Which weight loss methods have worked for you?

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I'll come home, eat a light meal, work in the yard until sunset, and have another meal.

Apart from drinking tea regularly which I can't usually be bothered with, the only thing that worked really well for me was entering a weight loss competition. The prospect of winning a prize and beating 100 other contestants worked beautifully. I lost weight, came first, picked up my prize, then promptly ate myself to a higher weight than I'd begun at.

I didn't claim it was a perfect method.

I cut out drinking a lot of soft drinks and replaced them with water, milk, juice, or tea.
It may help not to drink a lot of caffeine too since it can be addictive (when in the process of cutting out soft drinks).

Best way is to create a caloric deficit by working off more calories than you consume. Also, for sustainable results, you need to structure your diet in such a way where you only have treats on special occasions, or at least infrequent enough that you don't put the weight back on.

A couple hours of moving heavy wet snow means I get to binge!

I use a combo of diet modification and distraction therapy With diet modification you can still eat some of the less healthy foods, but try to find healthy alternatives when you can. Also, don't buy the worst culprits when out grocery shopping. Just have those occasionally when eating away from home. With distraction therapy you go longer between meals. I always eat hearty meals, but if I go longer between meals I eat fewer meals in a week, and thus fewer calories. This is called mini fasting. The only way I can do this is to do things that keep me distracted, and it does work. Because of my other health issues, I can no longer do active exercises, but I do have a couple of stretch tubes with handles which I use to exercise my arms. My knees and back are shot, but every little bit helps. I am obese, but have managed to lose about 60 pounds. It's not a straight line downward, as I occasionally go back up a few pounds, mostly in winter when my body holds onto more weight as a defense against cold weather. As part of my diet modification I also eat fewer processed foods and more salads with my meals.

My methods are not a magic quick-loss method, but they are helping me to gradually lose weight, and without dangerous drugs, or dangerous stomach surgery. I'm willing to put up with the long time frame for this, as it sure beats using those drugs, or getting the surgery. I am also eating a lot healthier than I used to, while still eating some of the less healthy foods I like. Because I can do that, I feel less deprived, so I able to stick with these methods of weight loss. If my knees and back weren't shot I would be losing weight even faster, as I would be able to take walks, which I used to like to do. Unfortunately, I've had too many falls over the years, and carried around too much weight for too many years, so now I have to use 2 canes to get around. Looked into knee replacement surgery, but there is a high risk of strokes, heart attacks, and pulmonary embolisms with this surgery, so I won't do it. Besides, I did some additional research on alternatives. There are several much safer alternatives currently in developement. Once they are ready for the general publlic I can try those.

Just remember:

- Diet modification
- Distraction therapy
- Exercise--if physically possible. Even my using stretch tubes while sitting in a chair provides some help.
- Also, get enough rest. People who are tired tend to eat more to try to get more energy from food, instead of from rest.

I've lost more than a stone in the last 6 weeks by exercising.

For me nothing worked. No matter what adjustments I made to my diet contents, amounts, timing, and exercise routine I did this steady lose 10 gain 20 pattern for years. I've been in physical therapy since early this summer, and a couple weeks in the PT commented that I was showing signs of the kind of overall structural damage from being so overweight and started asking what I'd tried and all that. I thought at first it was going to be another "You've just got to try harder and eat better" lecture from a doctor that had no context of how I was eating or what my normal activity levels were. Instead he jotted it all down and asked if I'd be willing to go with him to the endocrinologist across the hall for bit. He ran through what I'd tried with her and some symptoms with some worse than expected balance issues and with my attention and memory he'd noticed that I'd just been chalking up to being overloaded from my walking boot, and work stuff, and so many doctor visits lately and figured was just pushing all my sensory buttons. I'd kept telling him its fine, I'm autistic, this is normal, but he insisted.

The endocrinologist got me on the schedule for a formal appointment, but also had me go get a ton of blood tests done. The appointment wasn't suppose to be fore a few weeks, but she bumped me up after getting the results back. I had almost no progesterone, vitamin d, vitamin b, and a ton of my proteins were in the tank too. I also had a pair of gene mutations that on their own are just annoying, but together were doing a kind of feedback loop on my whole metabolic system. She put me on a hormone replacement medication and a huge amount of vitamin supplements and I've dropped nearly 50lb since August. Basically my body didn't know what to do with anything and was shoving almost all the fuel into storage and flushing the rest.

I can also think straight(ish) again. I hadn't really realized how bad the attention stuff was getting, but I was to the point that I was forgetting how to do things in the middle of doing them. I was also a lot more depressed than I had realized. Not enough materials in system to make all the neurotransmitters I guess. Mine was kind of an extreme case because of the double mutation whammy, but the endo was saying that even minor hormone dips can cause a lot of difficulty with maintaining a healthy weight (and also went on a very polite rant about how primary care docs are idiots for not testing for hormones or MTHFR and other mutations at all, but I can't tell if that was professional bias or something they don't actually do, or what).

Great to hear you figured it out with help of blood tests!

I have regular blood tests to make sure everything is "normal." In my case the doctor doesn't want me to lose any more weight but other than she is happy with what I'm doing.

Diet and exercise. Mainly diet.

I have pcos and low thyroid function but putting in the effort still works if you try hard enough. I have to take a million supplements to counter my medicine and health problems, but it’s worth it.

For the past few weeks my weight loss plan has been me waking up every day and planning to skip one or more meals, then I get hungry, then I eat, then I feel disappointed with myself for lack of willpower.

It's a shame because I successfully used this method to lose 7 kg about 6 years ago.

I weighed 108.5 pounds last night. I went to Target to buy more deeply discounted holiday chocolate but there wasn't anything left worth buying.