So today, I'm starting to work toward my goal, take a few pounds off at a time.

For breakfast today, I had 2 cups of cooked, plain oats and added 1 tea spoon of sugar. Is this good enough for breakfast, it's about 315 calories. Will this help me achieve my goal of 2 pounds off per week?

NOTE: Obviously, I'm not going to eat oatmeal for breakfast, lunch and dinner!

Thanks!

In all honesty - I could look at that meal and say that you could do a lot worse. I might want to add skimmed milk (to add protein and calcium) and would substitute the sweetener instead of sugar or use an alternative natural sweetener like fruit - but a spoon is just a spoon and it all depends on other factors like how heavy you currently are which leads to how much weight you may want to lose. Also what you are getting in the way of nutrients during the rest of the day.

You do not want to be posting about every meal you have - or for that matter consider having. In one context a meal could be healthy - but unhealthy in another. You need to be getting some protein in your diet - and as a meal that is not going to contribute much protein for instance. You need other nutrients too.

You need to learn to build and evaluate your own healthy diet for yourself. Then the world is your oyster....

You would be best off reading the exercise and nutrition sections paying particular attention to the sticky threads.

Get a free account from FitDay - Free Weight Loss and Diet Journal and set up the profile information. Enter your exercise and food and see what your calorie balance looks like. Since you want to lose some weight - you need to set things up so that there is a deficit - but not too much of one.

People generally lose weight if they eat calories at a level between 8 times and 12 times their weight in pounds depending on their exercise level. Start with 11 or 12 times and see how that pans out. If you lose weight - all well and good. If not - reduce it and see how that works out...

You should be able to set nutritional targets for yourself from your studies of the nutrition section. You will be able to see what nutrients are in your diet by looking at fitday too. You will thus be able to hone your diet for both good health and effective weight loss.

In addition I would suggest that you adopted the good nutritional guidelines that I set as bonuses in the challenge that I ran over the summer. Each is like a seperate little nutrition lesson - and I am sure that your diet would benefit from making sure that you are doing them all. You may well be doing some of them but I suspect that you will not be doing them all.

http://weight-loss.fitness.com/club-...oresheets.html

Korrie did a sticky in the newcomers section which covers how you can set up your ticker. If you have the ticker in your signature it will help others to help you.

I'll echo what Omega said .. definitely register for the free account and start logging your food. You'll learn what foods are better or worse and how to incorporate them into your diet.

Your breakfast isn't bad - but it has to be taken into the context of your WHOLE day. For example, your breakfast is pure carbs. It's healthy carbs and I think oats are great ... so don't freak out about that. But will you then have veggies for lunch? Will you have fruit for a snack? See ... everything is interlinked.

Just to give you an idea of how I eat (usually), this is my usual weekday meal plan:

Breakfast: yogurt and blueberries and honey (or oats, blueberries, and honey)
Snack: Apple and cheese
Lunch: tuna or chicken salad sandwich on whole grain, carrots, celery (some kind of crunchy veg)
Snack: can of low sodium tomato juice and a boiled egg
Snack: protein powder shake (after my workout)
Dinner: some kind of lean protein (grilled chicken, baked fish, shrimp, lean pork chop, whatever), some kind of veggie (oven roasted mixed veggies) and maybe some brown rice or pasta
Snack/Dessert: if I have available calories sometimes I'll have a skinny cow ice cream sandwich, or some popcorn, or instead I'll have a glass of wine with dinner or a martini before dinner.

As you can see - it all fits together - I make sure that I have a protein and a veg or fruit every single time I eat. I know that I get sufficient calcium, I keep my sodium down, and I get a lot of protein to help maintain muscle.

Hi! It's my first day on diet, so I found this forum to support other overweight people and to find someone to support me. What you describe looks just like my diet. But, oh...how much I still need to lose... that's too much. How to set weight loss goals?

I dont follow your statement.

What is too much?
Why?
How much do you weigh?
How much do you need to lose?

Why do you have difficulty in setting weight loss goals?

Each person is different. We are not carbon copies of each other. We have bodies which differ from each other by such things as weight, height, gender, age, state of fitness, amount of exercise done. All these factors contribute something to how many calories we burn and therefore into how many calories we should eat to lose weight.

Many people assume that people lose weight better if they eat less. This is wrong.

If you make postings like this you do not give anyone any information to help you. I suspect that you are making a lot of basic assumptions about weight control which are wrong - and probably have hindered your previous attempts at weight loss.

There are a lot of informative sticky threads on this forum that you would benefit from reading. Read those sticky threads and give information when you post.

Yes, I agree with Omega!

The diet I listed above is about 1600 calories and about 120g of protein per day. It's also balanced to meet the RDA of all other nutrients and to be low in sodium.

Give us more information about your goals and we can help you better to figure out if that calorie level is good for you.