Healthy eating is making me depressed. I LOVE hamburgers, I LOVE potatoes, LOVE rice, loveljakldfjsdjalfkjafd. cheese!!!!!

I've been trying to stick with veggies, fruits, grains, lean meat but it's so freaking hard right now. I need to literally punch something. So far I've lost 6-7lbs......

I'm 5'2, 125lbs and I'm trying to lose 20 pounds. *drop kicks an apple*

/vent over

Why can't you have hamburgers, potatoes, rice and cheese?

i have them all regularly as part of my lifestyle eating.

I have a cheeseburger at least once a week. You can have a good burger and oven fries for dinner without doing too much damage. Rice and cheese are pretty easy to work in as well. I think if you started actually counting your calories instead of just assuming "I can't have X because it is fattening" you may be surprised what you can have. I had a sausage dog and chips for lunch yesterday. I never thought that was possible. I just "assumed" that I would have to give that up.

1 Turkey smoked sausage (110 cal) which was surprisingly very good.
1 oz Sun Chips (140)
1 Bun (90 cal)
2 tbs. Kraut (5 cal)
Mustard
Water

345 calorie lunch. I had oatmeal for breakfast (200 cal). Heck I could have had a Big-Mac combo for dinner and still been below target intake.

I'm not saying it is the most nutritional use of calories. I'm just saying there is no need to deprive your self.

Seriously...eat a cheeseburger. I do, and have since I started. People can't believe it when they see me out in a local restaurant actually EATING since I've been losing weight.

There's this misconception I've noticed...people think you HAVE to give up everything you love to lose weight. I tried that over and over, and it didn't work. This time, dangit, if I want a burger, I'm eating a burger. I've even been known to eat pizza.

However, as a calorie counter, I've got to make sure my calories for the day, and other levels I track, are low enough to allow that burger for lunch, or dinner, or whatever. It's helped me stay on track by being ALLOWED to eat what I want....just less of it than before, or less frequently.

Eat a burger....slowly. Enjoy every single bite. It'll make it easier to stick to everything else you're doing.

In the last week I've had cheeseburgers, fries, potatoes, chili, pizza...

No one said you had to deprive yourself of what you love. The burgers we use are lean, the fries are baked and trans-fat free, the potatoes and chili just plain rock and we make the pizza with our own ingredients so we can control the calories.

Enjoy yourself. What you're doing now has to be a lifestyle... something you can reasonably do for a lifetime. You can't (nor should you) avoid food you love for the rest of your life so don't bother trying. And if it's really bad and can't be made healthier then just limit portions or frequency.

Thanks everyone. I think I'm gaining back my sanity by reading this.

Today I ate 1 hardboiled egg for breakfast, 1 sweet potato with some bit of salad and seaweed soup for lunch. Snacked on some wheat thins >_> and ate chicken/veggie soup after I came back from work.

What do you guys think? Is that perfectly ok? Haha.

Wow. 58lbs lost? You're my hero XD.....

No, but seriously.... what's your usual dietary plan? If eat hamburgers, what do you usually do to balance that?

By the way, how much do you work out? I usually work out for 30 min.... not sure if that's enough.

I see what you mean, but I'm curious even if you go below your caloric intake, what if you go beyond your daily advised fat intake? I'm a little confuzzled, since I read somewhere my daily fat intake should be around 40grams and that's insane for me.... is it saying that that's the advised fat intake you SHOULD have (and not below) and not necessarily saying going beyond 40grams would result in fat gain...? If so, what would you measure as exceeding the amount of fat you can have in a day, not the amount of fat you should at least have, if that makes any sense.

Asuka, I just generally eat whatever I did before, just with more veggies and fruits and healthier stuff in between. Like tonight, for example, we're having grilled chicken breast, mashed potatoes made with fat free evaporated skim milk (which is SO much better than regular milk), broccoli and green beans. For snacks I'll have fat free or reduced fat pretzels, fiber one bars, bananas and apples. A normal lunch is the occasional Lean Cuisine (TOO high in sodium though), or a bowl of cereal with 2% milk and toast with peanut butter...or tuna salad made with light mayo and some wheat crackers.

I'll eat a cheeseburger every other week or so, normally, but used to eat them three or four times a week. I use Sparkpeople to count calories, or if Sparkpeople doesn't have the specific burger I'm looking for, I'll look on chowbaby.com for fast food calories (tons of fast food places on there).

So let's say I'm going to allow myself a cheeseburger from Sonic (which is all we have here) on Friday. On that day I'll figure the calories for the burger (551 according to chowbaby.com), and a small order of fries if I want. Then the rest of the day I'll figure my calories (normally around 1,450 to 1,550) to stay below that goal. Sometimes I'm a little hungrier during the day on those days, but the splurge makes it worth it.

Hope that answers your question....

As for workouts, I do 35-40 minutes of cardio five days a week, and weights three days a week.

Asuka, I suggest getting an account at FitDay and inputting what you eat into that to track your calories, fat, carbs and protein.

You should strive for 10-20% (no more than 30%) of calories from fat. So what that number would be from you would depend on your daily caloric needs. FitDay will calculate all of that for you. It's a good service and it's completely free.

What were your total calories for this day?
Unless your quantities were quite high this is probably way too low for you.

What are your stats/goals?

Like it is suggested above- get an account on fitday.com or just write everything down and keep track of your calories.
You will be surprised what fits in to your day.
Make your 'diet' sustainable for life, not a temporary change- this means including some 'bad' foods from time to time if you want.

Hey...

My goal is to lose 20lbs.

I don't want to dwell on yesterday but I will give you a disappointing 411 on today. I ate a total of 1800 something calories because I binged at dinner (aunts birthday). I feel pretty crappy but afterwards, I exercised and according to my "cycling tracker" I burned 350 calories. I'm planning on going back on the bicycle in a bit to work off the last 25 min.

This getting healthy/losing weight deal is confusing me.

My original meal plan today was

Breakfast: 1 cup cottage cheese, 7 strawberries, 1 apple and 1 hard boiled egg.

Lunch: 1 cup spaghetti with onion/garlic sauce (no meat) with 1 large dill pickle.

Snack: 3 apples

Dinner: Sirloin steak with steamed vegetables.

That would've averaged up to 900-1000 calories. I'm 5'2, 21 yrs old and weigh 126lbs. My daily caloric intake should be no more than 1391 and not any less than 30%. What ended up happening was that I went to a birthday party at soup plantation and it just ended in disaster.

To be honest I eat like a bird. My stomach is pretty small and I get full VERY easily. People always comment on how small of a meal I eat so...( that doesn't exclude me binging on things I find tasty, but which is rare.)

I'm trying to figure out how to eat a small meal that has adequate calories for a day and still be able to be healthy and LOSE weight.

My dilemma is that when I eat till I'm full I'm not having much calories.

I'm really confused, I'd really appreciate it if someone could help me give suggestions on how I can attain at least 1200 calories a day (what kind of foods) and still have a THREE small meals and the rest snacks.

^^ I do too, even find a way to add pizza in the mix! :P

I have pizza every now and again too. Nowadays, I prefer not to because of the number of calories in such a small package makes it difficult to be satiated.

Figure out what your caloric intake should be per day and plan your meals around that. I even went out for wings and beer one night and it didn't affect my weight. Granted, I had a single basket of wings (extra spicy so I wouldn't want to eat more than a basket... being all you can eat wings night and all) and one Bud Light. I just re-arranged the rest of my meals for the day to accomodate this.

But even if you ate pizza til you popped... one day of pizza eating isn't going to undo the work you've done to date..

it's people who fall into the trap of - oh I had xXXX today - so I really screwed up - so now I can do X,Y, Z and ABC for the next week -and never get themselves back on track that the problem starts... Have the pizza, have the fries - enjoy - just don't let it turn into a 3 week pigfest...