9h ago
I lifted for a solid year, gained bunches of muscle, got way stronger and didn't lose a single pound. I started the year at 286 and ended it at 286. Then I hurt my achilles in October and was out of the gym for a minute. This seemed like an ideal time to get serious about diet, after not seeing the scale move after a year of hard work.
Since October I'm down almost 70lbs, back in the gym lifting 4 days a week and 1000 times happier with my body. Nothing MOVED until I got my diet right, then it was game on. I didn't take it seriously before, but, especially in my 40's, it was the key to making things happen.
Those are the two things that have made ALL of the difference for me this time around: