Mushroom Coffee For Weight Loss

hi all... I needing to get on better shape for my kids. mushroom coffee seems to be all the rage at the moment. does anyone here use it? and has it helped with weight loss or fitness submitted by /u/Quirky_Scar7857 to r/daddit [link] [comments]

Been doing 16/8 for a year black coffee kept me going but acid reflux got brutal heartburn by noon. Switched to cold brew helped a bit then heard mushroom coffee has less acid and maybe fights fatigue from stress. Tried a brand with lions mane and reishi makes decent cold brew at home. Energy feels cleaner no pounding chest after but still dips later. Does it help weight loss or just steady vibe. Also mixing in d3 k2 cause read it pairs with magnesium for bones and energy as we age. Collagen in there too but skin not changing fast. What brands you swear by for mushroom stuff and how long till you felt it. Or is it placebo. submitted by /u/SavingsProgress195 to r/fasting [link] [comments]

Turned 35 last month and suddenly my skin looks like it lost a fight with a cheese grater, nails splitting like they're auditioning for a horror movie, joints creaking louder than my upstairs neighbors at 2am, and I swear my face is sprinting towards 50 while the rest of me lags behind. Bloodwork? Perfect, of course. Doctors shrug like its my personality causing the wrinkles. Tried the collagen trend because Reddit swore by it, choked down vital proteins or whatever that stuff is for two months straight. How long does collagen take to work anyway? Still waiting for the glow up, or maybe it just works on people who werent born looking prematurely weathered. Joint pain same as ever, skin same as ever. Heard mushroom coffee might fix everything from energy crashes to looking like a zombie. Tried making mushroom coffee at home, tasted like regret brewed with dirt, no weight loss magic or anti aging miracles. Anyone got the best mushroom coffee brands that don't make you question life choices? Now circling D3 and K2 supplements because apparently thats the secret to not crumbling like a cookie. Anti aging routine? Mine is slathering on creams that cost more than rent and hoping for the best. Anyone got a real routine that actually makes you look younger instead of just smelling like expensive disappointment? Best collagen brand reddit hive mind, hit me with what works for hair skin joints without the placebo tax. Or am I doomed to age faster than expected because genetics decided to troll me extra hard. Spill your wins or at least make me laugh while I mourn my youth. Edit: Thanks guys, appreciate all the insights. I’ve ordered Live Conscious Beyond Collagen powder to give it a proper trial and will stick to it consistently for the next few months. Will update after four months with what actually changed for skin, joints, and nails. submitted by /u/Glum_Entrepreneur894 to r/Supplements [link] [comments]

🤔 Thanks for reading our Progenifix Review ... Let’s be honest. Weight loss after 40 hits different. The fat’s clingy, the stress is clingier, and your willpower evaporates somewhere between coffee and 3 PM cravings. If you're tired of spinning your wheels while your belly spins out of control, you're not alone. A slow metabolism and stress often tag-team your progress and your mood. Progenifix offers a different kind of help — one based on mushroom pills for metabolism boost, not mystery powder and shame. 📦 Product Overview Product Name: Progenifix Category: Supplements → Weight Loss Overall Verdict: 4.6/5 🍄 What Is Progenifix? Progenifix is a plant-based supplement that uses medicinal mushrooms for weight management. Its big pitch? Less stress = less fat. Instead of amping you up with stimulants, it helps lower cortisol so your body can focus on burning fat — especially around the belly. That’s what makes it feel more like a holistic weight loss remedy than a crash diet in capsule form. It’s gentle but surprisingly effective. 🔬 How Does Progenifix Work? The science behind this isn't rocket fuel — it’s stress, cortisol, and your body saying “we need a break.” The formula works as a cortisol lowering supplement for belly fat, helping your body shed stubborn weight without the chaos of stimulant-driven pills. Many users see it as one of the better natural ways to reduce cortisol, especially those who’ve struggled with the stress and weight gain connection. So if you've wondered how to lose weight without stimulants, this route might be your best bet. Plus, it feels safer than most weight loss supplements without caffeine or stimulants floating around online. 🍄 Key Ingredients Breakdown Lion’s Mane Known for focus and appetite balance, this shaggy mushroom packs a punch. Lion’s mane for appetite control has been known about for many years and this formula uses it to full effect. Chaga Chaga’s here for its anti-inflammatory and sugar-balancing effects. Fans often mention the chaga benefits for weight loss without jitters. Cordyceps This little powerhouse pulls double duty: increased stamina + better fat burn = legit cordyceps energy and fat loss. White Button Mushroom Often overlooked, this one brings down fat storage, making white button mushroom supplement users feel lighter and more energized. Together, these four make up a smart, clean fat-burning mushroom complex. And yes, they’re all part of a well-crafted mushroom extract for fat metabolism solution that doesn’t feel sketchy. Ever asked, do lion’s mane and chaga help with fat loss? This blend says yes — with receipts. 👩‍🦳 Vanessa’s Experience with Progenifix Vanessa — my cousin’s partner of 14 years — has always been the kind of person who radiates calm. She teaches yoga on the weekends, eats intuitively, and genuinely enjoys things like fermented beet kraut and lemon balm tea. But over the past year, she noticed something off: her belly was puffier, her energy more unpredictable, and her usually grounded vibe felt more like a nervous hum. “I felt like I was inflating emotionally and physically,” she told me. “I wasn’t overeating, I wasn’t being lazy — I just felt heavy. In my body and in my head.” She gave Progenifix a try mostly because the ingredients aligned with her interest in adaptogenic mushrooms. Within two weeks, she noticed her sleep improved. By the fourth week, the stubborn bloat she’d been carrying started to ease up. She wasn’t obsessively weighing herself, but she felt lighter — in her joints, her clothes, and her general mood. The biggest shift? Her cravings dialed down without any force. “I wasn’t stress-snacking on roasted chickpeas at 10 p.m. anymore,” she laughed. Her only complaint was that on a couple of mornings she forgot to take the capsule and didn’t love that it seemed to work best taken consistently on an empty stomach. Not a deal-breaker, just something to get used to. She’s still taking it now, nearly three months in — not because she’s chasing skinny, but because, in her words, “it makes me feel more like myself.” ✅ Pros and Cons Pros 🟢 Uses herbal fat burners that actually work (no junk fillers) 🟢 Great for safe weight loss pills for over 40 🟢 Helps naturally reduce stress-triggered weight gain 🟢 Packed with effective adaptogenic supplements for fat loss Cons 🔴 Capsules are a little large — not ideal for pill-haters 🔴 Requires consistency — it’s a slow-burn effect 🔴 Limited availability — stick to the real site ⭐ Star Ratings ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Ingredient Quality: Backed by proven best mushroom supplements for weight loss ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆ Effectiveness: Works gradually — not instant, but reliable ⭐⭐⭐⭐⭐ Safety: Clean, plant-based, zero caffeine ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆ User Experience: Easy routine but capsule size may annoy ⭐⭐⭐⭐☆ Value: Costs more upfront but delivers in balance 💰 Pricing Options You’ve got 3 choices: 1 Bottle – $69 3 Bottles – $177 ($59 each) 6 Bottles – $294 ($49 each) If you’re in this for long-haul gains (and losses), the 3- or 6-pack wins. This is easily a best natural supplement for weight loss pick at its price point. 🛒 Where To Buy Progenifix Stick with the official site. Scammers are creative — don’t get duped by some guy selling “Progenfixx” with two Xs and zero refunds. Progenifix before and after results are only guaranteed through the legit checkout page — where the 60-day refund policy is honored. 🧠 NEW: Why Adaptogens Work for Fat Loss Adaptogens help your body respond better to stress, which in turn supports hormones and metabolism. It's the backbone of holistic weight loss using adaptogens. 🧾 Conclusion Progenifix isn’t trying to be flashy. It’s a quiet helper for people tired of their body storing stress and fat like a doomsday prepper. If you’ve asked yourself how do medicinal mushrooms help burn fat, now you’ve got your answer — slowly, naturally, and without frying your nerves. As far as Progenifix real user experiences go, the feedback is clear: it helps people feel better, lighter, and less stuck. It’s not a miracle capsule — it’s a nudge in the right direction. But sometimes that’s exactly what we need. ❓ FAQ Q: What’s the main benefit of this supplement? A: It’s a natural stress relief supplement that helps with weight loss, especially from stubborn areas like the belly. Q: Can men take Progenifix too? A: Of course. The mushrooms don’t care about your pronouns. Q: Does it work with other supplements? A: Yes, just check if you’re doubling up on adaptogens. Q: Is it suitable for vegans? A: Yes, the formula is plant-based and free from animal products. Q: Is it one of the better mushroom-based options? A: It’s definitely high up in the best mushroom supplements for weight loss category. Tried Progenifix? Did it work for you? Share your honest thoughts and help someone else make a smarter choice. Drop your experience in the comments. It’s good karma 🙏 Thanks for reading! – Mary G Disclaimer: The information provided in this article is for educational and informational purposes only and is not intended as medical advice. Progenifix is a dietary supplement and is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure, or prevent any disease. Individual results may vary. Always consult with a qualified healthcare professional before beginning any new supplement, especially if you are pregnant, nursing, taking medications, or have an existing medical condition. Do not exceed the recommended dosage. Keep out of reach of children. The statements regarding this product have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration (FDA). Use of this product should be based on your own research and in consultation with your physician or other medical advisor. (Please note this channel is supported by affiliate relationships. Using some links on the page may lead to our affiliate partners where we may receive a small commission should you decide to buy. There is no extra cost to you and it's a great way to support our efforts here on Review Junkies - thank you!) submitted by /u/m4ry-c0n7rary to r/ReviewJunkies [link] [comments]

After ten years of chronic illness, I am relieved to finally be able to write the post I had hoped I could one day write.... It’s long. But I think you'll find it interesting. If you have also spent years chasing a mystery illness, you will understand. Finding out the source of these chronic health issues has taken up a significant amount of my free time for nearly a decade. And it has become almost an obsession for the last two years. If you want to skip to the answer, I'll entirely understand. I'll reverse things and put a TL;DR at the end. But I won't spoil the surprise by putting it here at the top. I think the answer is both pretty unique and potentially very common. And it's nothing to do with acceptance or resistance either. I’ll be posting this in the MCAS and histamine intolerance sub reddits, LPR sub reddits, muscle tension dysphonia sub reddits, the MTHFR subreddits, and maybe more. Over the last ten years I have spent cumulatively weeks, if not months, of my life here on reddit (and other sources) trying to work out what was going on. And I have done DEEP research on all these sub reddits. And while none of these turned out to be the core cause - I am incredibly grateful for all the information shared. Along the way I have discovered various things about my body, my genetics and my diet which WILL continue to be useful to me. They just so happened not to be the root of my issues. I hope that at some point, this helps someone else. Its hard to know how unique my case is, but the answer turned out to be crushingly simple, and yet eluded me for decades. Join me for a brief overview and a writeup of my journey... THE ONSET It's worth noting from the off that by most measures I'm a fit and healthy man. I run, cycle, used to work out 3-4 times a week, don't eat too many carbs. Eat a varied diet. I sleep well. Don't take drugs or smoke. Broadly speaking I've taken good care of myself, which made this all the more confusing. I spent my 20s working in hospitality - from a barback to a barista, cocktail bartender to a waiter, and then into management. The dream/hope/plan had always been to open my own and by the time I was 30 I opened a restaurant in Central London with my business partner. We worked our asses off, but we were also lucky. It became exceptionally successful, and was for some time the most talked about restaurant in London. That was a deep relief to us and investors - but brought with it a huge amount of expectation. And I worked to banish my own self doubts. 80hr weeks and more for years on end. Often with no days off, or only occasional days off. Early on, even before the restaurant opened, I noticed that I seemed to have developed a slightly hoarse voice and a tightness in my throat. And often red, itchy eyes. But to be honest I was so busy I didn't pay much attention. Symptoms were come and go. My body would ache - but I was doing 14-16 hour days on my feet often fuelled by not much more than coffee, adrenaline and staff food at 4pm. So that didn't seem too surprising. I certainly enjoyed a drink after work on occasion - sometimes quite a few drinks - but no more than most 30 year olds. THE LONG DECLINE As the years went by at the restaurant my symptoms worsened. I developed pounding headaches, gut issues, fatigue, and itchy skin. Worst of all though, was the hoarse voice and throat tightness. By the time staff briefing came round at 5pm I often needed to ask one of the team to take over because I could barely get any words out. As you can imagine, running a searingly busy restaurant while not being able to speak is tricky. The entire job revolves around speaking to floor staff, guests and kitchen all day. I began to notice that these symptoms always seemed to flare around the time I ate staff food - 4-5pm - and receded by about 9pm. So I came to the straightforward conclusion that I must be allergic to something I was eating. I began trying to work out what was causing it. Not knowing that this endeavour would be the start of nothing short of a medical mountain.... To list everything I tried would take far far too long. But suffice to say, I tried all the usual main allergens (nuts, fish, crustaceans, gluten, dairy, egg etc) I tried cutting out carbs, I tried eating smaller meals, I tried cutting out coffee, I tried cutting out alcohol. But nothing seemed to help. Frustratingly I would have a few good days in a week and then some bad days. I might then have a whole week feeling fine, one bad day, and then back to fine. Symptoms were intermittent and I couldn't find any correlation with anything I was eating. But I was getting worse. From around 2017-2022 I began to become truly unwell. I developed dry skin on my hands, aching neck, chronic IBD type issues and an increase in all the previously noted headaches, fatigue, itchy skin, red eyes and hoarse voice. I was still working long hours and was getting worn down both mentally and physically trying to summon up the energy and enthusiasm to do what I loved - running the restaurant. I began to shift to a more office based role to conserve my energy and pull my weight in terms of work. But the brain fog and fatigue made work harder and harder. Depression crept in and though I could sleep like a log, I never felt rested. In many ways COVID and the lockdowns came as a blessed relief. An opportunity to rest and recuperate. Over these years (2017-2022) I went to doctors, a consultant ENT, I had x-rays, blood tests, allergen tests, stool samples and more. I tried supplements, tried changing hair products, shampoos, tried meditation, fibre, antihistamines of ALL types, electrolytes in my water, broccoli sprouts, yoga, cutting out salicylates, a FODMAP diet, air filters, face masks, linen sheets and much much more. I wondered if I was depressed, had ADHD, maybe I was just getting old? Was it cooking fumes? VOCs in the walls? Maybe I was just exhausted. Maybe I was just imaging it and it was all psychosomatic? I became increasingly desperate for an answer but all medical tests and examinations suggested I was fine. I needed to supplement my vitamin D and my folate levels were a bit low, but not much else. I was frustrated though, because I was sure something was related to food. My symptoms were always worse in the afternoon, and I tend not to eat breakfast. I also noticed that my symptoms were generally better on days off and could resolve for days at a time when I took a holiday. But they always got worse as soon as I started work. THINGS COME TO A HEAD By 2022 my wife and I were blessed to have a baby, and the combination of parenting, long hours, health and fatigue at the restaurant had crushed me both physically and mentally. I was no longer able to carry out my role in terms of running the business alongside my partners. And I feared I was not going to be able to support my wife physically or emotionally in looking after our family. I had come to believe I was just stressed and burned out. And I needed a break. That would fix me right? So by reluctant but mutual agreement I left the restaurant I had founded and dreamed of opening. I took several months off to look after my wife and daughter, and my symptoms did indeed improve significantly. I felt physically better than I had in a long time. Though psychologically I couldn't shake the feeling of failure. It seemed I just hadn't been strong enough to keep going. Perhaps I was mentally just not tough enough for the restaurant business. From 2022 up until the present I have worked as both a consultant and for a technology company in the hospitality space. I went back to work after a few months. This time in a much less stressful role, more flexible, no staff rotas to contend with, and with very little financial or emotional stress. But I was horrified to find out that my symptoms returned almost immediately after starting work again. The headaches, hoarse voice, itchy eyes, throat tightness, extreme fatigue, dry skin and chronic gut issues came back even worse than before. In retrospect, this should have been a clue. But I was convinced my symptoms were 'real', related to my gut, metabolism, immune system - or something. Now though, working from home, I had the time, the control over my food (not eating staff food at the restaurant) and the desire to finally get to the bottom of things. Again, to list everything I have researched and tried would make for a small novel, but in short.... WHAT DIDNT WORK I tried low histamine diets, low amine diets, low sodium diets, keto diets, high fibre diets, low fibre diets, FODMAP diets and more. I was SURE my issue was allergic/immune in nature at points and tried all sorts of MCAS and histamine intolerance ideas. Testing on the NHS never happened. I tried endless antihistamines, eye drops, nasal sprays, neti pots, raw local honey, bee pollen, herbal tinctures, nettle leaf tea, ginger, holy basil. I tested almost every supplements under the sun - VitD, all Bs, P5P, 5 HTP, taurine, glycine, creatine, choline, colostrum, spirulina, zinc, magnesium, lithium, bromelain, quercetin, black seed oil, copper, trace minerals, omega 3s, butyric acid, NAC, NAD, mushrooms of all sorts, high strength B1 protocol and SO many more. I have probably tried several thousand pounds worth of supplements. My symptoms seemed to flare in line line with my gut issues. I tried all sorts of probiotics, prebiotics, kefirs, l.reuteri, SIBO protocols, fibre, berberine, oregano oil, fasting. I suspected reflux of some sort. Silent reflux, bile reflux, classic reflux. I tried antacids, PPIs, limiting fat intake, bile salts, alkaline water and various other ideas. I investigated muscle tension dysphonia. I tried vocal exercises and massaging my larynx. I went to my doctor endlessly. I have been referred to ENTs, gastroenterology, endocrinology, had thyroid panels, full blood tests, cortisol tests, stool samples, CT scans, X rays, MRI scan. They even referred me to a specialist 'maybe this is a rare unknown cancer' centre in London who checked me for all sorts of things. I had my house checked for mould, I bought expensive air purifiers and ran them across my whole house day and night. I wondered whether I had any fillings or foreign objects I didn't know about causing inflammation. I tried vagus nerve stimulating devices and all sorts of nervous system relaxation, meditation etc. I considered very strongly that this was all in my mind. I had CBT therapy, EMDR and brainspotting therapy. I tried breathing techniques, getting 9 hours sleep a night. And I tried acceptance therapy too. Nothing made things better or worse. WHAT HELPED BUT WASN'T THE ANSWER At one point I ended up on the MTHFR forums and began to suspect I had methlyation issues. I took a genetic test and found I am indeed slow MTHFR, slow COMT and slow MAOA. Massive thanks to the research done by /tawinn on these communities. This explained why I had some huge success in 2022 with the carnivore diet. By eating steak and eggs and excluding flour/grains I had unwittingly supplemented creatine and choline and removed folic acid from my diet. This resolved many of my symptoms completely. In fact for a period of about a week I believed I had cracked it - I felt absolutely incredible. My depression lifted, I felt light as a feather. However, I was also not working at that point (I was home with the baby) and my physical (rather than mental/emotional) symptoms began to return shortly after. Carnivore / keto and avoiding grains remains an important part of my ongoing diet. I am not extremely strict - but I become prone to depression, reflux and sluggish feeling if I eat too many carbs or grains. I continue to supplement creatine, choline, glycine, folinic acid and Vitamin D with hyrdroxocobolamin (B12). And I take water with a pinch of celtic salt for electrolytes and minerals. I also seem to gain general health benefits from a low histamine diet. I have quite a few genetic traits that slow histamine clearance breakdown pathways (slow MAOA, DAO, NAT2 and ALDH). I have always suffered from hayfever and my skin and sleep both improve on a low histamine diet. THE LAST FEW YEARS Over the last 18 months my desperation to work out the source of my issues ramped up to almost manic levels. Often taking up many evenings of research online each week. Symptoms were affecting all aspects of my life. Between 3pm and 9pm each day I could barely function. Regardless of my workload, stress levels and diet. I methodically went back over all sorts of previously tested ideas. I went deep on Ehlers Danlos sub reddits, long covid sub reddit's, MCAS sub reddits and more. I tried complete fasting, dry fasting, elimination diets. Exercise, stretching, no exercise, 9 hours sleep, no caffeine. Anything and everything I could think of. I also doubled down on the possibility that this was all in my head. Physical symptoms manifested by the mind. And/or a nervous system stuck in a fight or flight state - I committed to sleep, therapy, breathing techniques and more. I even tried micro doses of some special mushrooms. But in my heart I still felt there was something more fundamental going on. Something more tangible causing these symptoms. I didn't feel stressed or anxious - except in the sense that I wanted to feel better. Over Christmas and New Year 2025/26 I had 16 days off work and yet again all my symptoms resolved. Despite eating and drinking anything and everything over the break, my dry skin healed, chronic gut issues resolved and I slept less but felt more rested. I was able to exercise again. Every day tasks - the washing up, tidying, sending emails - just felt so much easier. I felt like myself. This time, as going back to work at the start of January approached, I felt calm, centred and positive. I convinced myself this time would be different. I would come to each day with a positive mindset, stretch and take breaks, be kinder to myself.... but all the symptoms began to return that exact same afternoon. I was gutted. AN ACCIDENTAL ANSWER... By this point, a few weeks ago as I type this, I was ready to tear my house or body apart to work out what was going on. My symptoms seemed to be directly related to work. I checked every inch of the study I work in, I read about people with allergies to computers, I moved the fan heater in the room and replaced it with an oil radiator. I read papers on the effects of screen colour, refresh rates, circadian rhythms and more. I tried more stretches. I adjusted my posture (which doesn't seem particularly bad). I wondered whether I was shallow breathing. But still I could not find ANYTHING that made a difference. Which brings us up to last week. Last Monday evening, exactly a week ago, I lay on the sofa complaining about the issue to my Mum on the phone (bless her). I was lying on my front and using headphones so my hands were free. And I began massaging my trapezius muscles just to the side of my neck. I pressed one side hard while I chatted and then did the other, and was interested to see that my voice seemed to improve immediately. My headache seemed better too. My interest was piqued. Shortly after, when I was off the phone I used the nearest hard object I could find (a wooden dustpan handle) to press against my traps some more and I think I asked my wife to massage them a little too. It felt good. I immediately booked a chiropractor for the next day. Just in case this could be the answer. I massaged them more Wednesday morning and had my first good day while at work in months. The chiropractor that evening seemed sceptical (as was I) but did note I had tight trapezius muscles and extremely tight jaw muscles. She did some standard techniques but I had already been feeling great all day. I am now 7 days in, and have had 7 days with a complete absence of symptoms. The longest continuous stretch during work weeks for many many years. I have continued to massage my trapezius muscles and incorporated some stretches suggested by a physio. And frankly I feel like I have been given a new body. To my utter amazement my gut issues have resolved, my throat is no longer tight, I am sleeping less but feeling much more rested. The skin on my hands is improving and my eyes are no longer itchy. I ran one of my best 5k times in years and felt light and easy doing so. Best of all, the insidious brain fog and fatigue has evaporated - I think the dishes need doing and 10 mins later they're done. I think the study needs tidying and I find myself getting it sorted. Every aspect of day to day life feels easier - feels like it used to. I have had so many false hopes and investigations, that I wont fully commit to this being the answer until I can confirm I've had a month or so of feeling better. But I know this time is different. To imagine that I might have spent a decade chasing chronic illness only to find that I needed to massage my shoulders seems utterly absurd. But that is the only conclusion I can come to. If I had had a massage earlier, the last decade might have taken a different track. But for now I am simply rejoicing at having found an answer. I am overjoyed to just be with my family and feel well. As to why this seems to have had such a remarkable impact - I'm really at a loss to explain. Some sort of effect on the vagus nerve seems possible. Has it allowed my nervous system to regulate? Has it increased bloodflow to some part of my brain? Feel free to hit me with ideas. CONCLUDING THOUGHTS As I noted at the start, I have been chasing the source of these symptoms for ten years now and have done immense amounts of research into all sorts of aspects of biology - and yet this seemingly simple fix eluded me. I have read so many stories of people with chronic and often unknown health conditions and I know your pain. I have felt it deeply and been taken to the depths of despair not understanding what was wrong with me. I have been convinced at points that I was suffering from a systemic immune issue, gut issue or nervous system dysregulation. Hence why I have spent so long looking into MCAS, histamine intolerance, long covid, EDS, LPR, SIBO, MTHFR, MTD and more acronyms besides. My story is not intended to invalidate any of those conditions whatsoever. If that is your takeaway, I am at fault for not explaining more thoroughly. There is no doubt that all those conditions exist - and many are overlapping for their sufferers. For years I have held out hope of a simple and reliable cure or source of my symptoms. I have read many other members' 'try this simple fix - it worked for me' stories. And they didn't help me. I tried them all. This story probably won't help you either, and for that I'm sorry. I know so well what it feels like to hope for an answer that feels like it will never come. But even if it helps just one person, years from now, it will have been worth writing it down to pass this information on. And just maybe it will help more. I wish each and every one of you good luck on your journey, and I hope the time comes when you get to write your healing story too. TL;DR here: I spent ten years with a chronic unknown illness manifesting as hoarse voice, throat tightness, itchy eyes, dry skin, fatigue, brain fog and gut issues. Extensive medical testing, allergen testing, diets, meditation, supplements, breathwork, sleep, therapy (and more) did nothing. Last week I found out if I massage my neck and trapezius muscles, the symptoms resolve. UPDATE 27/01 - I have added a comment below with more info and ideas suggested by others. Do give it a read. submitted by /u/Inner_Department6771 to r/SIBO [link] [comments]

After ten years of chronic illness, I am relieved to finally be able to write the post I had hoped I could one day write.... It’s long. But I think you'll find it interesting. If you have also spent years chasing a mystery illness, you will understand. Finding out the source of these chronic health issues has taken up a significant amount of my free time for nearly a decade. And it has become almost an obsession for the last two years. If you want to skip to the answer, I'll entirely understand. I'll reverse things and put a TL;DR at the end. But I won't spoil the surprise by putting it here at the top. I think the answer is both pretty unique and potentially very common. And it's nothing to do with acceptance or resistance either. I’ll be posting this in the MCAS and histamine intolerance sub reddits, LPR sub reddits, muscle tension dysphonia sub reddits, the MTHFR subreddits, and maybe more. Over the last ten years I have spent cumulatively weeks, if not months, of my life here on reddit (and other sources) trying to work out what was going on. And I have done DEEP research on all these sub reddits. And while none of these turned out to be the core cause - I am incredibly grateful for all the information shared. Along the way I have discovered various things about my body, my genetics and my diet which WILL continue to be useful to me. They just so happened not to be the root of my issues. I hope that at some point, this helps someone else. Its hard to know how unique my case is, but the answer turned out to be crushingly simple, and yet eluded me for decades. Join me for a brief overview and a writeup of my journey... THE ONSET It's worth noting from the off that by most measures I'm a fit and healthy man. I run, cycle, used to work out 3-4 times a week, don't eat too many carbs. Eat a varied diet. I sleep well. Don't take drugs or smoke. Broadly speaking I've taken good care of myself, which made this all the more confusing. I spent my 20s working in hospitality - from a barback to a barista, cocktail bartender to a waiter, and then into management. The dream/hope/plan had always been to open my own and by the time I was 30 I opened a restaurant in Central London with my business partner. We worked our asses off, but we were also lucky. It became exceptionally successful, and was for some time the most talked about restaurant in London. That was a deep relief to us and investors - but brought with it a huge amount of expectation. And I worked to banish my own self doubts. 80hr weeks and more for years on end. Often with no days off, or only occasional days off. Early on, even before the restaurant opened, I noticed that I seemed to have developed a slightly hoarse voice and a tightness in my throat. And often red, itchy eyes. But to be honest I was so busy I didn't pay much attention. Symptoms were come and go. My body would ache - but I was doing 14-16 hour days on my feet often fuelled by not much more than coffee, adrenaline and staff food at 4pm. So that didn't seem too surprising. I certainly enjoyed a drink after work on occasion - sometimes quite a few drinks - but no more than most 30 year olds. THE LONG DECLINE As the years went by at the restaurant my symptoms worsened. I developed pounding headaches, fatigue, and itchy skin. Worst of all though, was the hoarse voice and throat tightness. By the time staff briefing came round at 5pm I often needed to ask one of the team to take over because I could barely get any words out. As you can imagine, running a searingly busy restaurant while not being able to speak is tricky. The entire job revolves around speaking to floor staff, guests and kitchen all day. I began to notice that these symptoms always seemed to flare around the time I ate staff food - 4-5pm - and receded by about 9pm. So I came to the straightforward conclusion that I must be allergic to something I was eating. I began trying to work out what was causing it. Not knowing that this endeavour would be the start of nothing short of a medical mountain.... To list everything I tried would take far far too long. But suffice to say, I tried all the usual main allergens (nuts, fish, crustaceans, gluten, dairy, egg etc) I tried cutting out carbs, I tried eating smaller meals, I tried cutting out coffee, I tried cutting out alcohol. But nothing seemed to help. Frustratingly I would have a few good days in a week and then some bad days. I might then have a whole week feeling fine, one bad day, and then back to fine. Symptoms were intermittent and I couldn't find any correlation with anything I was eating. But I was getting worse. From around 2017-2022 I began to become truly unwell. I developed dry skin on my hands, aching neck, gut issues and an increase in all the previously noted headaches, fatigue, itchy skin, red eyes and hoarse voice. I was still working long hours and was getting worn down both mentally and physically trying to summon up the energy and enthusiasm to do what I loved - running the restaurant. I began to shift to a more office based role to conserve my energy and pull my weight in terms of work. But the brain fog and fatigue made work harder and harder. Depression crept in and though I could sleep like a log, I never felt rested. In many ways COVID and the lockdowns came as a blessed relief. An opportunity to rest and recuperate. Over these years (2017-2022) I went to doctors, a consultant ENT, I had x-rays, blood tests, allergen tests, stool samples and more. I tried supplements, tried changing hair products, shampoos, tried meditation, fibre, antihistamines of ALL types, electrolytes in my water, broccoli sprouts, yoga, cutting out salicylates, a FODMAP diet, air filters, face masks, linen sheets and much much more. I wondered if I was depressed, had ADHD, maybe I was just getting old? Was it cooking fumes? VOCs in the walls? Maybe I was just exhausted. Maybe I was just imaging it and it was all psychosomatic? I became increasingly desperate for an answer but all medical tests and examinations suggested I was fine. I needed to supplement my vitamin D and my folate levels were a bit low, but not much else. I was frustrated though, because I was sure something was related to food. My symptoms were always worse in the afternoon, and I tend not to eat breakfast. I also noticed that my symptoms were generally better on days off and could resolve for days at a time when I took a holiday. But they always got worse as soon as I started work. THINGS COME TO A HEAD By 2022 my wife and I were blessed to have a baby, and the combination of parenting, long hours, health and fatigue at the restaurant had crushed me both physically and mentally. I was no longer able to carry out my role in terms of running the business alongside my partners. And I feared I was not going to be able to support my wife physically or emotionally in looking after our family. I had come to believe I was just stressed and burned out. And I needed a break. That would fix me right? So by reluctant but mutual agreement I left the restaurant I had founded and dreamed of opening. I took several months off to look after my wife and daughter, and my symptoms did indeed improve significantly. I felt physically better than I had in a long time. Though psychologically I couldn't shake the feeling of failure. It seemed I just hadn't been strong enough to keep going. Perhaps I was mentally just not tough enough for the restaurant business. From 2022 up until the present I have worked as both a consultant and for a technology company in the hospitality space. I went back to work after a few months. This time in a much less stressful role, more flexible, no staff rotas to contend with, and with very little financial or emotional stress. But I was horrified to find out that my symptoms returned almost immediately after starting work again. The headaches, hoarse voice, itchy eyes, throat tightness, extreme fatigue, dry skin and chronic gut issues came back even worse than before. In retrospect, this should have been a clue. But I was convinced my symptoms were 'real', related to my gut, metabolism, immune system - or something. Now though, working from home, I had the time, the control over my food (not eating staff food at the restaurant) and the desire to finally get to the bottom of things. Again, to list everything I have researched and tried would make for a small novel, but in short.... WHAT DIDNT WORK I tried low histamine diets, low amine diets, low sodium diets, keto diets, high fibre diets, low fibre diets, FODMAP diets and more. I was SURE my issue was allergic/immune in nature at points and tried all sorts of MCAS and histamine intolerance ideas. Testing on the NHS never happened. I tried endless antihistamines, eye drops, nasal sprays, neti pots, raw local honey, bee pollen, herbal tinctures, nettle leaf tea, ginger, holy basil. I tested almost every supplements under the sun - VitD, all Bs, P5P, 5 HTP, taurine, glycine, creatine, choline, colostrum, spirulina, zinc, magnesium, lithium, bromelain, quercetin, black seed oil, copper, trace minerals, omega 3s, butyric acid, NAC, NAD, mushrooms of all sorts, high strength B1 protocol and SO many more. I have probably tried several thousand pounds worth of supplements. All sorts of probiotics, prebiotics, kefirs, l.reuteri, SIBO protocols, fibre I suspected reflux of some sort. Silent reflux, bile reflux, classic reflux. I tried antacids, PPIs, limiting fat intake, bile salts, alkaline water and various other ideas. I investigated muscle tension dysphonia. I tried vocal exercises and massaging my larynx. I went to my doctor endlessly. I have been referred to ENTs, gastroenterology, endocrinology, had thyroid panels, full blood tests, cortisol tests, stool samples, CT scans, X rays, MRI scan. They even referred me to a specialist 'maybe this is a rare unknown cancer' centre in London who checked me for all sorts of things. I had my house checked for mould, I bought expensive air purifiers and ran them across my whole house day and night. I wondered whether I had any fillings or foreign objects I didn't know about causing inflammation. I tried vagus nerve stimulating devices and all sorts of nervous system relaxation, meditation etc. I considered very strongly that this was all in my mind. I had CBT therapy, EMDR and brainspotting therapy. I tried breathing techniques, getting 9 hours sleep a night. And I tried acceptance therapy too. Nothing made things better or worse. WHAT HELPED BUT WASN'T THE ANSWER At one point I ended up on the MTHFR forums and began to suspect I had methlyation issues. I took a genetic test and found I am indeed slow MTHFR, slow COMT and slow MAOA. Massive thanks to the research done by /tawinn on these communities. This explained why I had some huge success in 2022 with the carnivore diet. By eating steak and eggs and excluding flour/grains I had unwittingly supplemented creatine and choline and removed folic acid from my diet. This resolved many of my symptoms completely. In fact for a period of about a week I believed I had cracked it - I felt absolutely incredible. My depression lifted, I felt light as a feather. However, I was also not working at that point (I was home with the baby) and my physical (rather than mental/emotional) symptoms began to return shortly after. Carnivore / keto and avoiding grains remains an important part of my ongoing diet. I am not extremely strict - but I become prone to depression, reflux and sluggish feeling if I eat too many carbs or grains. I continue to supplement creatine, choline, glycine, folinic acid and Vitamin D with hyrdroxocobolamin (B12). And I take water with a pinch of celtic salt for electrolytes and minerals. I also seem to gain general health benefits from a low histamine diet. I have quite a few genetic traits that slow histamine clearance breakdown pathways (slow MAOA, DAO, NAT2 and ALDH). I have always suffered from hayfever and my skin and sleep both improve on a low histamine diet. THE LAST FEW YEARS Over the last 18 months my desperation to work out the source of my issues ramped up to almost manic levels. Often taking up many evenings of research online each week. Symptoms were affecting all aspects of my life. Between 3pm and 9pm each day I could barely function. Regardless of my workload, stress levels and diet. I methodically went back over all sorts of previously tested ideas. I went deep on Ehlers Danlos sub reddits, long covid sub reddit's, MCAS sub reddits and more. I tried complete fasting, dry fasting, elimination diets. Exercise, stretching, no exercise, 9 hours sleep, no caffeine. Anything and everything I could think of. I also doubled down on the possibility that this was all in my head. Physical symptoms manifested by the mind. And/or a nervous system stuck in a fight or flight state - I committed to sleep, therapy, breathing techniques and more. I even tried micro doses of some special mushrooms. But in my heart I still felt there was something more fundamental going on. Something more tangible causing these symptoms. I didn't feel stressed or anxious - except in the sense that I wanted to feel better. Over Christmas and New Year 2025/26 I had 16 days off work and yet again all my symptoms resolved. Despite eating and drinking anything and everything over the break, my dry skin healed, chronic gut issues resolved and I slept less but felt more rested. I was able to exercise again. Every day tasks - the washing up, tidying, sending emails - just felt so much easier. I felt like myself. This time, as going back to work at the start of January approached, I felt calm, centred and positive. I convinced myself this time would be different. I would come to each day with a positive mindset, stretch and take breaks, be kinder to myself.... but all the symptoms began to return that exact same afternoon. I was gutted. AN ACCIDENTAL ANSWER... By this point, a few weeks ago as I type this, I was ready to tear my house or body apart to work out what was going on. My symptoms seemed to be directly related to work. I checked every inch of the study I work in, I read about people with allergies to computers, I moved the fan heater in the room and replaced it with an oil radiator. I read papers on the effects of screen colour, refresh rates, circadian rhythms and more. I tried more stretches. I adjusted my posture (which doesn't seem particularly bad). I wondered whether I was shallow breathing. But still I could not find ANYTHING that made a difference. Which brings us up to last week. Last Monday evening, exactly a week ago, I lay on the sofa complaining about the issue to my Mum on the phone (bless her). I was lying on my front and using headphones so my hands were free. And I began massaging my trapezius muscles just to the side of my neck. I pressed one side hard while I chatted and then did the other, and was interested to see that my voice seemed to improve immediately. My headache seemed better too. My interest was piqued. Shortly after, when I was off the phone I used the nearest hard object I could find (a wooden dustpan handle) to press against my traps some more and I think I asked my wife to massage them a little too. It felt good. I immediately booked a chiropractor for the next day. Just in case this could be the answer. I massaged them more Wednesday morning and had my first good day while at work in months. The chiropractor that evening seemed sceptical (as was I) but did note I had tight trapezius muscles and extremely tight jaw muscles. She did some standard techniques but I had already been feeling great all day. I am now 7 days in, and have had 7 days with a complete absence of symptoms. The longest continuous stretch during work weeks for many many years. I have continued to massage my trapezius muscles and incorporated some stretches suggested by a physio. And frankly I feel like I have been given a new body. To my utter amazement my gut issues have resolved, my throat is no longer tight, I am sleeping less but feeling much more rested. The skin on my hands is improving and my eyes are no longer itchy. I ran one of my best 5k times in years and felt light and easy doing so. Best of all, the insidious brain fog and fatigue has evaporated - I think the dishes need doing and 10 mins later they're done. I think the study needs tidying and I find myself getting it sorted. Every aspect of day to day life feels easier - feels like it used to. I have had so many false hopes and investigations, that I wont fully commit to this being the answer until I can confirm I've had a month or so of feeling better. But I know this time is different. To imagine that I might have spent a decade chasing chronic illness only to find that I needed to massage my shoulders seems utterly absurd. But that is the only conclusion I can come to. If I had had a massage earlier, the last decade might have taken a different track. But for now I am simply rejoicing at having found an answer. I am overjoyed to just be with my family and feel well. As to why this seems to have had such a remarkable impact - I'm really at a loss to explain. Some sort of effect on the vagus nerve seems possible. Has it allowed my nervous system to regulate? Has it increased bloodflow to some part of my brain? Feel free to hit me with ideas. CONCLUDING THOUGHTS As I noted at the start, I have been chasing the source of these symptoms for ten years now and have done immense amounts of research into all sorts of aspects of biology - and yet this seemingly simple fix eluded me. I have read so many stories of people with chronic and often unknown health conditions and I know your pain. I have felt it deeply and been taken to the depths of despair not understanding what was wrong with me. I have been convinced at points that I was suffering from a systemic immune issue, gut issue or nervous system dysregulation. Hence why I have spent so long looking into MCAS, histamine intolerance, long covid, EDS, LPR, SIBO, MTHFR, MTD and more acronyms besides. My story is not intended to invalidate any of those conditions whatsoever. If that is your takeaway, I am at fault for not explaining more thoroughly. There is no doubt that all those conditions exist - and many are overlapping for their sufferers. For years I have held out hope of a simple and reliable cure or source of my symptoms. I have read many other members' 'try this simple fix - it worked for me' stories. And they didn't help me. I tried them all. This story probably won't help you either, and for that I'm sorry. I know so well what it feels like to hope for an answer that feels like it will never come. But even if it helps just one person, years from now, it will have been worth writing it down to pass this information on. And just maybe it will help more. I wish each and every one of you good luck on your journey, and I hope the time comes when you get to write your healing story too. TL;DR here: I spent ten years with a chronic unknown illness manifesting as hoarse voice, throat tightness, itchy eyes, dry skin, fatigue, brain fog and gut issues. Extensive medical testing, allergen testing, diets, meditation, supplements, breathwork, sleep, therapy (and more) did nothing. Last week I found out if I massage my neck and trapezius muscles, the symptoms resolve. UPDATE 27/01 - I have added a comment below with more info and ideas suggested by others. Do give it a read. submitted by /u/Inner_Department6771 to r/HistamineIntolerance [link] [comments]

1.The week starts for the Stewarts with Evan on stage at church once again, singing a solo. As long as they keep tithing and promoting this new cult church, he gets to play broadway star. Carlin has a brand new journal to doodle in and she only gives the cult leader 2 hearts on this sermon, instead of the normal 3. They quickly wrap up church and get back to what’s really important… going viral. Layla Rae Stewart hits 1 million followers via mommy’s IG and several of her reels go mega viral, with more than 5 million views this week. All Carlin has to do is set up the camera so it is aimed at Layla and stand behind her drinking an energy drink. The brand pays big bucks for this, and it hits the algorithm where 6 million grown folks stare back at a 5 year old. It’s time for the cult church’s annual couples retreat, and this year, Carlin and Evan can’t get there fast enough. He drops their weekly vlog on Wednesday, and Carlin is already packing a bag on Tuesday night. We know by now why she is SO hep to get in that couple’s counseling. Carlin ain’t no dummy, and if Evan wants to wear LuLuLemon and join her at the nail salon, that is just fine with her as long as he doesn’t write some foul confession and slap it online for her millions of followers to see. Evan does go late night golfing and winds up draining the battery on his Tesla. He says it was because he was on the phone with Carlin and didn’t realize he had passed his exit. At the time, we wondered what these 2 could possibly have to talk about when they are breathing the same air 23.5 hours a day… but, boy do we know now. You know that phone line was HOT. Anyway, he’s still a thumb and has to spend the night trickle charging at some sketchy hotel on the side of the interstate. Evan has been racking up views on his own IG by doing trendy challenges with the kids. If you ever doubted that girls perform better than boys… just look at the numbers on Layla’s challenge reel (9 mill) versus Zade’s (1 mill). In a move that no one saw coming, Carlin decides to edit and repackage her epidural free birth content and post it… on the very day that her sister-in-law Tiffany finally decides to reveal her newest baby. It feels purposeful and personal when you realize that Josie did the same thing. Carlin hits the jackpot again and gets over 7 million views on hers. Tiffy can’t compete and probably shouldn’t even try. With so many reels going viral lately, the Stewarts will up their rate, but also up their content and poor Layla and Zade are already working 80 hour weeks. Luckily, mommy is away for the weekend, and gives them a little break. To make up for it, Carlin posts an old clip from Bringing UP Bates featuring her doing a terrible job of acting like she’s high after having her wisdom teeth removed. It’s a stark reminder that homegirl isn’t new to this grift… but she is damn sure true to it. 2.Well… another self righteous, pompous, performative, sanctimonius, virtue signaling jerk was snuffed out this week…and he’s been hiding in plain sight on The Clark Family social media. That’s right… everyone’s boy next door, innocent, squeaky clean all American guy is really just an everyday low down dirty gutter snipe. Travis Clark is a piece of work and hat’s off to all of the snarkers who knew it way back when and suffered through the down votes, the preaching from the religious zealots and the accolades that rained down on him every time he talked to his camera while his wife looked on lovingly. I don’t know if it’s worse that this dink cheated, or that he decided he needed to cleanse his soul by announcing it to all of creation but damn… he really decided to take the private chat to the public domain on a Saturday night in mid-January. Obviously the clues have been there since the holidays, and the sleuths had been slowly building a case for why something was not right in the house that Hailey built. Walking away from a lucrative YouTube with no warning was the biggest clue, but the lack of content and the obvious separation were the ringers. Throw in a weird holiday party with school friends and some sus “heart eye” comments and you’ve got yourself a full fledged fundie scandal. The thing that makes this really, truly gross is that Katie announced a miscarriage this week. It’s a tightly edited reel and baby daddy is missing from the entire thing except when she announces the pregnancy and he’s caught looking like Voldemort just moved in. Why would Katie choose to share this now, and why was Carlin with her at the hospital when it happened? The whispers turned into a roar… and the Bates certainly weren’t talking. Katie hasn’t filmed anything personal in weeks. Could they be living separately? Looking back at his content over the past few months we see that he was obviously struggling, someone even mentioned how unkempt he looked, with no haircut and stubble… but nursing school is tough and he was working hard to make a new life for his family, right? Yea, no. This ninny was juggling 2 lives and failing at both. My question now is… when he was on that beach with his brother on New Year’s Eve… was that some rehabilitative place his parents sent him? He says he is “getting help”…. But we all know that probably means with the preacher and a few elders. Speaking of church… Travis was a Youth Leader at Clear Springs Church… is that job gone now? It should be. Katie holds all of the cards, and she should remember that. She’s a lucrative influencer and could definitely make it on her own. Will she though? One thing ole Travvie didn’t say in his confession is how much he loves Katie, and would do anything to take away her pain, that he would be lost without her. In cases like these, what is unsaid speaks the loudest. Is this the end of the saga… or only the beginning? Some things we have all learned… don’t discredit a Redditor with a hunch… One emoji can topple a kingdom… and F boys come in all sorts of packaging, my friends. 3.When everything else in the world feels upside down you can always depend on… that dang hair pool noodle. It’s at 75% off as Josie continues to close her Effortless Shop. Pretty soon she will be paying US to take them from her. Once the shipping costs more than the product, it’s time to call it a day ma’am. The Balkas eased back in to HSN mode this week with Kelton showing up to sell pots and pans and frozen bread. Josie looks on as Kelton reads the script about how this bread is just the most amazing thing he’s ever tasted, and you can watch her practically wince as he goes on and on… knowing full well she makes her own sourdough on the regular. She also sells an electrolyte drink that she never swallows and pushes that ridiculously expensive online grocery store where she buys cheese puffs and meat sticks. We learn this week what Josie’s plan is post pool noodles and surprise, surprise…. It’s YouTube. She begins repackaging all of her old content all the way back to learning she was pregnant with Brooks and uploading it to her YouTube account as “Shorts”. In the midst of all of this old footage, she hides a new GRWM where she updates everyone on their housing situation. It’s a wild ride with no clear reasons or information, but if you can make it through her speed mumbling, you learn that they aren’t building a new house and are now full on looking for something to buy. She says they have found an old historic home that needs lots of work, but she’s in love with it. We know for a fact that in May of 2024, they bought property. She told her audience about it, shared that they were building and promised an update that never came. People discovered her Pinterest that was full of new house ideas, and she even followed an interior designer from her area. Perhaps Kelton believes in paying cash for everything as is the old IBLP way and he refuses to be in debt with a mortgage. One day, when she is filming her kids in a new location… then we will know. Hopefully that happens soon because the background when she films is showing the reality of living in a small home with 4 kids 6 and under and it ain’t pretty. 4.Alyssa Webster found a reason to show off her latest floor length formal nightmare of a gown by getting all dressed up to sit in her bedroom barefoot and celebrate 12 years since she got engaged to Lurch. The girls got in on the action in a copy/paste getup that screams WE ITCH. Whether the children are 4 or 10 the outfits are exactly the same, and the only thing different is which pair of scuffed up/torn up shoes they are wearing. Rhett stands there complying, stiff as a board, looking like he has a baptism at 10 and revival service at 6. Meanwhile, Ellie Bates’ viral reel continues to grow with over 3.5 million views …and with more views, comes more confidence from the youngest influencer. She proudly shows off her exercise routine and has a link to share. Later she, Warden and Addee are at the skating rink with the Balka kids. Josie and Kelton are probably at the cult marriage retreat desperately in heavy prayer with the Stewarts. “Dear Lord, please keep my husband’s fingers away from Instagram”. Ellie also spends some time with Ryker Bates teaching him how to throw faces for the camera. At just 2 years old, he has the duck face pout down perfectly. 5.Big(gest) brother Zach Bates obviously tried to help with Katie’s troubled marriage back in the summer of 2025. Suddenly, after selling them their dream home, he and Whitney were always hanging out with the Clarks and Whitney even admitted they had never been close before. He tried to teach Katie how to cook, hoping a decent meal might keep her philandering husband at home. Noodles and cheese just didn’t scratch that itch though. Zach updates his followers in the second full week of January that he has miraculously lost 9.5 pounds in just a matter of days… Even though he continues to showcase fried chicken, steak, French fries, mushroom gravy with heavy whipping cream and pounds of butter along with bacon and sausage every 45 minutes, dude is still “somehow” losing weight. He needs to remember to film more from the treadmill to help his weight loss story be more… believable. Zach celebrates earning 100,000 followers on Instagram after just over a year of being on the platform. See what influencer management can do for you? Now don’t dig in to those numbers too closely because you may find that at least 76,500 of them are bots. Whitney seems to be in a lull but does manage to film Lilly sleeping in church and then sell the same electrolyte powder that Josie is selling without having the chunky chalky stuff so much as touch her lips. She also tries to keep her kids quiet while Zach plays cooker man in the kitchen for YouTube. It’s the same chicken dish he’s made a dozen times before, but with a different sauce. Zach says he is starting year 2 with the Bates Kitchen and wants to focus on his plating skills. Ummm… how about handwashing and cleanliness? Cause this pud is currently cross contaminating like it’s a competition and wallowing food around with open sores on his hands. He also talks while smacking on food with his mouth wide open and continues to tell the viewer NOT to do what he did just did. You will never convince me that the 9,000 views on this vlog aren’t from people who searched “Cooking Comedy”. 6.While the rest of the family is in crisis mode, Trace and Lydia Bates are hard at work trying to procreate and win the race to grandbaby #41. Trace promised Momma B that they were trying, and in order to stay ahead of the curve, he rents a Beach Mountain A-frame cabin and whisks Lydia away for a little romantic weekend. Who are we kidding…. They actually went up there so he could snowboard, snow tube, film content and have brother Warden join them. Lydia is as graceful on skis as your 2nd grade neighbor and just about as interested. They keep talking about the big family trip to Keystone coming up but she insists she is happy just sitting in the ski lodge drinking coffee and filming him each time he races down the mountain. Doesn’t that sound SO fun? Back in Rocky Top, Lydia is hitting the Jesus Gym super hard and films Trace and the kids dropping her off to workout with Carlin like some Hunger Games Fitness Edition. They also drop her off at a coffee shop so she can get some editing done in peace. I’m sure Trace is quite happy to ride around with the kids buckled in their car seats while Lydia does all of the hard work. She shares a reel showing off Kaia at 7 months and the baby now lives in that rolling walker, just like Ryker once did. Finally, she hooks up with her 2nd or 3rd BFF, Kelly Jo Bates for a Sam’s Club shopping trip. It’s a sponsored ad and Kelly is here for the exposure. 7.Remember when Katie and Travis went on their influencer cruise and stopped off to spend the night at Erin’s in Florida? Erin was hugging her baby sister and loving on her after what seemed like years since they had seen each other. Just another example of how her older siblings may have tried to help “counsel”Katie and Travis. Now though, Erin is far from the fray and fully back to posting her life on social media. Of course, she’s never going to show anything less than perfect and if Chad dare think of straying he’ll be forced to stick his tongue down her throat on IG again, so he tows a tight line. Erin is selling home cleaners and green makeup and better for you nail polish these days and is always coated down in her beef fat all for sale just in case you want to shine like a copper penny. We don’t see a lot of Chad, but he’s there, behind the camera. She makes a reel of her kids assaulting that poor haggard backyard orange tree. There isn’t an orange left on the limbs and at one point there’s at least 5 kids hanging in there. Erin wants you to envy her glass of fresh squeezed orange juice but I saw one of those young’ins picking their nose and another one licking their hands so she can keep that. She’s back to bragging about her kids chore charts and throws in a mention of their home school charts too. She’s morphing into Michelle Duggar by the second as she goes on and on about jurisdictions and diligence and how her children crave housework. She wants to send you these charts for FREE and all you have to give her in return is your email address. Then about 8 times a year you’ll receive a newsletter where the Paines pretend to be missionaries and beg you to give them money… allegedly. Her reels are full of people praising her for the way she is raising her children and people love to think that she’s somehow better than her performative siblings. Her kids are still being filmed and exploited and shown to God only knows who without their permission so the only difference is the subject matter. For some weird reason Erin decides to show off her feet on IG this week. She does it more than once while bragging about her $200 sandals gifted to her by Tori and trying to sell her fancy nail polish. She says she knows feet are weird so that answers the age old question of “are these people really that naive?” Nope, they know. They absolutely know. It’s a choice. 8.Michael and Brandon are back behind their TV trays this week to update us all on what’s going on with them. They are on month 8 with the foster boys who they thought would just be with them for 5 or 6 months. The boys are not currently available to be adopted and the Keilens have no idea how long they will be together with them. If they could adopt them, they certainly would, but reunification is the goal. Michael says there are tons of appointments with specialists and therapists and case workers every week. All of that and then the subtle shade starts…. They really want us to know that the 4 year old WAS struggling with speech until Michael got involved. She has worked with him so intently learning his phonics and letter blends that he no longer needs speech therapy. You hear that Carlin? Michael ain’t playing around. The little boy can read some words, and write his numbers up to 15. Can we start a petition to get Zade over to Michael’s for a 6 week visit? She also says they don’t talk much about her family bc all of her other siblings “share so much”. You don’t say girl? They say they can’t show the boys’ faces bc of legal reasons, and even if they could they just aren’t sure if they would because their lives are their story to tell. The last question is about whether they are happy. Michael says for the most part she is, although there is some anxiety about the future. Brandon really goes in talking about how comparison is the thief of joy and how people close to them may have lots of THINGS but he reminds himself of the blessings he does have and that keeps him focused. These 2 are paying dust to what the other family members are doing and have no problem letting you know exactly where they stand. Brandon wraps it up by saying he’s going to change their YouTube to more of a Bible Study type of thing so to be on the lookout for that. I certainly will be so I can make sure to miss it. 9.After 6 weeks we are finally able to see Lawson’s second son who looks exactly like Lawson’s first son. They certainly seem to have no limit of time on their hands as they release 873 reels, posts, vlogs and stories. That hospital room got more use than a Buccee’s bathroom. It’s all so cringy it’s aggravating to even try to explain it and if Katie had to film all of that it’s no wonder she came home, took to her bed and is losing her mind. Outside of new baby content, Lawson is the only sibling to have posted about Travis cheating. He posts a reel with a Bible verse basically saying to be a decent human bc your children are watching and also you could go straight to hell. You know, standard Lawson stuff. Dude isn’t missing ANYthing. I still wonder what he really thought since we know he was meeting Travis everytime he stopped his car to charge in Nashville. They even went to supper together and Travis stayed over at his house. Maybe that was the deal… he could go work on his music, but he had to check in with big brother Lawson. Tiffy is right there to back Lawson up in the comments and let the world know what a perfect human he is. In reality he was his usual overbearing tiny man self….telling nurse’s what to do and mansplaining things to Tiffany’s parents. Of course Kelly Jo is pictured holding Theodore within an hour of birth and Tiffy’s parents are pushed into a far corner. The baby weighed 6’09 and was 18.5 inches long. Tiffy had no issues delivering this time. In fact the only issue was me losing my lunch after viewing a reel where I see Lawson preparing his wife’s undies and helping her put them on. Enough! 10.Bits and Bytes… Do we think Travis planned to send Katie to NJ to get their house ready to sell so he could play house with his mistress in Knoxville?… Esther and the kids spent the weekend in Pennsylvania celebrating a late Christmas with her family…Josie films herself giving Baby Brooks a bath in see through skin tight PJs…great advertisement for the Bible Booty workout she subscribes to…the only reel from Tiffany’s birth to go viral features Kelly coaching her. It gets 5 million views…Zach and Whitney now have chickens…Jackson Bates is back on IG to promote his new remodeling business called JackBuilt. Kelly shares the reel and most of the siblings congratulate him. Have a great week friends. I guess we learned this week that all of those fundie rules were really just more of a suggestion… submitted by /u/dixcgirl10 to r/BatesSnark [link] [comments]

1.The week starts for the Stewarts with Evan on stage at church once again, singing a solo. As long as they keep tithing and promoting this new cult church, he gets to play broadway star. Carlin has a brand new journal to doodle in and she only gives the cult leader 2 hearts on this sermon, instead of the normal 3. They quickly wrap up church and get back to what’s really important… going viral. Layla Rae Stewart hits 1 million followers via mommy’s IG and several of her reels go mega viral, with more than 5 million views this week. All Carlin has to do is set up the camera so it is aimed at Layla and stand behind her drinking an energy drink. The brand pays big bucks for this, and it hits the algorithm where 6 million grown folks stare back at a 5 year old. It’s time for the cult church’s annual couples retreat, and this year, Carlin and Evan can’t get there fast enough. He drops their weekly vlog on Wednesday, and Carlin is already packing a bag on Tuesday night. We know by now why she is SO hep to get in that couple’s counseling. Carlin ain’t no dummy, and if Evan wants to wear LuLuLemon and join her at the nail salon, that is just fine with her as long as he doesn’t write some foul confession and slap it online for her millions of followers to see. Evan does go late night golfing and winds up draining the battery on his Tesla. He says it was because he was on the phone with Carlin and didn’t realize he had passed his exit. At the time, we wondered what these 2 could possibly have to talk about when they are breathing the same air 23.5 hours a day… but, boy do we know now. You know that phone line was HOT. Anyway, he’s still a thumb and has to spend the night trickle charging at some sketchy hotel on the side of the interstate. Evan has been racking up views on his own IG by doing trendy challenges with the kids. If you ever doubted that girls perform better than boys… just look at the numbers on Layla’s challenge reel (9 mill) versus Zade’s (1 mill). In a move that no one saw coming, Carlin decides to edit and repackage her epidural free birth content and post it… on the very day that her sister-in-law Tiffany finally decides to reveal her newest baby. It feels purposeful and personal when you realize that Josie did the same thing. Carlin hits the jackpot again and gets over 7 million views on hers. Tiffy can’t compete and probably shouldn’t even try. With so many reels going viral lately, the Stewarts will up their rate, but also up their content and poor Layla and Zade are already working 80 hour weeks. Luckily, mommy is away for the weekend, and gives them a little break. To make up for it, Carlin posts an old clip from Bringing UP Bates featuring her doing a terrible job of acting like she’s high after having her wisdom teeth removed. It’s a stark reminder that homegirl isn’t new to this grift… but she is damn sure true to it. 2.Well… another self righteous, pompous, performative, sanctimonius, virtue signaling jerk was snuffed out this week…and he’s been hiding in plain sight on The Clark Family social media. That’s right… everyone’s boy next door, innocent, squeaky clean all American guy is really just an everyday low down dirty gutter snipe. Travis Clark is a piece of work and hat’s off to all of the snarkers who knew it way back when and suffered through the down votes, the preaching from the religious zealots and the accolades that rained down on him every time he talked to his camera while his wife looked on lovingly. I don’t know if it’s worse that this dink cheated, or that he decided he needed to cleanse his soul by announcing it to all of creation but damn… he really decided to take the private chat to the public domain on a Saturday night in mid-January. Obviously the clues have been there since the holidays, and the sleuths had been slowly building a case for why something was not right in the house that Hailey built. Walking away from a lucrative YouTube with no warning was the biggest clue, but the lack of content and the obvious separation were the ringers. Throw in a weird holiday party with school friends and some sus “heart eye” comments and you’ve got yourself a full fledged fundie scandal. The thing that makes this really, truly gross is that Katie announced a miscarriage this week. It’s a tightly edited reel and baby daddy is missing from the entire thing except when she announces the pregnancy and he’s caught looking like Voldemort just moved in. Why would Katie choose to share this now, and why was Carlin with her at the hospital when it happened? The whispers turned into a roar… and the Bates certainly weren’t talking. Katie hasn’t filmed anything personal in weeks. Could they be living separately? Looking back at his content over the past few months we see that he was obviously struggling, someone even mentioned how unkempt he looked, with no haircut and stubble… but nursing school is tough and he was working hard to make a new life for his family, right? Yea, no. This ninny was juggling 2 lives and failing at both. My question now is… when he was on that beach with his brother on New Year’s Eve… was that some rehabilitative place his parents sent him? He says he is “getting help”…. But we all know that probably means with the preacher and a few elders. Speaking of church… Travis was a Youth Leader at Clear Springs Church… is that job gone now? It should be. Katie holds all of the cards, and she should remember that. She’s a lucrative influencer and could definitely make it on her own. Will she though? One thing ole Travvie didn’t say in his confession is how much he loves Katie, and would do anything to take away her pain, that he would be lost without her. In cases like these, what is unsaid speaks the loudest. Is this the end of the saga… or only the beginning? Some things we have all learned… don’t discredit a Redditor with a hunch… One emoji can topple a kingdom… and F boys come in all sorts of packaging, my friends. 3.When everything else in the world feels upside down you can always depend on… that dang hair pool noodle. It’s at 75% off as Josie continues to close her Effortless Shop. Pretty soon she will be paying US to take them from her. Once the shipping costs more than the product, it’s time to call it a day ma’am. The Balkas eased back in to HSN mode this week with Kelton showing up to sell pots and pans and frozen bread. Josie looks on as Kelton reads the script about how this bread is just the most amazing thing he’s ever tasted, and you can watch her practically wince as he goes on and on… knowing full well she makes her own sourdough on the regular. She also sells an electrolyte drink that she never swallows and pushes that ridiculously expensive online grocery store where she buys cheese puffs and meat sticks. We learn this week what Josie’s plan is post pool noodles and surprise, surprise…. It’s YouTube. She begins repackaging all of her old content all the way back to learning she was pregnant with Brooks and uploading it to her YouTube account as “Shorts”. In the midst of all of this old footage, she hides a new GRWM where she updates everyone on their housing situation. It’s a wild ride with no clear reasons or information, but if you can make it through her speed mumbling, you learn that they aren’t building a new house and are now full on looking for something to buy. She says they have found an old historic home that needs lots of work, but she’s in love with it. We know for a fact that in May of 2024, they bought property. She told her audience about it, shared that they were building and promised an update that never came. People discovered her Pinterest that was full of new house ideas, and she even followed an interior designer from her area. Perhaps Kelton believes in paying cash for everything as is the old IBLP way and he refuses to be in debt with a mortgage. One day, when she is filming her kids in a new location… then we will know. Hopefully that happens soon because the background when she films is showing the reality of living in a small home with 4 kids 6 and under and it ain’t pretty. 4.Alyssa Webster found a reason to show off her latest floor length formal nightmare of a gown by getting all dressed up to sit in her bedroom barefoot and celebrate 12 years since she got engaged to Lurch. The girls got in on the action in a copy/paste getup that screams WE ITCH. Whether the children are 4 or 10 the outfits are exactly the same, and the only thing different is which pair of scuffed up/torn up shoes they are wearing. Rhett stands there complying, stiff as a board, looking like he has a baptism at 10 and revival service at 6. Meanwhile, Ellie Bates’ viral reel continues to grow with over 3.5 million views …and with more views, comes more confidence from the youngest influencer. She proudly shows off her exercise routine and has a link to share. Later she, Warden and Addee are at the skating rink with the Balka kids. Josie and Kelton are probably at the cult marriage retreat desperately in heavy prayer with the Stewarts. “Dear Lord, please keep my husband’s fingers away from Instagram”. Ellie also spends some time with Ryker Bates teaching him how to throw faces for the camera. At just 2 years old, he has the duck face pout down perfectly. 5.Big(gest) brother Zach Bates obviously tried to help with Katie’s troubled marriage back in the summer of 2025. Suddenly, after selling them their dream home, he and Whitney were always hanging out with the Clarks and Whitney even admitted they had never been close before. He tried to teach Katie how to cook, hoping a decent meal might keep her philandering husband at home. Noodles and cheese just didn’t scratch that itch though. Zach updates his followers in the second full week of January that he has miraculously lost 9.5 pounds in just a matter of days… Even though he continues to showcase fried chicken, steak, French fries, mushroom gravy with heavy whipping cream and pounds of butter along with bacon and sausage every 45 minutes, dude is still “somehow” losing weight. He needs to remember to film more from the treadmill to help his weight loss story be more… believable. Zach celebrates earning 100,000 followers on Instagram after just over a year of being on the platform. See what influencer management can do for you? Now don’t dig in to those numbers too closely because you may find that at least 76,500 of them are bots. Whitney seems to be in a lull but does manage to film Lilly sleeping in church and then sell the same electrolyte powder that Josie is selling without having the chunky chalky stuff so much as touch her lips. She also tries to keep her kids quiet while Zach plays cooker man in the kitchen for YouTube. It’s the same chicken dish he’s made a dozen times before, but with a different sauce. Zach says he is starting year 2 with the Bates Kitchen and wants to focus on his plating skills. Ummm… how about handwashing and cleanliness? Cause this pud is currently cross contaminating like it’s a competition and wallowing food around with open sores on his hands. He also talks while smacking on food with his mouth wide open and continues to tell the viewer NOT to do what he did just did. You will never convince me that the 9,000 views on this vlog aren’t from people who searched “Cooking Comedy”. 6.While the rest of the family is in crisis mode, Trace and Lydia Bates are hard at work trying to procreate and win the race to grandbaby #41. Trace promised Momma B that they were trying, and in order to stay ahead of the curve, he rents a Beach Mountain A-frame cabin and whisks Lydia away for a little romantic weekend. Who are we kidding…. They actually went up there so he could snowboard, snow tube, film content and have brother Warden join them. Lydia is as graceful on skis as your 2nd grade neighbor and just about as interested. They keep talking about the big family trip to Keystone coming up but she insists she is happy just sitting in the ski lodge drinking coffee and filming him each time he races down the mountain. Doesn’t that sound SO fun? Back in Rocky Top, Lydia is hitting the Jesus Gym super hard and films Trace and the kids dropping her off to workout with Carlin like some Hunger Games Fitness Edition. They also drop her off at a coffee shop so she can get some editing done in peace. I’m sure Trace is quite happy to ride around with the kids buckled in their car seats while Lydia does all of the hard work. She shares a reel showing off Kaia at 7 months and the baby now lives in that rolling walker, just like Ryker once did. Finally, she hooks up with her 2nd or 3rd BFF, Kelly Jo Bates for a Sam’s Club shopping trip. It’s a sponsored ad and Kelly is here for the exposure. 7.Remember when Katie and Travis went on their influencer cruise and stopped off to spend the night at Erin’s in Florida? Erin was hugging her baby sister and loving on her after what seemed like years since they had seen each other. Just another example of how her older siblings may have tried to help “counsel”Katie and Travis. Now though, Erin is far from the fray and fully back to posting her life on social media. Of course, she’s never going to show anything less than perfect and if Chad dare think of straying he’ll be forced to stick his tongue down her throat on IG again, so he tows a tight line. Erin is selling home cleaners and green makeup and better for you nail polish these days and is always coated down in her beef fat all for sale just in case you want to shine like a copper penny. We don’t see a lot of Chad, but he’s there, behind the camera. She makes a reel of her kids assaulting that poor haggard backyard orange tree. There isn’t an orange left on the limbs and at one point there’s at least 5 kids hanging in there. Erin wants you to envy her glass of fresh squeezed orange juice but I saw one of those young’ins picking their nose and another one licking their hands so she can keep that. She’s back to bragging about her kids chore charts and throws in a mention of their home school charts too. She’s morphing into Michelle Duggar by the second as she goes on and on about jurisdictions and diligence and how her children crave housework. She wants to send you these charts for FREE and all you have to give her in return is your email address. Then about 8 times a year you’ll receive a newsletter where the Paines pretend to be missionaries and beg you to give them money… allegedly. Her reels are full of people praising her for the way she is raising her children and people love to think that she’s somehow better than her performative siblings. Her kids are still being filmed and exploited and shown to God only knows who without their permission so the only difference is the subject matter. For some weird reason Erin decides to show off her feet on IG this week. She does it more than once while bragging about her $200 sandals gifted to her by Tori and trying to sell her fancy nail polish. She says she knows feet are weird so that answers the age old question of “are these people really that naive?” Nope, they know. They absolutely know. It’s a choice. 8.Michael and Brandon are back behind their TV trays this week to update us all on what’s going on with them. They are on month 8 with the foster boys who they thought would just be with them for 5 or 6 months. The boys are not currently available to be adopted and the Keilens have no idea how long they will be together with them. If they could adopt them, they certainly would, but reunification is the goal. Michael says there are tons of appointments with specialists and therapists and case workers every week. All of that and then the subtle shade starts…. They really want us to know that the 4 year old WAS struggling with speech until Michael got involved. She has worked with him so intently learning his phonics and letter blends that he no longer needs speech therapy. You hear that Carlin? Michael ain’t playing around. The little boy can read some words, and write his numbers up to 15. Can we start a petition to get Zade over to Michael’s for a 6 week visit? She also says they don’t talk much about her family bc all of her other siblings “share so much”. You don’t say girl? They say they can’t show the boys’ faces bc of legal reasons, and even if they could they just aren’t sure if they would because their lives are their story to tell. The last question is about whether they are happy. Michael says for the most part she is, although there is some anxiety about the future. Brandon really goes in talking about how comparison is the thief of joy and how people close to them may have lots of THINGS but he reminds himself of the blessings he does have and that keeps him focused. These 2 are paying dust to what the other family members are doing and have no problem letting you know exactly where they stand. Brandon wraps it up by saying he’s going to change their YouTube to more of a Bible Study type of thing so to be on the lookout for that. I certainly will be so I can make sure to miss it. 9.After 6 weeks we are finally able to see Lawson’s second son who looks exactly like Lawson’s first son. They certainly seem to have no limit of time on their hands as they release 873 reels, posts, vlogs and stories. That hospital room got more use than a Buccee’s bathroom. It’s all so cringy it’s aggravating to even try to explain it and if Katie had to film all of that it’s no wonder she came home, took to her bed and is losing her mind. Outside of new baby content, Lawson is the only sibling to have posted about Travis cheating. He posts a reel with a Bible verse basically saying to be a decent human bc your children are watching and also you could go straight to hell. You know, standard Lawson stuff. Dude isn’t missing ANYthing. I still wonder what he really thought since we know he was meeting Travis everytime he stopped his car to charge in Nashville. They even went to supper together and Travis stayed over at his house. Maybe that was the deal… he could go work on his music, but he had to check in with big brother Lawson. Tiffy is right there to back Lawson up in the comments and let the world know what a perfect human he is. In reality he was his usual overbearing tiny man self….telling nurse’s what to do and mansplaining things to Tiffany’s parents. Of course Kelly Jo is pictured holding Theodore within an hour of birth and Tiffy’s parents are pushed into a far corner. The baby weighed 6’09 and was 18.5 inches long. Tiffy had no issues delivering this time. In fact the only issue was me losing my lunch after viewing a reel where I see Lawson preparing his wife’s undies and helping her put them on. Enough! 10.Bits and Bytes… Do we think Travis planned to send Katie to NJ to get their house ready to sell so he could play house with his mistress in Knoxville?… Esther and the kids spent the weekend in Pennsylvania celebrating a late Christmas with her family…Josie films herself giving Baby Brooks a bath in see through skin tight PJs…great advertisement for the Bible Booty workout she subscribes to…the only reel from Tiffany’s birth to go viral features Kelly coaching her. It gets 5 million views…Zach and Whitney now have chickens…Jackson Bates is back on IG to promote his new remodeling business called JackBuilt. Kelly shares the reel and most of the siblings congratulate him. Have a great week friends. I guess we learned this week that all of those fundie rules were really just more of a suggestion… submitted by /u/dixcgirl10 to r/BringingUpBates [link] [comments]

So I've tested my fair share of weight loss teas over the years – everything from those sketchy "flat tummy" blends to countless green tea variations. So when I came across Yu Trim Fit Purple Tea, I was curious but skeptical. After trying it myself and having some of my coaching clients test it, here's my honest take. My overall rating: 3.8 out of 5 stars What I Actually Liked About This Tea Let me start with the positives. Unlike most weight loss teas that are basically just rebranded green tea mixed with laxatives, this one uses Kenyan purple tea as its base – which is genuinely something different. The first thing I noticed? No jitters. If you're someone who gets shaky or anxious from too much caffeine (like me), you'll appreciate that this tea has about 42% less caffeine than your typical green tea. I could drink it in the afternoon without worrying about lying awake at 2am. The appetite suppression was real, but subtle. I'd describe it as "helpful" rather than "powerful." It definitely helped me skip my usual 3pm snack attack, which I think comes from the Caralluma Fimbriata ingredient they include. Don't expect miracles, but it does take the edge off hunger better than just drinking regular tea. That said, I've tried stronger appetite suppressants. Overall, Yu TrimFit is decent tea for managing cravings but this brand is currently my top pick (rated: 4.6/5) for actually curbing cravings and supporting weight loss. Where TrimFit Disappointed Me Here's my biggest frustration: the proprietary blend nonsense. The label says there's 513mg total of their special blend, but they won't tell you how much of each ingredient you're actually getting. How much Caralluma Fimbriata am I drinking? What's the actual L-Theanine content? This lack of transparency is kind of discouraging/shady practice even though I know it's super common in supplements. And let's talk about results. The product makes some pretty bold claims about reducing BMI and shrinking belly fat. Neither I, nor my clients & some people I know saw anything close to those dramatic results when using this tea alone. Yes, it helped a bit with controlling appetite, but if you're not also eating better and moving more, don't expect your metabolism to just improve magically with this tea. How It Stacks Up Against Other Weight Loss Teas This is definitely better than sketchy detox teas masquerading as “weight loss teas” – it doesn't turn you into a bathroom hostage like those "detox" teas. I once tried a Chinese slimming tea that, and I'm not exaggerating here, made me feel like I was "crapping out my soul" (shoutout to whoever perfectly described that experience online). Yu TrimFit doesn't do that to you, thank goodness. It's also way gentler than those caffeine-bomb teas that basically just speed up your heart rate temporarily. The purple tea's antioxidant content seems legit, and I didn't get that awful crash I've experienced with heavily caffeinated options. But here's the thing – if we're talking pure bang for your buck, you could probably get similar benefits from good quality loose-leaf Japanese green tea (like sencha) for less money. I've seen plenty of people in tea communities mention that plain green tea helped them cut down on snacking without needing any fancy formulations. Who Might Actually Benefit From This Yu TrimFit could be worth trying if you: Want a gentle appetite suppressant without the digestive nightmare of laxative teas Get anxious or jittery from high-caffeine drinks Need something to help you resist snacking between meals Prefer a tea that won't upset your stomach If you're hoping to lose significant weight without changing anything else about your lifestyle, save your money. Like most people have discovered with these teas, they work best as one piece of a bigger health puzzle – not as a magic solution. My Bottom Line Yu Trim Fit Purple Tea sits comfortably in the middle of the weight loss tea market. It's not a miracle worker, but it's not complete snake oil either. If you're curious about what makes purple tea different, go ahead and try it – just keep your expectations grounded and remember this is meant to support your efforts, not replace them. The tea is legitimately packed with antioxidants that fight free radicals and inflammation, and it may help moderately with appetite control and fat burning. What I Recommend Instead While Yu TrimFit has some good points, this brand (my rating: 4.6/5) is still my personal favorite for weight management. What makes it stand out is the smart two-phase approach – you get a Morning Energy tea with green tea, oolong, ginseng, and garcinia cambogia that kicks your metabolism into gear, plus an Evening Detox blend with senna leaves, licorice root, and fennel. I've found this day-and-night system works better than Yu TrimFit's one-size-fits-all formula because it tackles both daytime metabolism/energy AND nighttime detox/bloating. Plus, it actually tastes good (the natural monk fruit sweetness helps), so I look forward to drinking it instead of forcing it down like some weight management teas I've tried. After testing dozens of tea formulations, this remains the most well-rounded and effective option I've found for managing appetite, maintaining energy, and dealing with occasional bloating – all without harsh side effects. So, What Actually Makes Purple Tea Special? Purple tea only grows in Kenya's high-altitude farms, where intense UV exposure forces the tea plant to produce protective compounds called anthocyanins. These give the tea its purple color and serious nutritional benefits. The star compound here is GHG (don't worry about the scientific name – just know it's a rare antioxidant you won't find in other teas). Research shows GHG helps block fat absorption and helps your body burn fat more efficiently by boosting your liver's metabolism. That's why purple tea is getting attention in weight loss circles. Compared to green tea, purple tea packs 1.6 times more antioxidants and has 42% less caffeine. It's also better at fighting free radicals – purple tea has a 51% scavenging rate compared to green tea's 34%. This means it's more effective at combating oxidative stress and keeping your body functioning well. How Purple Tea Actually Supports Weight Loss Here's what's happening: That GHG compound I mentioned helps reduce how much fat your body absorbs from food while simultaneously helping your liver burn fat more efficiently. Basically, it attacks fat storage from two angles – preventing new fat storage while helping burn what's already there. In studies where people drank purple tea daily for 4 weeks, researchers saw real improvements: BMI went down Body fat mass decreased Belly fat and waist measurements shrank Animal studies also showed it reduced triglycerides – those fats in your blood linked to obesity and heart disease. There's another angle too: chronic inflammation actually makes it harder to lose weight by slowing down your metabolism. Purple tea's antioxidants and anthocyanins fight this inflammation and oxidative stress, which can support your weight loss efforts. Purple tea does contain some caffeine, but much less than green or black tea. This small amount gives your metabolism a gentle nudge without causing energy crashes later. However, this isn’t something that just boosts up metabolism dramatically, in my opinion, and if you’re looking for a tea to help with weight management, there are better options out there. Checkout this article – https://www.cambridgewellbeing.org/12-herbal-weight-managment-teas/ Other Health Benefits You Get From Purple Tea This stuff is basically a health drink that does way more than just help with fat burning. Loaded with Antioxidants: Purple tea beats green tea in the antioxidant department. Thanks to anthocyanins and EGCG, it fights free radicals – the troublemakers responsible for aging, inflammation, and chronic diseases. Think of it as giving your body armor against oxidative stress. Brain Health Support: The EGCG and antioxidants protect your brain cells from damage and might help prevent mental decline as you age. Early research even suggests potential benefits for fighting brain diseases like Alzheimer's. Blood Sugar Management: If you're diabetic or watching your blood sugar, purple tea helps control how quickly your body absorbs glucose, preventing those blood sugar spikes after meals. Heart Health: The unique mix of antioxidants helps lower bad cholesterol and triglycerides while protecting your cardiovascular system. Low Caffeine Perks: Unlike energy drinks or strong teas, purple tea gives you a mild caffeine boost without making you jittery. You can drink it anytime without worrying about being wired. How to Use TrimFit Purple Tea for Best Results Brewing It Properly: Use 1-2 teaspoons of purple tea leaves per 8-ounce cup Heat water to 175-185°F (not boiling – that's important) Let it steep for 3-4 minutes (steeping too long makes it bitter) Timing Matters: For best results, drink it 20-30 minutes before meals to help reduce fat absorption and aid digestion Morning or early afternoon works great for a metabolism boost without interfering with sleep Stay Consistent: To actually see results, aim for 2-3 cups daily. Studies showed people needed 4-6 weeks of consistent use to see significant changes in body fat and waist size. Pro tip: Skip the sugar and cream. If you need a touch of sweetness, a tiny bit of honey works. The Pros Natural fat burning: Contains GHG and antioxidants that boost fat burning, speed up metabolism, and reduce fat absorption Antioxidant powerhouse: Packed with anthocyanins (15 times more than blueberries) that fight oxidative stress, reduce inflammation, and protect your cells Low caffeine: Gives you gentle energy without jitters or crashes – perfect if you're caffeine-sensitive Blood sugar support: Helps regulate glucose absorption, which is great for diabetics or anyone managing insulin levels Weight loss backing: Science shows it can reduce BMI, body fat, and waist size with regular use Brain benefits: EGCG and anthocyanins protect brain cells, sharpen focus, and support mental clarity Safe and gentle: Low risk of side effects; safe for long-term use without overstimulation Versatile: Tastes good hot or iced, works well without sugar or additives, low-calorie hydration option Digestive friendly: Reduces gut inflammation and supports healthy gut bacteria The Cons Subtle effects: Weight loss and metabolism boost happen gradually with consistent use – not overnight. I've personally had better results with other brands Hard to find: Not as available as green or black tea; can be pricey because it's rare Mild energy boost: If you want a strong caffeine kick, purple tea's low caffeine might feel weak Flavor preference: The earthy, slightly floral taste isn't for everyone, especially if you're used to sweeter drinks Not a magic bullet: Works best alongside healthy eating and exercise – can't replace proper nutrition or activity Possible interactions: May interact with blood sugar or blood pressure medications; check with your doctor if you're on these meds My Performance Ratings Breakdown Appetite Control: 3.5/5 The caffeine helps reduce appetite by stimulating your nervous system, which naturally curbs cravings. It also prevents those sudden hunger pangs caused by blood sugar crashes. It works, but it's not as powerful as some other brands or higher-caffeine options. Energy Boost: 3.5/5 With 42% less caffeine than green tea, you get a mild energy lift without jitters or crashes. Metabolism Support: 3.5/5 Purple tea's GHG and antioxidants have been shown to enhance fat metabolism by activating certain enzymes in your liver. The mild caffeine plus antioxidants create a moderate but steady metabolic boost – good for long-term results. Fat Burning: 4/5 Research shows purple tea reduces fat absorption while increasing fat burning, thanks to GHG and EGCG. Human studies have documented reductions in body fat, BMI, and waist size over time. Blood Sugar Control: 4/5 It helps block glucose absorption, preventing blood sugar spikes after eating. Really beneficial if you're managing blood sugar or insulin sensitivity. Mental Clarity and Focus: 3.5/5 It's not an instant brain stimulant, but it supports long-term mental sharpness. The EGCG and anthocyanins act as brain protectors, improving clarity and health. Early research suggests it might help guard against degenerative brain diseases while enhancing focus. Digestive Health: 3.5/5 Purple tea supports gut health indirectly through its antioxidants, which reduce inflammation. While it's not specifically a digestive tea or probiotic, its antioxidants help create a healthier gut environment and better digestion. Safety: 4.8/5 Very safe for most people thanks to low caffeine and natural ingredients. Gentle on the stomach with minimal side effect risk unless you have a tea allergy or extreme caffeine sensitivity. Long-Term Value: 4/5 With consistent use, purple tea delivers sustainable benefits like fat loss, better metabolism, and cognitive support. It's not a quick fix but works gradually over time – ideal for long-term weight management and overall health. Who Should Try TrimFit Purple Tea? If You Want to Lose Weight Naturally Why it may work: Slightly reduces fat absorption, and boosts metabolism through GHG. Studies show real results in reducing body fat, BMI, and waist size over time. Alternatives to consider: A blend of appetite-suppressing teas – checkout my recos above, current #1 pick, green tea (higher EGCG), oolong tea (fat-burning through heat generation), or matcha (more caffeine for faster metabolism). If Caffeine Makes You Anxious But You Need Energy Why it works: With 42% less caffeine than green tea, you get gentle energy without jitters or crashes. Perfect for afternoon pick-me-ups. Alternatives: Rooibos tea (zero caffeine, lots of antioxidants), white tea (low caffeine but energizing), or peppermint tea (refreshing and calming). If You Need Better Metabolic Health Why it works: Antioxidants help regulate glucose absorption, improve liver function, and enhance how efficiently your metabolism works. Great for managing blood sugar and slow metabolism. Alternatives: Cinnamon tea (balances blood sugar), turmeric tea (anti-inflammatory for metabolism), or green coffee bean extract (metabolism booster). If You Want Better Focus and Brain Function Why it works: Loaded with EGCG and anthocyanins that support brain health, protect brain cells, and enhance mental clarity without overstimulation. Alternatives: Ginkgo biloba tea (improves blood flow to brain), matcha (quick energy + focus), or lion's mane mushroom tea (memory and brain function). If You Need Antioxidant Support Why it works: Anthocyanins and antioxidants reduce oxidative stress, fight inflammation, and protect cells – more powerful than blueberries or green tea. Alternatives: Hibiscus tea (antioxidant-rich), elderberry tea (immune support), or pomegranate green tea (antioxidant bomb). If You're Focused on Heart Health and Blood Sugar Why it works: Antioxidants reduce triglycerides, regulate blood sugar absorption, and support heart health by maintaining steady glucose levels. Alternatives: Black tea (lowers cholesterol), fenugreek tea (reduces blood sugar), or ginger tea (improves circulation). If You Want a Low-Calorie Drink Why it works: Light and refreshing hot or cold. You can enjoy it without sugar or milk, making it perfect as a low-calorie beverage. Alternatives: Cucumber mint water (hydrating), chamomile tea (relaxing), or lemon water (low-calorie cleanse). If You Deal with Inflammation and Gut Issues Why it works: Antioxidants support healthy gut bacteria and reduce inflammation, helping digestion and overall gut health. Alternatives: Peppermint tea (soothes digestion), ginger tea (anti-inflammatory and gut-friendly), or fennel tea (reduces bloating). If You Prefer Sustainable Solutions Over Quick Fixes Why it works: Purple tea works gradually by combining antioxidants, GHG, and mild caffeine for sustainable results in weight loss and overall health. Alternatives: Green tea (long-term benefits), chamomile green tea (soothing and functional), or oolong tea (slow fat-burning). submitted by /u/ThisMods to r/Health2020 [link] [comments]

As someone who's tried numerous weight loss teas over the years (from flat tummy teas to various green tea formulations), I want to share my thoughts on Yu TrimFit Purple Tea. I'd rate it about 3.8/5 stars overall. What I liked about Yu TrimFit Purple Tea First off, I appreciate that this isn't just another repackaged green tea with laxatives. The Kenyan purple tea base is genuinely different from what I've tried before. It doesn't give me that jittery feeling I get from heavily caffeinated teas, which makes sense given it has 42% less caffeine than typical green tea. If you're sensitive to caffeine like I am, this is actually a decent alternative that won't have you bouncing off walls or crashing later. The appetite suppression effect is moderate but noticeable. I found it helped me avoid my usual 3pm snack cravings, which I attribute to the Caralluma Fimbriata in the blend. Nothing miraculous, but it does take the edge off hunger better than regular tea. However, appetite suppression effect was still milder than some other brands like this one, which is currently my no.1 pick for appetite suppression, and weight loss. Where Yu TrimFit falls short My biggest complaint? The proprietary blend. At 513mg total, I have no idea how much of each ingredient I'm actually getting. Is there enough Caralluma Fimbriata to make a difference? How much L-Theanine am I getting with my caffeine? This lack of transparency is frustrating and common in the supplement industry. I also found the results to be modest at best as well as some people I coach. Those claims about significant BMI decreases and reduced abdominal fat? My clients didn't experience anything that dramatic, while using this alone as weight loss aid. It helped a bit with appetite control, but don't expect miracles without diet and exercise changes. How it compares to other weight loss teas Unlike those "skinny teas" that are essentially glorified laxatives (looking at you, detox teas that had me running to the bathroom every hour), Yu TrimFit doesn't cause digestive distress. As someone who had a horrific experience with a Chinese slimming tea that, as one user aptly put, "made me crap out my soul," I truly appreciate this. It's definitely better than those teas that are just caffeine bombs meant to speed up your metabolism temporarily. The polyphenol content in purple tea seems legitimate, and I didn't experience the crash I've had with heavily caffeinated options. However, if you're comparing pure value, an affordable loose-leaf Japanese green tea like sencha might still give you similar benefits at a better price point. Many users in tea subreddits also mentioned simply drinking plain green tea helped them manage snacking without any fancy formulations. Who might benefit from Yu TrimFit If you're looking for a gentle appetite suppressant without laxative effects, this could work for you. It's especially good if you: · Get anxious from high caffeine content · Want something to help curb snacking · Prefer a tea that won't cause digestive issues If you're expecting dramatic weight loss without changing your diet or exercise habits, you'll likely be disappointed. Like most users have noted about various teas, they work best as part of a comprehensive approach to weight management. Bottom line Yu TrimFit Purple Tea is a decent, middle-of-the-road option in the weight loss tea market. It's not a miracle product, but it's not snake oil either. My advice? Try it if you're curious about the unique purple tea benefits, but keep your expectations realistic and remember it's a supplement, not a solution. All in all, Yu trim fit purple tea is a decent powerhouse of antioxidants that fight off free radicals, crush inflammation, and may help moderately with appetite suppression and fat loss. My current recommendations While Yu TrimFit has its merits, this brand (my rating 4.8 / 5) is still my go-to weight management tea. What sets it apart is the brilliant two-phase system—a Morning Energy tea that kickstarts metabolism with green tea, oolong, ginseng, and garcinia cambogia, paired with an Evening Detox blend containing senna leaves, licorice root, and fennel. I've found this comprehensive approach works better than Yu TrimFit's single formula by addressing both daytime energy/metabolism and nighttime detoxification/bloating. The taste is remarkably pleasant (especially with natural monk fruit sweetness), making it something I actually look forward to drinking, unlike many weight management teas. After trying dozens of tea formulations over the years, this remains the most balanced and effective option I've found for managing appetite, energy levels, and occasional bloating without harsh side effects. What Makes Purple Tea Unique? First off, Purple Tea is grown exclusively in the high-altitude farms of Kenya, where extreme UV rays force the tea plant to produce anthocyanins to protect itself. These compounds give it its vibrant purple color and make it a nutritional powerhouse. Purple Tea contains GHG, a rare polyphenol not found in other teas. Studies show that GHG helps reduce fat absorption and enhances your body’s ability to burn fat by boosting liver metabolism. That’s why it’s gaining so much buzz in the weight-loss world. Compared to green tea, Purple Tea has 1.6x more polyphenols and 42% less caffeine. And the antioxidants – Purple Tea has a 51% free-radical scavenging rate compared to just 34% in green tea. That means it’s better at fighting oxidative stress, keeping your body healthy and energized. The Role of Purple Tea in Weight Loss Unlike most weight-loss teas that rely heavily on caffeine or questionable additives, Purple Tea works through science-backed mechanisms that are actually good for your body. Here’s the deal: Purple Tea contains a unique compound called GHG (1,2-di-O-galloyl-4,6-O-hexahydroxydiphenoyl-β-D-glucose)– it helps reduce fat absorption in your body while boosting fat metabolism in your liver. Basically, it tackles the fat storage process at two key points. So, instead of storing those excess calories as fat, your body starts burning them more efficiently. In studies, people who consumed Purple Tea daily for 4 weeks saw significant improvements in weight-loss markers: ● BMI decreased ● Body fat mass reduced ● Abdominal fat and waist size shrank In animal studies, it also reduced triglyceride levels (those fats in your blood linked to obesity and heart disease). Chronic inflammation can actually make it harder for your body to shed pounds by slowing your metabolism. Its polyphenols and anthocyanins, which fight inflammation and oxidative stress help in weight loss too. Purple Tea also contains caffeine, but at a much lower level compared to green or black tea. This small amount gives your metabolism a gentle boost without causing energy crashes. Additional Health Benefits of Purple Tea It is a super drink packed with health benefits that go way beyond burning fat. Packed with Antioxidants: Purple Tea contains a higher level of antioxidants than green tea. Thanks to compounds like anthocyanins and EGCG, it fights free radicals in your body, which are responsible for aging, inflammation, and chronic diseases. It’s like giving your body a protective shield against oxidative stress. Improves Brain Health: Purple Tea’s EGCG (epigallocatechin gallate) and antioxidants protect brain cells from damage and may help prevent cognitive decline. Early research even shows its potential to fight degenerative brain diseases like Alzheimer’s. Blood Sugar Control: If you’re diabetic or trying to keep blood sugar in check, Purple Tea helps regulate glucose absorption, preventing those post-meal sugar spikes. Cardiovascular Support: With its unique mix of polyphenols, Purple Tea helps reduce bad cholesterol and triglycerides while protecting your heart. Low Caffeine Content: Unlike energy drinks or strong teas, Purple Tea gives you a mild caffeine boost without jitters. It’s perfect for hydration at any time of the day. How to Use TrimFit Purple Tea for Weight Loss 1. Brew it Right: ● Use 1-2 teaspoons of Purple Tea leaves for an 8-ounce cup. ● Pour hot water (around 175-185°F; not boiling) over the leaves and let it steep for 3-4 minutes. Over-steeping might make it slightly bitter. 2. When to Drink It: ● For best results, have Purple Tea 20-30 minutes before meals. This helps reduce fat absorption from food and supports digestion. ● Try drinking it in the morning or early afternoon to kickstart your metabolism without the jitters you’d get from coffee. 3. Consistency is Key: To see noticeable results, aim to drink 2-3 cups daily. Studies showed that consistent use over 4-6 weeks led to significant reductions in body fat and waist size. Pro Tip: Avoid adding sugar or cream. If you need a bit of sweetness, a drop of honey works well. Pros ● Natural Fat Burning: Contains GHG and polyphenols that enhance fat oxidation, metabolism, and reduce fat absorption. ● Rich in Antioxidants: Packed with anthocyanins (15x more than blueberries), which fight oxidative stress, reduce inflammation, and support cell health. ● Low Caffeine Content: Provides a gentle energy boost without jitters or crashes, making it suitable for caffeine-sensitive individuals. ● Supports Blood Sugar Control: Regulates glucose absorption, making it beneficial for diabetics and those managing insulin levels. ● Weight Loss Support: Scientifically backed to reduce BMI, body fat, and waist size when consumed consistently. ● Brain Health Benefits: Contains EGCG and anthocyanins that protect brain cells, enhance focus, and improve cognitive clarity. ● Safe and Well-Tolerated: Low risk of side effects; safe for long-term use without overstimulation. ● Versatile and Refreshing: Can be enjoyed hot or iced, without sugar or additives, as a low-calorie hydrating option. ● Promotes Digestive Health: Reduces inflammation in the gut and supports a healthy microbiome. Cons ● Mild Effects: Results like weight loss or metabolism boost require consistent use over time; it’s not a quick fix. If weight loss is the goal, you're likely to have better results with other brands. ● Limited Availability: Not as widely available as green or black tea; premium pricing may apply due to exclusivity. ● Subtle Caffeine Boost: If you’re looking for a strong energy kick, Purple Tea’s low caffeine content might feel underwhelming. ● Taste Preference: The earthy, mildly floral flavor may not appeal to everyone, especially those used to sweeter beverages. ● Not a Standalone Solution: Works best as part of a balanced diet and active lifestyle; cannot replace proper nutrition or exercise. ● Potential Interactions: May interact with blood sugar or blood pressure medications; consultation with a doctor is recommended for specific conditions. My final Performance Evaluation (Ratings) of TrimFit Tea 1. Appetite Control: 3.5/5 Purple Tea’s caffeine content plays a role in reducing appetite by stimulating the central nervous system, which helps curb cravings naturally. Additionally, it prevents sudden hunger spikes caused by glucose crashes. It is effective but the appetite control isn’t as potent as some other brands like this one or other high-caffeine beverages or supplements. 2. Energy Enhancement: 3.5/5 With 42% less caffeine than green tea, Purple Tea provides a mild energy boost without the jitters or crashes. 3. Metabolism Boosting: 3.5/5 Purple Tea contains GHG and polyphenols, which have been shown to enhance fat metabolism by upregulating enzymes like carnitine palmitoyltransferase (CPT1A) in the liver. Its combination of mild caffeine and antioxidants contributes to a moderate but steady boost in metabolic rate, making it effective for long-term results. 4. Fat Oxidation and Burning: 4/5 Research highlights that Purple Tea reduces fat absorption while enhancing fat burning, thanks to its unique compounds like GHG and EGCG. Human studies have shown reductions in body fat mass, BMI, and waist size over time 5. Blood Sugar Regulation: 4/5 Purple Tea helps inhibit glucose absorption, which prevents post-meal blood sugar spikes. This makes it particularly beneficial for individuals managing blood sugar levels or insulin sensitivity. 6. Cognitive Support and Mental Clarity: 3.5/5 It’s not a quick brain stimulant but supports long-term mental clarity. The EGCG and anthocyanins in Purple Tea act as neuroprotective agents, improving brain health and clarity. Early studies suggest it may help protect against degenerative diseases while enhancing focus. 7. Digestive and Gut Health: 3.5/5 Purple Tea supports gut health indirectly through its antioxidants, which help reduce inflammation. While it’s not a probiotic or digestive-focused tea, its polyphenols contribute to a healthier gut environment and improved digestion. 8. Safety and Tolerability: 4.8/5 Purple Tea is very safe for most people, thanks to its low caffeine content and natural composition. It’s gentle on the stomach and well-tolerated, with minimal risk of side effects unless you have a tea-specific allergy or extreme caffeine sensitivity. 9. Long-Term Effectiveness: 4/5 When consumed consistently, Purple Tea offers sustainable benefits like fat loss, improved metabolism, and cognitive support. It’s not a quick fix but works gradually with regular use, making it ideal for long-term weight management and health improvements. Who should try TrimFit Purple tea? What kind of people Purple tea is best for ? 1. If You Are Looking to Lose Weight Naturally ● Why Purple Tea Works: It helps with fat oxidation, reduces fat absorption, and boosts metabolism through its unique compound, GHG. Human studies show measurable results in reducing body fat, BMI, and waist size over time. ● Potential Alternatives: A combination of various appetite suppressing & weight loss teas – this is my current no.1, Green tea (higher EGCG content), oolong tea (fat-burning through thermogenesis), or matcha (higher caffeine for quicker metabolism boost). 2. If You’re Sensitive to Caffeine but Need a Boost ● Why Purple Tea Works: With 42% less caffeine than green tea, Purple Tea provides a gentle energy boost without jitters or a crash. It’s perfect for afternoon slumps or pre-work hydration. ● Potential Alternatives: Rooibos tea (caffeine-free and antioxidant-rich), white tea (low caffeine but energizing), or peppermint tea (refreshing and calming). 3. If You Want to Improve Metabolic Health ● Why Purple Tea Works: Its polyphenols and antioxidants help regulate glucose absorption, improve liver function, and enhance metabolic efficiency. It’s particularly useful for managing blood sugar and slow metabolism. ● Potential Alternatives: Cinnamon tea (regulates blood sugar), turmeric tea (anti-inflammatory for metabolic health), or green coffee bean extract (boosts metabolism). 4. If You Need Cognitive Support and Focus ● Why Purple Tea Works: Packed with EGCG and anthocyanins, Purple Tea supports brain health, protects brain cells, and enhances mental clarity without overstimulation. ● Potential Alternatives: Ginkgo biloba tea (improves brain blood flow), matcha (quick energy + focus), or lion’s mane mushroom tea (for brain function and memory). 5. If You Want Antioxidant Support for Overall Health ● Why Purple Tea Works: Its anthocyanins and antioxidants reduce oxidative stress, fight inflammation, and protect cells from damage – more potent than blueberries or green tea. ● Potential Alternatives: Hibiscus tea (rich in antioxidants), elderberry tea (immune support), or pomegranate green tea (antioxidant powerhouse). 6. If You’re Focused on Heart Health and Blood Sugar Control ● Why Purple Tea Works: Its polyphenols reduce triglycerides, regulate blood sugar absorption, and support heart and vascular health by maintaining steady glucose levels. ● Potential Alternatives: Black tea (reduces cholesterol), fenugreek tea (lowers blood sugar), or ginger tea (improves circulation). 7. If You’re Looking for a Low-Calorie Hydrating Beverage ● Why Purple Tea Works: Purple Tea is light, refreshing, and perfect hot or cold. You can enjoy it without sugar or milk, making it an ideal low-calorie drink. ● Potential Alternatives: Cucumber mint water (hydrating and refreshing), chamomile tea (relaxing), or lemon water (low-calorie detox option). 8. If You Struggle with Inflammation and Gut Health ● Why Purple Tea Works: The polyphenols and antioxidants in Purple Tea support a healthy gut microbiome and reduce inflammation, aiding digestion and overall gut health. ● Potential Alternatives: Peppermint tea (soothes digestion), ginger tea (anti-inflammatory and gut-friendly), or fennel tea (reduces bloating). 9. If You Prefer Long-Term Health Solutions Over Quick Fixes ● Why Purple Tea Works: Purple Tea works gradually by combining antioxidants, GHG, and mild caffeine to deliver sustainable results for weight loss and overall health. ● Potential Alternatives: Green tea (long-term benefits), chamomile green tea (soothing and functional), or oolong tea (slow fat-burning effect). submitted by /u/nishi_red to r/NoFriendsFriendsClub [link] [comments]

Boost your health and slim down naturally—try Mushroom Coffee for Weight Loss today! Packed with adaptogens and nutrients, it supports metabolism, curbs cravings, and provides steady energy without the jitters. Start your journey to a leaner, energized you—make the switch now! https://preview.redd.it/jmfj0v00mmmf1.jpg?width=1500&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=e93fb1a4368a2be5bd8e9cd81f902029cf7591c4 submitted by /u/ExercisesForInjuries to r/ExercisesForInjuries [link] [comments]

submitted by /u/ExercisesForInjuries to r/WeightLossFoods [link] [comments]

If you're still clinging to your regular cup of joe, you're missing out on the slimming secret health experts and wellness influencers are obsessed with. Mushroom coffee isn’t just a trend — it's a game-changing elixir that can help curb cravings, support metabolism, and boost energy without the crash. Click here to discover the mushroom coffee! https://preview.redd.it/gvjznex4e1ze1.png?width=1100&format=png&auto=webp&s=62d18ec7bfd41b07dda9f40d73c61814bd04a144 submitted by /u/ExercisesForInjuries to r/ExercisesForInjuries [link] [comments]

Before you read I just want to distance myself from the texts below that I wrote, I am sharing this for authenticity, and not to give advice on how to lose weight. My singular hope is that someone can read through this text and come to the understanding that change is complicated and rough - but you can defeat obesity. It could take four years, could take longer. You are a different person compared to who you were, and this is what it means to change your lifestyle. Your life changes. You change. The texts are arranged from oldest to newest. From 2021 February to 2024 June. TL:DR at very bottom. Weight loss diary: Hi! I made this reddit account due to my concern for my own health. It was when I saw 140kg on my bathroom scale that I knew I had to do something about it. For the record, as of Feb 10, I weigh 130kg. I see specialists for managing my weight and I am currently on a hunger suppressant called Mysimba Mysimba is also known as contrave. Subreddit r/contrave (*Sneaky edit from 2022*) I *used to for a time* eat only one meal a day. This is a form of fasting. Subreddit r/fasting June-ish 2021 I'm still here just wanted to make a post saying that I am still here. for the past 2 months its been a bit more difficult, and my omad turned into 2 mad which turned into chaos. I'm on a good rhythm at the moment. Unfortunately due to this mishap I am around 123kgs. I have of course kept log of my weight. but I'm going to need a few weeks before I'm back at my lowest weight this year which is around 118 kg. I think it is important to keep perspective. Even if I weigh 123kg, that is still 17kgs less then what I weighed at new year. Perhaps its worth reflecting on what made me lose my omad streak. I have three contributing factors: Alcohol. In the beginning of this year I stayed clear of all alcohol. From around March I started to see if I can drink beer, as I like the drink and it makes things like group conversations a little more fun. The issue though is that I have a somewhat addictive personality and have semi-alcoholic tendencies. The two beers that I drank very cautiously - turned into 10 beers in only a few weeks. I think it is very sad that I am programmed like this. I still enjoy some beer nowadays, but I have better control, but I may have to phase it out. There are 200 calories in a bottle of beer over here. Take-out. I think take-out has a moderate contributing part when discussing the epidemic that we know as obesity. Just like how capitalism exploits and alienates the worker according to Marxian theory, take-out and it's processed components exploits the body's love for energy, despite the body already have tons of energy locked up as fat. It is also very alienating as we forget or don't know the food-making process, I'm not sure how you, the reader, feel about this, but when I make food I am often less hungry after my cooking process. I am also fully aware of what is in my food. Has the food stand / restaurant added in tons of sugar, oils and artificial flavour enhancers? You can't be entirely sure, that is my point. I didn't eat anything that wasn't made from my home until I moved in march. Sugar+fat. Basically junk food. Don't get me wrong, I'm not trying to pin all sugars or all fats as evil. A normal person can eat fruits and steaks without worrying. A balanced nutritious diet is the ideal. If the reader is a diabetic, you may want to be extra careful with anything that raises your blood sugar and triggers an insulin response. And if the reader is a vegan, I commend you, it is admirable to make the dietary sacrifice for ethical reasons, or perhaps its not a dietary sacrifice. Regardless, you've set your own boundaries, and I will respect it. Back to my point - I discovered chocolate, ice-cream and chips. Mind you it started off as a dessert in my omad, but after I ate the chocolate I would turn more hungry immediately. My body just wanted more and more. Again, I will party blame this on my predisposition of addictive behaviour. A chocolate bar does not last a day in my house once it is opened. It just feels good then and there to keep consuming. I could if unchecked eat many times my daily calorie limit if I had enough sugary chocolate bars, chips, hamburgers, fries, ice-cream and beer. The reason is that it doesn't satiate me as a home-cooked meal would. Okay, I will admit a home-cooked hamburger is probably alright, in combination with all of the reasons I have listed you can see how issues start to develop. So imagine its the weekend, its been a tough work-week, you want to drink a beer with your friends. One beer turns into 5 a day, only around omad time of course. Then you get a bit sluggish from the beer and decide to order a pizza, for good measure you get the delivery person to get you more beers. The morning after you wake up, you should be drinking water. You should always drink water! But, instead you confuse your thirst for hunger, so you order a german-style kebab, but you made the association in your adolescence that when you eat a kebab you have to drink beer to maximize the experience. So now, without much thought being made, you've made your omad at 11 am and are day drinking. Come evening-dinner time, you are hungry again and think that its going to be okay, today I will do two meals a day. But, then two meals spirals out of control. All of a sudden your bedroom is filled with beer cans, pizza boxes and chocolate wrappers. Oh and all this eventually bleeds into the weekdays too! Because of lockdown, you find little reason to leave your room/house other than buying food, so you aren't moving and getting potential endorphins. You get used to the food and instead of feeling amazing when you eat, you are instead eating to not feel awful. Not to mention you see the scale go upwards, defeating your hard work. I don't know what to call this condition I've been explaining, but to me it sounds like self-destructive behaviour and depression. So how does one get out of the downward spiral? I'm not saying it is easy, but I will make some steps right now. In order of priority (at least to me): Make a truly delicious homecooked meal. Make it big, make it omad. For me this could be Dwaejegogi-bokkeum and rice. Drink water. Drink water every hour you are awake, always have a container of water close to you. If you get a little hungry, drink a bottle of water. Most of the time, your hunger will disappear. (make sure you have a good salt-water balance though, you may have to supplement some salt, otherwise you may feel light-headed. This is directed mostly to people who live in places with soft (mineral-poor) water. Clean your room. The room can sometime be a reflection of your mind and behaviour. Is your room messy? Then your thinking and behaviour may also be messy. Cleaning your room will trick your brain into being more organized - 'if the room is clean, then surely I must be clean'. Its a great trick, plus it is small workout to clean your room. The best would be if you can do this every day. Go for a nice solid walk. Okay personally I don't walk to much, I like bicycling, so did that too. But walking is just as good. Walk for as long as it takes to completely clear your mind. I bicycled to a local lake, and then walked around it and bicycled back. In total took me maybe one hour and thirty minutes. It may be a point to not bring your wallet as to not be tempted by fast food you may see on the way. Make it inconvenient for you to eat and drink things you know you will regret. This means that you don't have sweets or junk in the house. Any beer that you have is at the very least not in the fridge. In combination with 5. I would say when at the store you buy for at least a couple of days worth of meals, but don't buy junk food!!! Depending on where you are at, all these things could be difficult. You can't change the past, you just can't. But, you can try to steadily work towards a goal that you have made for yourself. For me, that is having a body weight of around 100kg. Just try to change your present and future to make the outcome more likely. But you need to enjoy what you are doing! Omad works for me, find something that resonates with you, just don't destroy yourself in the process! In the end, you are just trying to be a better person for yourself. Don't compare yourself to others! Everyone has their story and everyone is worth something. You deserve be treated with dignity. It's not easy, but I am still here. Are you? I'm no longer on omad. Haven't been for quite some time I still have a lot of respect for fasting but at some point I just couldn't deal with such frequent fasts. I have to go through some mentally tolling tasks everyday and it has been easier for the mind to eat three times a day. I am on contrave and my dietician said in the first place that 3 meals is more sustainable. I kind see that a little bit more now. I'm pretty happy with where I am in life at the moment, in the past year I've been some dark places. Both on omad and off. To whoever reads this, I just want to let you know that it's alright to have your own strategy. Just because someone goes omad doesn't mean you have to, and even if you do and it goes great, you don't have to be so stubborn as to keep doing it despite you feeling lethargic for too much of the day etc. Look out for yourself because there are very very very few people who will do it for you. Good luck State of my body Well I am here to write a little bit about how it is going. To be honest, it's going quite well! Yes, maybe I weigh a little more than what I did in March, but I weigh a lot less than what I was in January. I am about 124.5 kg. I will pretty soon do some blood work to see how the Mysimba has affected me. I eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and I have a treadmill installed at my desk, which I can set the height to. I am writing this post at the same time as I am going a very relaxing 1 km/h tempo. I do notice that it is way more comfortable to walk on the treadmill with some running shoes, as I suppose the cushioning just makes the entire experience more enjoyable. I have been on the treadmill for 2 hours everyday since I started last Tuesday. It will probably not last, and today my speed has been significantly less intense. But I would say being consistent is the most important thing. I hope the reader has a nice day, and I wish you the best. June-ish 2022 I finally understand, and I'm so annoyed that I didn't realise it sooner I have gout. I've had gout for atleast five years. Everytime I've tried to lose weight I would lose my ability to painlessly stand which I used food and alcohol as something to deal with the pain, its been a vicious cycle. Things are finally kinda going better So I don't deal with stress all that well. I have had a mental block for quite some time. I tried a medication and its helping a little, not a lot, but its better than nothing. Also I feel like daily consumption of coffee is quickening me up a bit. I am around 124 kg. I've been going on long walks trying to have a minimum of 10 000 steps. Ever since I decided to do this its been going well. I've gotten myself a hair-cut, and my skin is clearing up. Basically I haven't looked this good in like 8 years, I've been told I look 10 years younger. But I still haven't been able to handle my academic duties, and is a constant source of stress for me. As I have elevated levels of uric acid in my blood I've been careful with consuming high purine foods. Its been okay, I don't really miss red meat all that much. Yes I still go on mysimba, its okay, I don't see why I wouldn't use it. I'm going to lifestyle rehabilitation It is currently in the very early morning, I haven't been able to sleep yet, not because I'm nervous about the fact that I'm leaving my family home into a rehabilitation institution, it's more likely because I slept in too late today, and because I have been packing. Also I didn't get to tire my body enough. But yeah I'm going to lifestyle rehab not because I live such bad lifestyle, but I want to give my family a break from living with making food and cleaning, I have sort of short circuited the productive side of my brain. So hopefully I'll learn some discipline. Buuut I'm starting to suspect that I have adhd which would explain why I am so dopamine starved and have trouble focusing. But who knows. I weigh around 122kg and after my rehab I am pretty sure that the 120s will be a distant memory. We've come some way from 140 kgs of regrets. Learned a lot as well, from gout to mental struggles (adhd?) I really wish I could focus more maybe the routine will be easier that my institution December 2022 update So my rehab is almost at its end. And I have so far conservatively lost 13 kgs. That is 121.5kg to 107.8kg. I haven't weighed this little since I was 15 maybe even 14. Which is crazy cool. My body is pretty tired though, it's Saturday and I do something everyday with hard work outs in the weekdays so it's not that odd. Better portion control and eating fruits between the main meals is my way to go for sure. We'll see how well this goes when I travel back home and try to live more independently. I hope the reader is doing well. March 2023 Update I am currently drinking coffee in the morning, I suddenly thought about this reddit account. I figure I would put in an update. I weigh somewhere around 109-110kg. When I was back from lifestyle rehab I weighed 106.8 kg. It doesn't bother me that I gone slightly up in weight, I have some hard stuff going on, and weight is not always the focus. What is important though is that if this was 3 years ago, I wouldn't have gone up a modest 3 kg, it would be more like 10 kg. I eat many fruits throughout the day, mostly though its clementines, apples and bananas. I tend to make a lunch salad consisting of iceberg, tomato, red onion slices, salt, pepper, balsameco (vinegar) and olive oil. I eat two slices of bread with low-calorie plant-oil butter, ham and cheese for breakfast. And the same for lunch but with three pieces of bread. Between every 'major' meal I eat fruit. I eat a low-calorie yoghurt every day along with one of my 'fruit mid-meals'. Dinner varies, luckily my house-hold fixes dinner. I do daily evening walks. To make the evening walks work I will sometimes smoke (not tobacco) on the walks, so that it doesn't become too mundane. After my evening walks that I do after dinner, I try to either relax playing computer games, or clean my room or take a shower. That is what works for me. Or at least, it works better than what came before. I will soon go back to life-style rehab. Which is good because then I can focus on more physical exercise, my work is so much that I can't afford to exercise otherwise. But come summer, I hope that my work will significantly drop. *** It is seven days later, and I noticed that I am now 2 kgs heavier. This is really not good, things started to get pretty bad with binged eating after I talked to my supervisor. I only heard positive and good-willed suggestions from him, but after that I could not work, and did a lot of the things I try to avoid doing. It is only now the day before I go back to lifestyle camp that I truly understand the gravity of what I have been doing the past 4 days. I could have made much more lifestyle choices. I need to wake up at 7 or 8 am for real, again. Thank god for lifestyle-rehab. I had a half-ways good working session yesterday. But nothing compared to before my supervisor meeting. May 1st update I thought about this profile again and thought it would be cool to add another update. I was inspired partially because someone in my household wanted to take a picture of me due to, what I assumed to be, the fact that I've dropped down in weight. I currently weigh 104.8 kg. It is passed my bed time so I will have to make it quick. I think I am in a much better place than I once was. But im looking at this picture and don't know what I am anymore. Am I fat, obese, overweight, normal, skinny, muscular? I just don't know. So I am considering posting the picture on a subreddit where I could ask. Its quite amusing to look back on previous posts, it really shows how much I've wanted to succeed with my weight loss. But I have a looming master thesis so I really shouldn't be spending my time staring into a laptop in the middle of the night. So, uh. Good night! December 2 2023 Update Once again, I just randomly thought about this account and thought enough time has gone to warrant an update. I am no longer a student, I work for a living trying to live modestly and to keep the good habits that I have formed in my weight loss journey. I was out with some colleagues, to be honest I felt a little unwelcomed, I suppose it had to do with the fact the rest of the group were all from the same country. I only had a beer yesterday, which is quite incredible when thinking about how I could down a six pack daily. I stepped on the scale today and saw 102.00 kg which is the lowest I have ever seen in my adult life. I've seen 102.xx kg a couple of times in the last few months, but I would go up in weight quickly after for the one reason or the other. I am still on all the medications that I have previously said I was. So I'm writing this on a Saturday night. I don't really feel like going into town, but I was planning on going to the store, buy some fruit, and go for an extended walk. Gotta get those 10,000 steps in, y'know? I feel like I don't get the time to do things like what I've done today, like looking over finances and how much money I have, or reflect on the weight-loss journey that I've been through. Because the fact is that I do not give myself enough credit in how far I've gotten in a relatively short time. Two years ago I was living the life of a junk-food addict/alcoholic with no real purpose. And the thing is, I loved it. It is a fear of mine, that I might lose it all once again because I could see myself doing it again. The only reason why I am the way that I am is because I can sustainably do what I do. I replaced my alcohol consumption with a thc-extract that I smoke on my daily walks. I wouldn't have been able to reasonably do this if I didn't have something else that I knew I could fall back on. I am a type of person who kind of needs to eat 5 times a day. I spent way too much time trying to be the person who could only eat once. What did I get to show for it? Gout and lethargy. I still have areas in my life I would like to improve on, of course. I want a job that is better fitted to my education, I have to say though, the job I have is quite nice, albeit doesn't pay as much as I feel like I probably deserve. I want to be a person who has a spotless room, but I haven't even vacuumed in like 3 weeks. I also really want to work on my charisma, I feel like Data from star trek in that one scene where they have a reception. You know, the one where he ends up like talking to a guy who is super into small talk so they small talk all day long. So before Data gets his groove into that, that is what I feel like in most social group interactions. It isn't a cakewalk living life with regrets of what I could have done to really capitalize on the privileges that were given to me. I suppose everyone feels this to a certain extent. Okay, time for me to go outside, eat some fruit, drink some water, get stuff back on track. I hope the reader is doing well. 2024 June 16th - I have conquered my Obesity I am very happy to share that I weighed in at 92.0 kilos this week. When I weigh 90.5 I will have a BMI less than 25. Less than 25! To give you some perspective of the life that I have lived through, 4 years ago I had a BMI of 38. But now, not only am I not severely obese (35+), not only am I not moderately obese (30-35), but now I am actually getting out of being overweight (25-30) entirely! Let's not get it twisted, I may no longer look obese, but I still feel obese, in different ways. My mind and thought patterns are destructive, and I have to follow strategies that I need to not go into a binged eating episode, My perception is so that when I look in the mirror I still see my old self (obese body)- people keep insisting that I look nothing like how I looked at my heaviest. So I have some body dismorphia. I would like to stress that I go on the following medications: Mysimba Alopurinol Lamictal Vitamin D And that I eat breakfast, lunch, snack, dinner, snack. That is 5 meals a day. The snack is most often composed of a banana and an apple. The breakfast and lunch are a ham and cheese sandwhich with margarine. The dinner is a chinese-korean stir fry composing of carrots, mushrooms, onion, garlic, ginger, spring onion, meat, gochujang, toban jan, lao ganma black bean in chili oil, sesame oil, soy sauce, rapeseed oil. This is eaten every week day, on the weekends I get take-out pizza (pepperoni pizza with jalapenos). This is my diet. I walk for about 100 minutes every day. This is the lifestyle that has gotten me from 120 kilos to 92 kilos. I am pretty sure this would have worked when I weighed more, but would probably need to add 1 or 2 more snacks, like between breakfast and lunch, and one more snack during the night. So this is really just a great place to be for me, I might chime in every now and again to update if there is an insight I think others would like to know. ************************************** TL:DR I ask ChatGPT: This text is a personal account of an individual's weight loss journey over three years, from February 2021 to June 2024. The author starts by acknowledging that they are sharing their experience not as advice but for authenticity, hoping to show that significant lifestyle changes are challenging but possible. Key Points of the Journey: Starting Point: The journey began with the realization of weighing 140kg. The author sought medical help, taking a hunger suppressant called Mysimba. Initial Struggles and Adjustments: Experimented with One Meal A Day (OMAD) fasting but faced challenges leading to fluctuating weight. Reflected on factors contributing to weight gain: alcohol, take-out food, and junk food. Coping Strategies: Made home-cooked meals, drank plenty of water, kept the environment clean, and engaged in regular exercise like walking or bicycling. Focused on removing temptations by not keeping unhealthy food or drinks at home. Progress and Setbacks: Noted various weight fluctuations and the impact of emotional and mental health issues like stress and depression on eating habits. Discovered health issues like gout, which complicated weight loss efforts. Lifestyle Changes and Rehabilitation: Attended a lifestyle rehabilitation program, leading to significant weight loss. Adopted new eating habits, such as having multiple small meals a day and incorporating fruits and vegetables. Reflection and Continued Efforts: Emphasized the importance of sustainability in weight loss methods. Highlighted the need for individual strategies that work for one's lifestyle and mental well-being. Recent Updates and Milestones: Documented reaching the lowest weight of 92kg, close to a normal BMI. Continued to manage weight with a structured diet, regular walking, and medications. Challenges and Mental Health: Acknowledged ongoing struggles with body dysmorphia and the psychological aspects of weight loss. Emphasized the necessity of treating oneself with dignity and not comparing oneself to others. The overall message is one of perseverance, self-awareness, and the complexity of significant lifestyle changes. The author stresses that while physical weight loss is achievable, mental and emotional challenges require continuous management. submitted by /u/140kgOfRegrets to r/loseit [link] [comments]

Hi Lovelies! I made a comment somewhere about how taking collagen and upping my protein helped my skin, hair, and nails MASSIVELY and a lot of people have been messaging me asking about that so I thought I would make a post. (I also lost a TON of weight without exercise (but strictly maintained CICO, counted my calories and forced myself to eat at least 90-100 grams of protein a day and have for the first time in my adult life reached my "perfect" body weight/goals in terms of body fat, and now I am hoping to spend time in the gym and gain muscle- but this is a skincare sub so I'll overall stick to that and talk a little bit about my weight loss and how it helped my skin in the end. Full disclosure, I am currently in the USA. And it is 10 times easier and more accessible to get things like protein and collagen here, but I have also done a lot of fitness in India and want to make this post in a Indian context as much as I can. You also can make collagen (kind of) for super super cheap. **VITAMINS:*\* What I love about India is that you can get your blood work done and see where you are lacking. There are a TON of vitamins and supplements available out there, and its hard to pinpoint what works for who and what vitamin causes what result. Because vitamins and supplements aren't regulated (and they definitely aren't in India), sometimes it's hard to know. And ALWAYS remember that too many supplements / vitamins CAN ABSOLUTELY be dangerous. Your body only absorbs so much. Beyond that, it's marketing and you're going to pee it out at best, and at worst they can actually mess with the way your body functions and cause permanent damage. So be careful, get your blood tested to see what you might actually be deficient in, and don't go too crazy and take a ton of unnecessary crap. Instead, stick to the basics. And ALWAYS CONSULT A DOCTOR FIRST AND MAKE SURE ITS OKAY. Just because it's available and easy to eat doesn't mean you should. The ones I take regularly are Women's multivitamin. Fish Oil. (If you eat fish great, still take these. If you don't, definitely take these! Omega 3s are super important for heart health, skin and hair among other things). Vitamin D (This is something most of us are deficient in). B12 (Despite being a meat eater, I have an absorption problem so I take a supplement. But if you eat meat you for the most part shouldn't need this. If you don't eat meat, you probably definitely should take this. But this is one thing you want to check and see if you have a deficiency issue as a deficiency here can cause a ton of health problems that you may not even be aware of). Iron (Only occasionally. Your body doesn't need a ton and more than required can cause bleeding). I recently also started taking a 4 gram fiber gummy (1-2 every day, in addition to trying to eat more fiber veggies). **I started taking these supplements 3 months ago religiously, and have noticed a massive change in my hair, skin, and weight loss (but I think the weight loss is more due to diet, but the supplements helped ensure I didn't lose hair and wasn't deficient).** **PROTEIN:*\* I *cannot* emphasize enough how much getting protein has changed my life. I have always been a meat eater, but I barely ate enough to give me the health benefits. If you are not a meat eater, I still have some advice for you, but it's absolutely going to be harder. For some context, I am 5'9 in height and used to weigh about 78 KGs. 4 and a half months of religiously eating 1200 calories (this was a safe number for me and my body. Every body is different) a day with close to 70 percent of it being straight up protein (I tried to hit atleast 80 grams in protein a day if not more) and that is what helped me lose a massive amount of weight for the first time in my life almost effortlessly. Before, every time I tried to lose weight without emphasizing protein- I failed miserably. I now weigh 58 KGs and I am SUPER happy with how I look and I feel *GREAT*. But it has also really really helped my skin. Get yourself an app that calculates protein content, and try your best to get protein EVERY DAY. If you eat meat, LOTS OF FISH / SEAFOOD. Salmon is a miracle but I know it's expensive in India. Shrimp is also phenomenal. Also can be pricy depending on where you are, but if you can buy in bulk and freeze it- DO THAT! Honestly though any fish available will be great. Chicken breast is also phenomenal. But really meat in general can and has sooooo many health benefits, especially in the protein department. If you can, try to get some in every day. For the eggatarians, EGG WHITES are amazing. You'll need a lot, but cheap and easy. An easy way to do it is to boil a ton, separate them, and eat them with pickles. (My favorite). (I did egg weights because the yolks are higher in calories and less in protein in comparison to the whites. But if you don't want to lose weight or are trying to gain, then eat the yolks too! They are a great source of nutrients). I used to boil and eat like 10 eggs a day sometimes. Daals, soybeans, peas, broccoli, mushrooms, lima beans and asparagus are great vegetables with protein. (I still eat a ton of soybeans). Milk is also a great and fairly easy source. But you are going to definitely need to get yourself a protein powder / shake. Even if you're a meat eater, it'll help. In order to get my 80-90 grams of protein a day, even WITH meat, I needed a protein shake that was close to 30 grams of protein in the shake. It sucks how pricey they can be in India, but if you can find something in bulk (even if it doesn't taste the best, just drink it)- it'll do wonders for your health and skin and IS ABSOLUTELY WORTH IT. If you are trying to lose weight / gain muscle, protein is even more essential. ( I'm only partially kidding here but if you can make an exception for seafood- highly recommend lol ) just because of how hard it is to get your protein without it and how dependent you have to be on supplements. But if that's your only option, of course that's totally fine. My mom is a vegetarian and doesn't even eat egg or milk and it absolutely reflects in her health, skin, and weight. (Much easier to gain weight if your diet isn't protein filled and is instead carb /fat heavy because you are likely to get hungry much quicker ). Now I am doing my best to get her to take protein, but it's just so hard for her. So please start forcing yourself to emphasize protein as soon as you can even if it is powders / shakes no MATTER what your body or skin goals are. Your body will thank you later. **COLLAGEN** : This isn't super well researched as to what extent exactly collagen supplements actually help. But there is plenty of anecdotal evidence and even better valued evidence to believe that it does definitely have a positive effect. A lot of people who take and eat collagen will tell you that it has made a difference (including me) and while that could be completely psychological, and I am definitely biased- I think it's at the very least worth trying for yourself and seeing how you feel and is at-least better for you and has some definitive scientific backing unlike some other dumb products out there. I have been drinking bone broth for 6 months and added a collagen supplement 3 months ago, and I have absolutely noticed a difference in my skin feeling and looking better, my hair being thicker and not falling out as much, and my nails have gotten SUPER thick and strong! Definitely way stronger than before. (I love growing them out now and painting fun designs on them). We all have collagen naturally, but it plays an important role in bone strength, skin, hair and nails and as we get older, we make less and less of it. It's also great for older folks, as there are solid claims that it helps keep your bones strong. Sad news for the vegetarians here, but **all collagen pretty much comes from animal bones.*\* (Not trying to debate ethics of this and your opinion is totally valid. If you're completely anti animal products, then collagen probably ain't happening for you. There is some sort of vegan "collagen" available in the US, but it's very expensive and there isn't evidence that it's actually effective or as effective as actual collagen. However, collagen supplements don't actually "taste" like meat if that helps (like other animal by products, such as a lot of gummies or fish oil pills / cosmetics, or even leather lol which a lot of very strict vegetarians in my family for some reason never realized actually comes from an animal). It typically comes in a powder form, and is usually unflavored and kind of looks like flour. You dissolve two table spoons of it in some sort of liquid like coffee or tea or milk or soup or daal or whatever and it's pretty tasteless. *It's also 10 grams of protein on it's own, so another good way to get in your protein*. The one I take is " Divided Sunset Collagen Peptides ". About 2 table spoons every day. Totally unflavored, looks and feels kind of like a dissolvable flour and I usually put it in a protein shake or my coffee or sometimes soup. I get this in the US though and I truthfully do not know how much it costs in India. It LOOKS like you can get a similar size for 700 INR to 1000 ish on Amazon. Which sucks but it is what it is. This one also comes from **"bone bones"**. I personally do not eat beef, but this is the supplement that I make an exception for. My dad is as anti beef as one could possibly get but that's a conversation for another day ( lol *sigh*) and I have somehow surprisingly convinced him to also eat it because I truly believe in the health benefits of it and I think it's even more important for my dad who doesn't get a lot of protein and is older and is losing weight in an unhealthy way due to muscle loss and age. **MAKING COLLAGEN FOR CHEAP*\* A lot of people don't realize that a lot of meat is a natural source of collagen. At the end of the day, getting your collagen from food sources VS supplements will ALWAYS be better as you get other health benefits and it absorbs better. But the BEST and easiest way to "make" / get collagen organically and for CHEAP is *drummmmrollllllllllllllll* **broth made with bones**. I regularly drink chicken broth and bison broth. (Big fan of bison meat and if you have access to it and are okay with eating it, DO IT. I know I know bison is kind of cheating. However the health benefits are AMAZING. Much healthier, leaner, and super high in protein and nutrients than especially other forms of red meat). The bison broth I drink comes from a farm here in the US and comes in dehydrated packets, and is frankly pretty pricey even here. But if you got the cash and are in the US / travel often- HIGHLY recommend. It lasts forever and you can take them everywhere..... Chicken broth is much cheaper, easier, and also has a lot of protein. But you can literally make ANY kind of broth at home for CHEAPPPPPP and you absolutely do NOT have to spend crazy amounts on the supplements. Broth is an AMAZING source of protein, collagen, is super low in calories (one cup on average is like 8-10 grams of protein and only 40 calories along with a days serving of collagen and other nutrients I mean whatttttttt???? You couldn't put that in a pill for a million dollars...) and TASTES DELICIOUS. It's like a savory cup of delicious soup. I add a little salt and I can honestly drink multiple cups of it unless I'm forced to stop, and will sometimes mix with raasam lol. natashaskitchen-chicken-bone-broth.com Here is a recipe for chicken bone broth that loosely tells you the process, but there really isn't a huge science behind it and you don't have to strictly follow it. If you eat meat, keep all the bones and store them in the freezer. Or go to the meat shop and just ask for bones and negotiate it for cheap. Chicken bones is the cheapest. Goat is fine too if you like that flavor. (Where my Hyderabadi paya drinkers atttt???). Get a bunch of scraps / bones. You want to try to get a lot of chicken feet if you can along with others. But it doesn't matter a ton which ones. Doesn't matter if some cooked leftovers or raw. All you need is a bunch of bones. Doesn't matter which bones, and doesn't even matter if there is some meat on them. Take them all and roast them in an oven for 45 minutes or in a pan on the stove for like 30-40 minutes on slow/medium until they are kind of browned. (Not essential but gives your broth a great flavor and I really recommend). Add the chicken bones to a LARGE pot with a bunch of COLD water. Then add whatever vegetables / vegetable scraps you want. A lot of people save their vegetable scraps and store them and then add them for flavor. Literally anything. Potato peels, onion scraps, carrot peels, any Indian vegetable scraps, cilantro, whatever! You can also add some cut up pieces of onions, garlic, celery, and carrots for that flavor if you can / want! Salt, pepper, bay leaves and garlic is classic seasoning but there are no rules! I also add turmeric sometimes and if you want it spicy, you can look up some "Hyderabadi authentic paya" spices and do that instead. AND THEN add like a solid splash of apple cider vinegar. This is pretty essential. If you don't have apple cider vinegar, then you can use lime juice but but apple cider vinegar is preferred. Let the whole pot sit for like an hour before cooking. This helps break down the collagen from the bones and you definitely want that. (Also USE A BIG POT. Something resembling a large stock pot). Now you CAN cook this in a pressure cooker if you have no choice but I wouldn't recommend. If you have a slow cooker, cooking it in the SLOWEST setting for a solid 18 hours or more is my favorite and is the easiest. Otherwise, put it on a stove on the slowest / lightest setting and let it sit, occasionally mixing. At least for 12 hours-15 hours for sure. The longer the better. If you use a stove, you definitely need to keep an eye on it every few hours as opposed to a slow cooker. After this, you'll see the separation of the collagen and the broth! And you're done! Take it and strain it. What you really want is the liquid. Take that liquid and cool it. After cooling you'll see the separation even more! It'll be beautiful. You can now freeze this or freeze a part of it. You can warm up a cup every day and drink it like soup with salt and it tastes soooooo good. You can use it as a base for soups, pasta sauces, or honestly any curry. I always use broths in my curries because not only does it enhance the flavor but it's super healthy! Your homemade broth will be tastier than anything you can buy in the stores. This is basically collagen. Much cheaper than supplements, much tastier (literally my favorite) and much healthier, and anyone can make it. It sounds complicated but with a little planning it's fairly easy! Try to get yourself a serving a day, and I promise you'll start to see and feel a difference!!!! (And if you can, get the elders in your home onto it too). **Other skincare products that have helped me that I also started about 3 months ago and could also be playing a role in the positive changes I have seen are:*\*- **Sunscreen**. Can't believe I have never used sunscreen before and for some dumb reason thought my brown skin meant I didn't need it. I don't think it matters what type you are using but just use SOMETHING. Even if you're going to be in the sun for a brief period of time or sitting in front of windows, put it on. It'll do wonders.- **Lotion / Moisturizer.** Been finally using this for the first time in my life regularly all over my face and body and hands. Don't think personally it matters which one you use. I have used a fancy super expensive one. I also have used normal ponds. Fine with either.- **Vaseline**. Great stuff. Basic and great. Slather a bunch on your lips before you sleep and you got a great lip mask. Put a bunch on your feet and wear socks overnight and you wake up with baby soft feet. I even use it on my body sometimes, especially legs. Works great. I also recently saw a "hack" where if you microwave some Vaseline and then add several drops or more of whatever perfume and then cool it again in the fridge, and then you can rub some on your pulses / neck and it supposedly helps the scent last much longer. I think this would be interesting with some oudh scents. **Retinol Night time cream.** I think this has been helping? Maybe on the forehead with some wrinkles? Who Knows. I'm in my 20s and didn't have a ton of wrinkles to begin with but whatever I would like to believe it's helping. They say retinol helps and it does have scientific backing so maybe any product with retinol in it will help.- **Salicylic Acid facewash**. I think this is helping. I never had a ton of acne to begin with besides hormonal but I have been happy with this and will continue using it.- **Collagen Toner with Snail Mucin.** Idk why I bought this. I found it on sale and its from South Korea and idk if it's making a difference but whatever lol. Probably won't buy again and it's probably useless lol.- **A face scrubber! ** This I love. I got a little silicone one with bristles (initially wasted money on a battery exfoliator and realized that it holds on to a bunch of bacteria and can make things worse). I think they're pretty cheap and probably on Amazon. It helps exfoliate my skin really well and I use this to wash my face.- **Jojoba oil.** I use a little of this on my eyebrows and lips and sometimes on my skin as a mask. You could probably use coconut oil lol but I found jojoba oil to appear less "oily". I even put a little on my hair and it doesn't have that oily look as much as coconut does.- **Laniege stuff.** I'm using the night water-mask and i'll see how it goes. So far I like it. Also waiting on the lip mask. I think their stuff is kind of pricey though, especially in India. **ACTUALLY** washing my face twice a day, and especially at night. I never used to do this and would often sleep in my makeup. So I think this has been helpful. **Loofa in the Shower** Actually scrubbing my skin with a loofa and body wash (or soap). I think the exfoliation helps. *DENTAL STUFF* Okay this isn't quite skin care, but I have pretty screwed up teeth. Never got braces when I should have. I also feel like my dental hygiene was not up to par for a large part of my adult life. For the past year or so, I started to diligently brush TWICE a day instead of only ONCE. I use and highly recommend an ELECTRIC TOOTHBRUSH. It helps you get the hard to reach places and ensures each side and tooth gets the attention it needs. I mostly use a flavorless toothpaste now but in India I used to LOVE meswak toothpaste. That stuff is delicious lol. ALSO FLOSSING??? Flossing was never really a thing for me in India and no one really talked about it or emphasized it but it's actually really important. Also started doing that regularly (once a day) and it really really helps. Regular floss or atleast dental picks if you can't reach everything but flossing definitely shouldn't be optional! I also use a mouthwash without alcohol in it but it's probably not essential. I probably still need some fillings and definitely need to cough up some big bucks to get some invisible braces eventually but whatever. It's never too late to start right? **Weight/Muscle Loss and Gain:*\* I know I also mentioned weight loss a few times, and I am now trying to focus on muscle gain. I was always pretty weak and lanky so that's a goal for me. While this is a skincare sub, I think it goes hand in hand with muscle and weight and has a direct impact on your skin and hair too. Everyone has different goals though so I am just sharing my experience. tdeecalculator.net I went to this website, calculated my tdee at sedentary and then deducted 500 calories. (Which is pretty aggressive and you honestly don't need to do it that way. It is much healthier to get in SOME exercise instead of none. If you do a tiny bit of exercise, you have much more wiggle room with food and that's important). And then I stuck to that. I diligently logged my calories every day, and even weighed my food if I had to. I inputted it into MyFitnessPal (an app) but I think "loseit" might be a better app with more free features. Both these apps have pretty much every Indian food item as well so that helped. I stuck to this, and as I mentioned before- in addition to making sure I got my vitamins, I MADE SURE THAT A LARGE PART OF MY DIET WAS PROTEIN. That is the number one reason I lost weight, wasn't starving all the time and felt good doing it. Even if you eat 100-200 calories less than your TDEE, you will absolutely lose weight. Besides emphasizing on protein, I still ate pretty much what I wanted. The only other changes I really did was reduced the amount of oil I cooked with, and I totally eliminated sugar from my coffee / tea and replaced it with monk fruit. (I find monk fruit delicious but stevia or whatever is more commonly available in India. It's a 0 calorie substitute and I love it. I used to drink coffee / chai like 5 times a day with a solid 3 table spoons of sugar. Replacing that entirely was a super easy change that I didn't even miss taste wise but it made a huge difference in my health). If you want to gain weight, you do the opposite. Still emphasize on protein, but eat 200-500 calories more than your TDEE instead of less. The best possible thing you could also do for both scenarios is start weight lifting. Even if you start small, and start at home, it'll do wonders. Little things like squats, or leg lifts or using a resistance band and then slowly working your way to a gym. Gaining muscle regardless of what your fitness goals are is an amazing thing for your health, body, skin and hair. If you are an Indian woman anything like me, then you'll know how hard it is to have muscle and keep it on and it only gets worse as you get older. I used to work out a gym in India regularly and I have never felt better and it absolutely made my skin glow. I can't recommend it enough. It doesn't matter how good or bad or strong or skinny or not skinny you are. And I know gyms and weight lifting can be intimidating. But everyone starts somewhere. Even if you go a gym and just start with a little walking on the treadmill with some incline, and try out some of the machines, that's a HUGE start. But building muscle and being stronger with your own body is just soooooo important no matter what. And you'll learn as you go, and you'll feel AWESOME. If you are trying to lose weight, please do it with a heavy emphasis on protein and incorporating some level of weight lifting into your routine, even if it's once or twice a week. Otherwise you'll lose important nutrients, muscle mass, and you'll end up looking and feeling like shit. **AND VERY IMPORTANTLY, ultimately weight loss or gain is a science. Eat less than your TDEE and you'll lose weight. Eat more, and you'll gain. But if you're on a weight loss journey, always calculate a HEALTHY calorie goal and get lots of protein. You might be tempted to eat less, but just because you can does not mean you should. If your goal is to eat 1400 calories a day, then EAT AROUND 1400 CALORIES A DAY. No less. Eating less than a healthy amount can cause very very adverse health effects, and can cause an extremely unhealthy relationship with food. If you are not careful and ensuring that you are hitting your goal every day, that unhealthy relationship can creep up on you before you even know it. So always make sure you are being safe and not unhealthy. There is no need to be obsessive. As long as you are sticking to a general calorie range, and are emphasizing on healthy foods and proteins for your calories and ideally combining it with some muscle gain / working out- you will thank yourself and be AMAZED at what your body can accomplish and how it'll feel. Don't be afraid to talk to a doctor about this if you find yourself having any sort of struggle**. My goal is to be able to do a pull up, hopefully more than one, by the end of 2024!!! Hopefully I'll see more changes in my overall health, skin and hair as I continue! :) And remember, ultimately bettering yourself skincare or otherwise is a process. It looks different for everyone. And a lot of stuff is just marketing or doesn't work straight up. You don't HAVE to spend an insane amount. I have found that a basic dove moisturizer works just as well as the fancy overpriced laniege stuff that I have tried. Vaseline and coconut oil is amazing too, and vaseline is a great "foot / hand / lip mask". And while collagen and protein is great, it sucks that it's as expensive as it is especially in India. While it might be a little bit harder, there are definitely creative cheaper ways to get them. The most important thing is that ultimately you feel better and optimistic about doing it. Mind and body connection is real, and if you wake every day excited about doing something new as a way to help solve a struggle that you have (maybe that's as simple as waking up and putting coconut oil on your hair or maybe making yourself chicken broth because you want to consume collagen regularly), you're much more likely to see positive results. 6 months ago, I didn't do a single thing to my body or face besides putting on makeup when I was out of the house and brushing my teeth / showering, because I didn't really care or believe it could get better. I coincidentally (or not) was in a lower place mentally. Now, I feel much better as a person and I try on a daily basis. How much of that is attributed to some vitamins and collagen VS other factors- I couldn't tell you. A lot of what I wrote has scientific backing. (Such as fish oil or vitamin b12 being necessary or protein being necessary or in the fact that eating less than your TDEE and exercising so your calories "out" is more than calories "in" is honestly the only way to lose or gain weight) But a lot of what I wrote is also anecdotal and I recognize that the snail mucin toner that I smear over my face probably isn't making as much of a difference as much as my mindset about it is and how fancy I feel doing something new and interesting to my face lol. I can tell you that I personally just feel better. And I think as long as you are trying, you'll feel better too. If you made it this far, I'd also love to hear about the things that have personally already helped you. :) ​ submitted by /u/Cutiepatootie8896 to r/IndianSkincareAddicts [link] [comments]

I’ll attach as much info as I can: Height : 165cm Age : 20 Current weight : 104kg Goal weight approx : below 80kg Food intake currently : Aiming for 1500-1700 calories daily. I’ve just started a calorie deficit diet. I did a little bit of research on it but not a tonne. Basically just made sure I wasn’t going to accidentally starve myself. Regarding what I’m eating, breakfast is a 27 calorie coffee (sue me I need it 🤣), paired with a protein ball or bar type of thing, averaging like 200 calories. Lunch and Dinner I’m using premade meals as I struggle with portion control (I had a very bad Binge ED which is why I weight 104kg) so I’m having these meals to stop myself from continuing old habits and getting used to standard portions. The meals are on average 350-550 calories depending on the type of meal obviously, I had roast beef with chips and peas topped with mushroom sauce today and it was 360 calories. Dinner I plan on having ravioli which is 510 calories. At lunch I also have a fruit juice from the same brand (today was carrot, orange, apple, strawberry and passion fruit) and average 150 calories. Then I sometimes have halo ice cream (I need joy and ice cream is my favourite thing in the world) which is plant based and 360 calories a tub. Yesterday I had a coffee, protein ball, lunch meal, juice, dinner meal, and halo and it was 1708 calories in total. Bit of backstory : I do plan on joining a gym but I’ve decided to wait because my downfall is my commitment / motivation. I always fall into old habits and give up. I don’t want to do that this time. I need to lose this weight, would love to lose a nice bit before June as I go home (other side of the world) and go to Europe for 2 months and want to be more confident. For reference, when I was 15 I was in the best shape of my life, I focused on powerlifting and miss it so much, after a work out if I flexed you could see faint abs and I had a deadlift of 130kg. I was a unit. And then I developed extreme body dysmorphia and thought I was the size of a whale and fell into depression and developed a binge ED and would eat so much fucking food. Stayed depressed. Then spend a couple years dealing with my mental health because I wanted to say bye bye and tried, anyway I thought it was better to be mentally healthy than physically and stayed around the same weight, maybe gained a bit more in those years, like 95-104 max. I’m now much better mentally. Much. Better. So now I’m giving this a proper go. But before I let myself get locked into a gym I need to prove to myself I can commit and do something about this. The workout : needing to prove I can be committed I’ve decided to do a daily home workout. Which I’ve abbreviated to 750/75. I don’t know if this is too much or little. I haven’t properly worked out in multiple years but I work as a dog handler which is quite physical. So I’ve maintained a lot of underlying muscle, beneath the pounds of fat. I can flex my legs and knock my fist against hard thigh muscles. One bicep is much bigger (it’s ridiculous) because of handling dogs and favouring one side. I’m considered the resident man at my work (all women) and can carry two 30L drums of chemicals up a flight of stairs at a time, now that’s a workout 🤣 so I can still carry 60kg up a flight of stairs despite being chunky. In total prob 10 trips up, and would be puffed at the end with like 10-20 second breaks between, a few couple minute breaks. So with my workout I wanted to make sure I actually work my body to the point of burning fat, because I’m not starting from nothing and don’t want to underwork and not actually be doing anything. So the 750/75 stands for 750 skips with a skipping rope / jump rope. I chose skips because I know they work quite a lot of your body despite being simple and are good for weight loss. Then 25 push ups, 25, sit ups, 25 squats because simple and work different areas as far as I know. The order varies and I take a break between the 750 and 75, with little quick breaks during both sets. I know it’s simple but I wanted something simple I could commit to. I just want to know if anyone can give me any additional advice on what I’m doing, I’m only on day 3, and I’m feeling it in sore muscles but I’m not like crippled. I’m also terrified of loose skin if anyone has dealt with that and has insight. My fitness knowledge has faded over the years and I just want any knowledge anyone feels like bestowing. I wanted to give as much insight into my situation as possible, total honesty. If this workout I’ve decided to do is going to have the opposite affect please let me know 🤣 submitted by /u/whoneedsrealityy to r/WeightLossAdvice [link] [comments]

awaken 180 food list Hey SlimQuesters! If you're following the Awaken 180 program for weight loss, you know how important it is to stick to the approved foods. The Awaken 180 food list is designed to help you lose weight fast while still enjoying delicious and satisfying meals. In this post, I'll provide the full Awaken 180 approved food list so you can use it as a handy reference. I'll also share some tips for getting creative with these foods so you don't get bored. But wait, there's more! If you're curious about diving deeper into weight loss strategies, keto recipes, and wellness tips, I've got just the thing for you. Head over to our website AAZMI HEALTH for a treasure trove of articles and resources. The Awaken 180 Food List: Proteins: Eggs Chicken breast Turkey breast Fish and seafood Whey protein powder Greek yogurt Vegetables: Broccoli Spinach Kale Cucumbers Bell peppers Onions Mushrooms Asparagus Brussels sprouts Cauliflower Fruits: Berries (strawberries, blueberries, raspberries) Apples Grapefruit Healthy Fats: Avocado Nuts and seeds Olive oil Coconut oil Other: Coffee Tea Bone broth As you can see, the list includes plenty of delicious and nutrient-dense options. The key is combining these foods in creative ways so you look forward to your meals. Some easy meal ideas: Veggie omelet with avocado Chicken salad wrapped in lettuce Tuna salad stuffed tomato Sheet pan salmon with roasted veggies Zucchini noodles with turkey meatballs Mushroom turkey burger without the bun The great thing about the Awaken 180 plan is you'll learn healthy habits that will keep the weight off long-term. Just stick close to the approved foods list along with regular exercise, and you'll be amazed at your transformation! If you want more recipes, meal plans and weight loss tips, be sure to check out my website AAZMI HEALTH. I have tons of great resources there to help you reach your goals faster. Let me know if you have any other questions! I'm happy to help. submitted by /u/azmiouss to r/SlimQuesters [link] [comments]

Article has references to Reddit. Some text and characters did not carry over in the copy & paste of the full article, so you can access it here: https://www.wsj.com/style/dave-rachel-hollis-disney-1ffac082 --- Behind the Tragic, Instagram-Perfect Life of an Ex-Disney Executive When Dave Hollis quit his plum Disney job to join his wife Rachel’s self-help empire, the pair built a business around sharing some of their darkest feelings on social media. The reality was even worse. By Erich Schwartzel Follow | Illustrations by Anthony Gerace for WSJ. Magazine Dec. 2, 2023 530 am ET THE DAY was starting at Dave Hollis’s Texas home when he opened Instagram and pressed “live.” Dave, who’d been a top executive at Disney before quitting to become a self-help influencer, was streaming one of his occasional virtual coffees from the poolside area he’d branded his “Patio of Peace.” For his viewers, it was another chance to spend time with a man they’d seen evolve from a skeptic of wellness to a proselytizer of living a deeper life. But on this particular morning in October 2021, fans could see something was off. Dave had been following in the footsteps of his wife, Rachel Hollis, the author of the bestselling manifesto Girl, Wash Your Face. In just three years, she had built a multimillion-dollar business telling women to embrace their imperfections. Dave eventually embraced that ethos too. He shared his personal struggles with alcohol and his insecurities and built a following of nearly half a million people. Together, he and Rachel mined their everyday lives—issues they had as a couple, intimate moments with their four children—to churn out podcasts, memoirs, coaching sessions, merchandise and more. But the rapid success soon took its toll. In the year leading up to that fall morning in 2021, the couple had announced their divorce, Rachel’s popularity had cratered, and Dave was now demanding fans buy his second self-help guide. “I bled into this!” he yelled as he held up the book, Built Through Courage. It was a nautical-themed collection of stories and advice inspired by a quote tattooed on his right forearm: “A ship in harbor is safe, but that’s not what ships are built for.” Presales for the book had been weak and Dave was livid that his followers weren’t buying it. Then came a voice from someone Dave’s followers knew well: his then-4-year-old daughter, Noah. Barging into the frame, she sweetly asked if her dad could come make her Mickey Mouse pancakes. He blew her off, saying he was talking to “our internet friends.” Later, she popped in again. “Get a life,” he told her, a bad joke that sounded unnecessarily harsh—and certainly not in keeping with the friendly dad persona he’d cultivated online. The stream went on for two hours, as the chorus of comments grew sharper: Sign off, his followers urged him. Go have breakfast with your kids—offline. Livestream commentators soon swarmed a Hollis-family Reddit group to castigate Dave, naming the episode “Pancakegate.”Dave eventually posted an apology. “I don’t recognize the person in the video,” he wrote. Three months later, he logged off of Instagram and checked into rehab, according to friends. “I am feeling completely broken from the pressure of this strange public life,” he wrote in a post. A year later he was dead. The rise and fall of Dave Hollis offers an unusual glimpse into the pressures of the weirdly intimate world of social-media influencers, where you are personally the product and everything you do in your life can be produced into a commercial event. This story weaves together interviews with friends of Dave’s from childhood, Hollywood and his time as a self-help influencer. It includes interviews with former employees and colleagues. It also draws from the many books, hours of podcasts and other outlets where Dave and Rachel publicly shared details about their lives. Rachel Hollis declined to comment for this piece. DAVE HOLLIS GREW UP in Southern California, the son of a contractor and a devoutly Christian mom. He was top of his class in high school and a DJ at the Pepperdine University radio station. Hustling in L.A. in his mid-20s, he soon met his wife, Rachel, then a 19-year-old assistant at Miramax. Rachel had come to Los Angeles from a small town where her father was a Pentecostal minister, she would later write. She was so religious that when she discovered the body of her older brother who had died by suicide, she remembered asking the 911 dispatcher if he was going to hell. Dave liked taking care of this “small baby rabbit,” he’d later write. They married in 2004. Dave was the provider, Rachel the attractive but approachable spouse wrangling a bunch of kids. She tried attending acting school, writing novels and, finally, event planning and self-help. Dave saw his job as keeping her expectations in check. Once, when she outlined deals that might take her self-help business to another level, Dave calculated the chance of them happening at 3 percent. Then, in 2015, Rachel posted a photo of herself on the beach to Facebook. She was laughing at the camera in an orange-and-blue bikini, showing off “a belly that’s permanently flabby from carrying three giant babies.” “They aren’t scars, ladies,” she wrote. “Flaunt that body with pride!”The post landed Rachel national attention, a viral cry from a new, fearless spokesperson for the unvarnished side of womanhood. Her first self-help book, Girl, Wash Your Face, was released by a Christian publisher.At first Dave was humiliated by its revelations—Rachel talked about her hairy toes and their lousy sex. But it soon sold two million copies. Its success also meant that suddenly Rachel was making far more money than he was, Dave would later write in his first self-help guide. “Now that she doesn’t need me,” he wrote, “will she still want me?” When Girl, Wash Your Face published, Dave was the head of global distribution for Disney. He spent his days pitching release strategies to stars like Dwayne Johnson and booking blockbusters like Star Wars: The Force Awakens into theaters. It was a job that came with stock options and tickets to the Oscars. In the spring of 2018, he invited his childhood friend Shawn Wehan for lunch on the studio lot. Sitting in an executive dining room one table over from Bob Iger, the legendary Disney CEO, Wehan remembers Dave telling him, “I could have that job in 10 years.” But he told Wehan he didn’t want it. In his mid-40s, he was feeling unfulfilled. And for the first time in maybe his entire life, he wanted to take a risk. So he quit. IN JUNE 2018, four months after Girl, Wash Your Face was released, the Hollises moved their family to Dripping Springs, outside Austin, Texas. They were going to build Hollis Co. into a self-help empire. A team of employees started to manage Dave’s Instagram account too, a task the boss didn’t take to naturally. He’d had a public job at Disney, leading conference keynotes and taking calls from reporters when a new movie premiered. But becoming the brand himself wasn’t so easy. Then, in the summer of 2019, Dave had a fleeting moment that made him more comfortable in the spotlight, according to an employee who worked closely with him. He was at a three-day self-empowerment retreat that Hollis Co. designed. Dave was running from one fire to another when Whitney Bass, a hairstylist from outside Minneapolis, stopped him. Bass remembers telling him that her husband tuned into the Hollis podcasts because he shared Dave’s skepticism of the self- help world. “I appreciate that,” she remembers Dave telling her. “I want to be relatable to people who are married to the unrelatable.” She asked for a selfie. Soon a line of more fans formed, and Dave’s second career began to take shape. Dave, once embarrassed by Rachel’s candor, soon was sharing his own insecurities and intimate details of their marriage. He went along with it when Rachel encouraged followers to join them in “Sexy September” and commit to having sex every day of the month. Suddenly even the most mundane moments were spun into carefully curated posts. One afternoon, he ran late to a meeting at company headquarters, an employee who worked directly with Dave recalls. As she waited for him, she saw on his Instagram that he’d just finished traveling with all four kids on his own. A superdad on the go. “You must be so tired,” she remembers saying when he arrived.“We had our nanny flying with us,” she says Dave told her. “But that doesn’t do as great on social.” His Instagram account, once dedicated to occasional pictures of his kids and pretty sunsets, became a stream of branded narrative often averaging more than one post a day for an audience that grew to more than 400,000. The Bronco he drove became “The Incredible Hulk.” His four children became recurring characters, especially his youngest, Noah. Playtime with her became a show called “Tea Time with Noah.” And there was one call after another to preorder his first book, Get Out of Your Own Way, before it debuted in March 2020. Rachel and Dave Hollis during a promotional interview for Rachel’s irst book, ‘Girl, Wash Your Face.’ PHOTO: AP See more... In the book, Dave admits he was once like his reader—convinced the world of self-improvement was full of “charlatans, peddling feel-good mysticism to weak souls.” Now he was so comfortable with it, he opened his book with the raw story of reading Girl, Wash Your Face for the first time. “I drank a handle of vodka. In a day and a half. By myself” was its opening, describing what it took for him to get through Rachel’s oversharing. Mortification, it turned out, made for good content. The rest of Dave’s book took anecdotes drawn from life and explored the lies we tell ourselves, including “real men don’t show emotion.” His team had transformed his skepticism into a strength. Dave read direct messages and comments regularly—and his fans say he responded, and then followed up with out-of-the-blue check-ins. But as his star rose, former employees at the time detected a rivalry forming between the couple. When Rachel created a production arm, she named it 3% Chance Productions—a reference to Dave’s one-time assessment of her potential success. Then in June 2020, Hollis Co. staff received a Slack message delivering shocking news. Rachel and Dave were getting a divorce. “We have worked endlessly over the last three years to make this work....” Rachel noted in an Instagram post announcing the split below a photo of the couple smiling. “[Fans] were just instantly pissed,” says Bass, the fan who’d stopped him for a selfie in Minneapolis. The couple had sold themselves as a model for others—while on the verge of separating? Dave grew self-conscious when he realized he agreed with them. “How much more inauthentic could we have been?” Wehan remembers him asking. A DIVORCE between two people who were supposed to have it all set disgruntled Reddit commentators ablaze. And Rachel, in the words of one popular critic, Kayla O’Brien, soon became a “never-ending content machine.” In punchy YouTube videos, O’Brien tore apart the junk science, odd teachings and hypocrisy she felt she saw in popular influencers and TikTok scam artists. A video criticizing Rachel soon became her most watched. “It is a business,” O’Brien says, noting she can make $1,500 a month off the videos. “But I do believe what I say.” when Rachel dismissed a housekeeper as the woman who “cleans the toilets.” When a follower said such language made her “privileged” and “unrelatable,” Rachel shot back. “Sis, literally everything I do in my life is to live a life that most people can’t relate to,” she said in a TikTok video, writing in a caption that she wanted to be like women she admired, such as Harriet Tubman, Malala Yousafzai and Wu Zetian, the first female emperor of China. “All Unrelatable AF,” she wrote in the video’s caption. The comments had come in April 2021, as a broader racial reckoning was shaking American business and culture. Rachel’s brand was tarnished, and followers started to leave. “I’m so deeply sorry for the things I said in my recent posts,” Rachel posted to Instagram.It did little to quell the uproar. The company Dave had helped to build was in a mushroom cloud. “HE WAS JUST a puddle of sadness,” says Lynn McKay of the first time she laid eyes on Dave, jogging on a back road in the summer of 2020, soon after she and her family had moved to the area from Los Angeles. It wasn’t just about the business. He missed his wife, his kids, his old life. On Instagram, Dave projected a single dad taking it one day at a time. He talked about the #GoalGetterChallenge and how to “break apart perfectionism.” He introduced the McKays to his followers, telling them that he believed God had delivered the couple’s arrival. “We were the guest stars, the neighbors,” Lynn says. They joined him for workout sessions in his gym, often streamed for his followers. Athleisure brands shipped leggings to his house, requesting they be passed along for Lynn to wear on camera during their workouts. After their first appearance, Lynn’s husband got 10,000 new Instagram followers overnight. But Lynn was concerned. She says she often pictured Dave at night, alone in his house and obsessively reading the comments left on posts telling his followers to let go of what others thought about them. “Listen to your own advice!” she’d tell him. On Valentine’s Day 2021, Dave revealed that he was in a new relationship with Instagram fitness influencer Heidi Powell, who’d built her name on ABC’s Extreme Weight Loss. As soon as the announcement was posted, Heidi remembers him grabbing her phone to monitor incoming comments, deleting the negative ones. “It actually was a sweet thing,” she says. Over time, Dave revealed that he knew some of the more frequent critics, rattling off their social handles. He must read these all of the time, Heidi says she thought to herself. “The hate sites,” she calls them. Heidi says she had never heard of Reddit. “I’ve been busy my whole life,” she says, by way of explanation. But Dave was obsessed. When Dave took her off-roading in the Incredible Hulk for the first time, he mounted a dashcam and uploaded the footage. “Other people feel pressure from themselves to post their highlight reel. We felt pressure from the world because we let them in,” she says. “It’s like The Truman Show.” After Pancakegate and the rehab that followed in early 2022, it was about four months before the “itch” to return to social media drove him to log back on, he would write on Instagram. His friends could see how much Dave thrived on helping people—one woman said she had thrown away her suicide letters after discovering his videos—and they urged him to focus on the one-on-one coaching he loved. But they also wondered why their smart and successful (and 47-year- old) friend was bothering with Reddit bullies and $7,000 sponsored posts. “I want my cake & wanna eat it too. Want to protect my mental health & stay connected to a community that has been by my side through everything,” Dave wrote in his return post. Followers saw an avatar of health online, spray-tanned and teeth whitened for Dave’s newest hobby: bodybuilding. It felt like yet another late-season plot twist— a new narrative that could sustain several weeks of posts about perseverance and showing up. In real life, neighbors saw him buying alcohol as early as 7 a.m. before heading home to record podcasts with titles like: You Are Worthy of Unconditional Love. One evening in February 2023, Dave was at home with his kids, Heidi recalls him telling her. His birthday was coming up, and one of his sons asked him what he wanted. Keep it simple, Dave said. Draw me a picture. His son went online to find a photo of his dad to use as inspiration. But the search also turned up a critic’s YouTube video tearing his dad apart. “How do I tell them what a great dad you are?” he asked Dave.Dave got in touch with Heidi. “I don’t know what to do,” he texted her, according to messages she’s kept. “I hate this part of my life.” She said he could leave the spotlight—and let them win. Or he could continue to flood the internet with positive Dave Hollis content. There were even SEO experts, she noted, that he could hire to help drown out the negativity. Dave’s response: “I am in on option 2.” Followers in early February didn’t see anything amiss. Dave posted a photo of his daughter fishing, and uploaded a podcast asking, Does Technology Make Me Happy? THE SALVE of a new plan didn’t last long. A week later, friends say he got so drunk he needed a ride home. Before Dave headed inside, he committed to attending an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting and church the next morning, friends said. Dave was alone at home, Heidi says, when he called her. She could tell something was wrong—his breathing was heavy, and he said he was ready to get help. When he didn’t show up for the AA meeting a family friend went to check on him. He was found dead in bed. At the funeral, details about what happened were hazy to even some of Dave’s closest friends. They knew he had recently gone to the hospital with high blood pressure—commentators speculated that he’d had a heart attack. At a memorial service held in February 2023, a list of speakers represented the many chapters of Dave’s life. There were friends who knew him from schoolyard soccer like Wehan; colleagues from Disney; fellow self-help influencers. Rachel was there but didn’t speak. (“I have no words and my heart is too broken to find them,” she wrote on Instagram. “Please wrap the kids up in prayers.”) Lynn McKay, Dave’s neighbor, listened as several speakers provided the Instagram-ready version of events, incomplete eulogies that mentioned only Dave’s humor, compassion and charity. She wanted to scream. Then Dave’s mother spoke and acknowledged that her son, like so many, was complicated. He’d struggled. Lynn felt a wave of relief. Someone had finally broken through the filter. An autopsy report later ruled Dave’s death as accidental. He was found with toxic levels of cocaine, ethanol and fentanyl in his system, a combination that interacted lethally with an “underlying natural disease of the heart.” But Lynn says she believes those drugs were treatments Dave sought for a different problem. She blames viral fame for his death and the platforms that power it. “They’re all drugs.” Months later, Wehan described Dave’s drug use as the “locked door” that influencers never open to their followers. At the memorial service, Wehan tried to piece together his own memories with snapshots from strangers who knew Dave from his online life, fragments he struggled to put into a fuller picture. Most troubling of all was how Dave, the man who’d surrounded himself with friends since childhood, who had nearly half a million followers at his command, had died alone. Dave was found, he learned, with his phone on his chest. submitted by /u/piscesk to r/hollisUncensored [link] [comments]

I am not the original poster, which is u/regretfortwo. This is a repost sub. The OOP has not been active in 3 years. This tale comes from r/JustNoMIL (and some sister subs at the end), a sub that compiles stories of mothers-in-law that are so horrible to deal with you need to Just...No. Common acronyms from r/JustNoMIL Trigger warning: Eating disorders Mood spoiler: Lots of righteous vengeance and skillful handling of MIL. Frustrating and disappointing ending This saga originally began with the OOP sharing about her MIL asking to move in, and the sub asked for background. OOP then posted a 9-part story about how awful planning a wedding/honeymoon was with her MIL's interference, along with some other unrelated stories. This post will only be about the move-in and final resolution(ish) due to size (it's massive). In a separate (mod-approved) post, I'll compile the wedding and aftermath and the unrelated stories, which include when the r/JustNoMIL sub came up with the "Cruise Control" nickname. Help! My husband wants to let his mom move in! 25 Mar 2018 One of my IRL friends told me about this sub so I started reading posts a while ago. I haven't posted until now because I was just using this sub to live vicariously through people who succeeded in getting their MIL out of their lives. Now I actually need advice, so here I am. First some background on MIL and why she already annoys me: My husband and I have been together for five years, married for one. His parents are divorced and he is an only child. MIL never lets him forget that he's "all she has." FIL remarried to a nice lady who has two adult daughters that we get along with. I actually met my husband through one of them. MIL wants to make plans with us constantly. She tries to keep a full social calendar and gets butthurt if we have previous plans or just want to have a quiet night in. When we were younger she would pay for us all to do something we couldn't afford to do as students and take us out to lunch afterwards. It seemed like she was a nice and generous mom. I regret this now. My husband is good about telling her no, but we pay for it the next time we see her. She mopes and asks us how our quiet night in was in a sad voice. She also gets upset if we hang out with DH's father or stepsisters. We didn't know better when we were younger and both did the whole "it's easier to lie" thing. Now we've set a precedent of being way too careful around her feelings and letting her butt in to our plans. She is over at our house about four times a week. Usually she stops by to "drop something off" and it's always a bullshit reason. She's really lonely and she needs real friends. Her lease will end soon at her apt and she plans to live on various cruise ships all summer before she signs a new lease. The plan seems sketchy to me. Every time she explains it she has a weird reason why she can't go on a cruise right away or stay in an AirBNB. She's taking the first cruise in May and then she'll come back in September to start a new job. The lease ends in TWO WEEKS and she just bothered to ask if she can stay with us a week ago. She's acting like this is an emergency situation and she might become homeless and die of the cold. It might be paranoid, but I'm afraid that she'll move in and the cruise plans will magically fall apart. We'd have to evict her and she'd drag out the process. I don't know what to do. My husband says "it's just until May" but I just don't trust her. I have a bad feeling about this. Every time we ask her about the cruise stuff she acts shifty and tries to change the subject. My husband doesn't see it but I do. If I was her I'd leave for the cruises now when they're probably less crowded, still do four months, come back in August instead of September to be able to get stuff in order for her new apartment and new job. Am I crazy? That's just makes more sense, right? The plan she has now will give her three days to get her things together before her new job starts. Maybe I'm missing crucial details. I don't know. Update to "help! My husband wants to let MIL move in with us!" 30 Mar 2018 My MIL is the one who claimed she was going to live on cruise ships all summer. The cruise story was fishy, so I started to poke her story with a stick. First I came up with a "brilliant idea" when she came over this afternoon. She came by to drop off a casserole dish that she "thought was ours" (she didn't really, it was an excuse.) Like usual, she came to "drop something off" but immediately sat down in my living room. I pulled out my laptop and asked her to tell us which cruises she is going on so that DH and I can think of joining her for a week! Normal MIL would be so excited and jump at the opportunity. She acted awkward and said that she doesn't know which cruise she will be on yet. I acted surprised and said that she probably won't be able to go now, because it's too late to make such a complicated and specific booking. She said that it's no trouble and I shouldn't worry about it. She is certainly hiding something. My other thought is that it might be something she is embarrassed by. Maybe she'll be taking a singles cruise and doesn't want us to know? I told DH that she can't move in or I will go bonkers. He said he doesn't want to deal with her crying and whining when we tell her. I volunteered to do it (because I don't trust him to give her a firm no!) and I also said "what would be worse, hearing her cry now, or having her cry later when we have to make her leave? If we have to make her go we won't be able to escape the crying. She'll be in our house. If you say no now, at least you can hang up the phone!" This is the argument that won him over. I can't believe my husband, a grown man, is so afraid of having to hear someone cry and whine. Easter dinner was a disaster (told MIL she can't live with us) 03 Apr 2018 I tried posting this earlier, but Reddit ate it :'( it's long, sorry! I hate holidays with MIL. She gets so upset if there are any other people there because she needs undivided attention from DH and I. We gave her Easter because it's a holiday that IDGAF about. I made a comically tiny roast for the THREE of us, and it was just as awkward as you would imagine. Most of it was fine. Not great, but fine. Once dessert started, it became un fracaso grande. MIL said "This evening has been so nice with the three of us. Just think, we could be doing this every night soon!" She winked when she said this, which nearly triggered my gag reflex. DH and I had mutually agreed to wait until after the holiday to say anything to MIL, and we were dumb and didn't have a plan for what to do if she brought it up first. I looked sideways at him to see if we could silently agree on something. All he could communicate to me with his facial expression was "I'm panicking! Mayday, mayday!" I just decided I may as well go for it. "Actually MIL, since you brought it up... we have discussed it together a lot and we decided that we can't host you. We will help you find a place to stay and help you with moving, but that's all the help we can offer." She looked like I slapped her, and asked me why with tears in her eyes. I said that we had a bad experience with my family staying for only two weeks, and that 6 or more weeks was not a burden on my marriage that I was willing to undertake. I love and value my husband too much. She started crying in earnest, mascara running down her face, the whole nine yards. She was soooo sad we didn't care about her awful situation and in between sobs acted very upset and blindsided that I could EVER think that SHE would be a burden on my marriage! (Notice that she directed it all at me, not DH. He was being silent as a mouse, damn him.) I couldn't help but feel angry at this. She was the entire reason that we eloped instead of having an actual wedding, and she crashed our honeymoon. She has been a burden from the beginning. By god, she actually interrupted us having sex a few days ago and it wasn't the first time! We both sat and watched her son and talk about how we have no regard for her feeeeelings. I shouldn't have said it, but I said "to be honest MIL, you're already a burden on my marriage." At this moment she started scream-crying. There is no other way to describe it. She was clutching her abdomen and just screaming directly into the table, followed by three heaving sobs, another long scream, three or four more heavy sobs. It was like she was trying to make as much noise as she possibly could. It backfired. Instead of making us guilty, we looked at her like she's a crazy person. This is progress coming from DH. I said "MIL, you seem to be determined to shut this conversation down by crying, as usual. It's hard to take your tears seriously when you use them to manipulate us so often." She snapped out of it immediately. It was so fast, I got whiplash. She looked at me and said "I will go and cry at home then, where at least I won't have anyone telling me that I'm a bad person for being upset!" And she left. That was it. All DH and I could talk about when she left was her immediate 180 sobbing like someone had died to immediately quieting down when I said that tears weren't working. It was creepy. Soooo creepy. She sent a text an hour later to DH. It was basically asking him if he agreed with me (said in a way that implied that he couldn't possibly agree) and if not, what the hell he was going to do about it. Like she could snap her fingers and make him override his wife for her. He and I talked about it, and he ended up writing this response to her and sending it after I agreed it was a good one: "The decision was mutual. We can still help you find a new place and move your things." She texted back "don't bother." The next morning I got this text from her: "I've had some time to think about the things you said last night, and you're right. The ten minutes I see you every week must be a terrible burden. Poor you. You won't have to put up with it anymore. I won't miss having to choke down your disgusting food. Do us all a favor and stop making that lemon cheesecake, everyone hates it." We had the lemon cheesecake for Easter dinner the night before. It's DH's favorite and he always opts for it instead of birthday cake, which she is salty about because she used to bake his cake for him every year. People request it from me all the time. She's full of shite. Not that I need to defend myself to you all, but I'm a good cook. She is just a picky eater. She hates most spices, onions, all peppers, most beans, any meat with fat that she can see, tomatoes unless they're puréed, meat with bones, all seafood, mushrooms, any potatoes other than red potatoes, and most vegetables. It's hard to serve her food and I do my best, but seriously? This woman "hates" garlic bread. Who hates garlic bread??? That's the last we've heard from her. DH and I are going to see a couple's counselor because I insisted. Overall he has started to see my side, especially after that little show she put on for us on Sunday. He knows she's a total fucknut, but he still thinks he has obligations to her. I'm trying to show him that he doesn't, but it's a process. EDIT: I'm adding a comment here on how I make the cheesecake because the comment is buried! https://www.reddit.com/r/JUSTNOMIL/comments/89jlk6/comment/dwrj7id?st=JFLE6QYO&sh=2ce1a19a Update on MIL who claims she will live on cruise ships for 4 months 13 Apr 2018 I really need a name for her that isn't "MIL who claims she will live on cruise ships for 4 months." I like Choko Ono because she screams like Yoko, claims she has to choke down my food, and is highly disruptive to any group dynamic. I also love some of the ones people came up with that reference her hatred of garlic bread. Lots of funny vampire names were suggested. She went 9 whole days without texting us! Can you believe it? She finally texted DH the following: "This is ridiculous. I think I raised you better than this." She does this a lot. She sends a cryptic text that shows she's upset and doesn't say why. She wants people to ask her questions so that she can unload all of her feelings onto them. She won't do it unless you put up some pretense by asking her the questions she is fishing for. I find this so exhausting and I'm trying to get DH to recognize this pattern. He doesn't see it because he isn't fluent in passive aggressive. Somehow. Despite being raised by her. He didn't take the bait! We discussed it and agreed that her text wasn't an effort to reach out like an adult. It came across as pissy and rude, and I'm sure that she is angling for an apology. Not going to happen. Okay, so that's all that has happened with her. Now I need some personal advice: We have an appointment with a couples counselor. It's next Tuesday. How do I prepare for this? Do I write down some of my thoughts and questions to bring, do I just show up? On the one hand I feel like I won't be able to use my time effectively if I don't have any preparation. On the other hand I think that there is some value to letting the process be more organic. I don't know. I find myself making lists in my head, rehearsing things I want to say, and finding gentler ways to say them. I just want so badly for something to click with DH. He's been having a lot of "aha" moments lately. It seems like some absence from his mother has given him time to actually think and process. I hope this continues. I sense a breakthrough on the horizon. I guess my question is, how do DH and I get the most out of therapy? Is there something we should know? Cruise Control has broken her silence 22 Apr 2018 She finally broke. Her silent treatment never lasts very long. Three weeks is actually pretty impressive coming from her. She texted "I call a truce." Like we're at war? DH and I have been focusing on each other and couple's counseling, not planning a surprise attack. She wants to meet and she has a few odd requests (some of which will NOT fly!) I don't have the text, it's on DH's phone and I don't want to be a snoop so I'll ask him if he can forward it to me later. The one request that really stands out is that she wants to meet with us separately, because she doesn't want to be "outnumbered." She wants us to meet in a neutral location and one of us waits in the car while the other gets to be subjected to her tears. Nice try Cruise Control, but we happen to know what triangulation is. She specifically asked that we don't meet anywhere that has food. She doesn't want to meet in a restaurant or a coffee house. That's fine, because it's impossible to find a restaurant that she can stomach with her long list of dietary dislikes. DH hasn't responded, but he has read receipts turned on so she knows we got it. We're going to think it over and talk about it in counseling, which will be on Tuesday. She's waited three weeks, she can wait a little longer. The one thing we immediately agreed on is that we're not doing the bullshit separate meetings thing. We're a couple, and we'll be treated as such. The end. Edit: Is it weird that I kind of feel like I don't have anything to say to her? I just have no desire to meet. She's done so much and been such a pain, but it seems like nothing we say will ever get through to her. I just feel like meeting gives her what she wants (interaction) and we'll walk away from the meeting angry or disappointed. Cruise Control is on a hunger strike, please help??? (TW: ED) 26 Apr 2018 This isn't something that she's ever done before. First we got a message from a friend asking us if she's okay because he saw her at the store and she looked deathly ill. That was a week ago. We said she's probably depressed and quickly explained that she wanted to move in. We didn't think much of it. Cruise Control usually texts or calls, so it was strange to us that she was trying to FaceTime with DH. She called on FaceTime several times and he didn't pick up. Finally she just recorded a video of herself and texted it to him. She has lost a considerable amount of weight, her eyes look sunken. She really looks bad. In the video she tells DH that she hasn't been able to make herself eat because she's so sad that he won't talk to her. It's been almost a month and she's lost a LOT of weight. She looks like a corpse. Do we treat this problem as an eating disorder and try to get her treatment for anorexia, or do we view this as a really insane manipulation tactic and refuse to give in? She's literally killing herself. She's obviously doing this at least partly to get our attention, otherwise she wouldn't have tried to have face-to-face meetings and video calls with us. I am trying to find out if we can have her involuntarily committed to a facility that treats eating disorders, but usually it's parents sending their kids there, not the other way around. It's also too late in the day to make phone calls, so that will have to wait until tomorrow. We've reached out to our couple's counselor, but this is really outside of his purview. Edited to add: We are definitely calling APS, asking the police for a welfare check, and looking into our options for having her committed. Can I ask a favor? Many of you have posted some amazingly helpful quotes and excerpts from books that have helped you, and I'm compiling them to give to DH. He is really struggling with believing that keeping a distance is the best thing we can do for her. Anything you can think of that would reassure him (and me, if I'm being honest) that the choice we're making is the right one is really appreciated. I can't thank you all enough for the literature recommendations you've given us, they're helping us so much. Cruise Control is surprisingly good at fooling people. 01 May 2018 I've made calls. I've begged and pleaded. They've seen the video she sent as well as photos comparing her weight one month ago to her weight now. She has them convinced that I am a spiteful daughter in law who has it out for her. She even has them convinced that I'm jealous of her (dangerous!! terrifying!!) weight loss. So we're wiping our hands of her. Either she's in danger, or she's fine and it's just a diet. You can't have it both ways Cruise Control. The narrative right now is that she's fine, so as far as we're concerned she's fine. Therapy is good. We've gotten some great advice on how to handle the situation. DH is still worried sick, because the situation blows. He's let go of believing that the solution is in his hands though. He feels strongly that this is all on her. That's all I can ask for right now, that he won't beat himself up. She texted me about how I'm bitch after she received a welfare check. As always, I am 100% to blame and DH must not know that I'm doing these things to her. 🙄 DH has gotten some texts. They're all unrelated to her hunger strike. She's trying to act like things are normal. She asked him to come to her apartment and do something to fix her computer (an old favorite bullshit invented errand of hers.) Well, now we know she's still in her apartment. I guess her landlord "changed his mind" about kicking her out. So, that's that. She isn't being cared for by any professionals, she hasn't been sectioned. I wonder how bad she really is because she is still going to work, according to her texts. Maybe she tried to look especially bad in the video she sent us. For all we know she has faked the whole thing. We haven't seen her in person. Until she deteriorates even more, there's not much we can do. Cruise Control has been hospitalized for dehydration 04 May 2018 [Editor's note: moved Update to bottom of this post] DH got the call from the hospital and then he called me. Cruise Control went to work this morning and then collapsed. She was taken to the hospital and she's being given fluids because she was so dehydrated. That's all we know. The call wasn't from Cruise Control and it didn't come from her cell phone. The call was through work, and the call was forwarded to his desk. Assumedly, Cruise Control told a nurse DH's name and workplace and asked them to notify him. She knows we ignore calls from her number. We're debating how to proceed. We're both still at work. DH thinks it would be good to give her healthcare providers some info (such as the video) but I told him that we don't know if she's really starving herself, we just know what she claims. If she's starving herself then doctors and nurses will be able to tell. Surely that would be one of the first things they'd notice? I want to show her that we will not magically reappear the moment her ass hits a hospital bed. I keep telling him that I'm worried that she will learn that putting herself in the hospital is the best way to get our attention. If she does this over and over, she will destroy her kidneys. Part of me wants to just call the hospital myself and then text DH that I've already handled it, but I'm trying to let him think his way through this stuff and coming to a good solution himself. The therapist warned me against infantilizing him because I've expressed frustration with him in a way that shows I don't think he's capable of making the smart choice. Since his mom already treats him like a child, I need to show him that I know and believe he is a capable adult. This will be my exercise in showing him I believe in him. I told him my thoughts and concerns. Now he needs to choose. UPDATE: DH took his lunch break early to drive to the hospital. He called ahead and asked to talk to her docs in private. He's going to explain that our therapist has advised us not to see her in the hospital (we went over this scenario when we learned about the hunger strike) and he's going to show them the video and let them know that APS has already investigated. As long as he manages to do this without Cruise Control getting a visit from him, I'm happy. We're attending therapy with Cruise Control. What should we be prepared for? 01 Jun 2018 Cruise Control is trying, in her way. She really has followed all of the rules we gave her. We told her that we would think about attending therapy with her if she asked. She can't help but act weepy when we interact with her, but she stops short of using guilt trips because she knows it'll result in time-out. She hasn't been allowed to set foot in our house and we've only seen her in person once. We do a phone/FaceTime call once a week. DH verified with the therapist that Cruise Control isn't making this up and trying to force a surprise meeting. I was shocked, but DH was the one who thought of that! It didn't even cross my mind. It will be us, CC, and CC's therapist. This therapist won't have met us before this point. It seems worrisome to me that we will have to represent ourselves and our point of view as two people to a therapist that already knows Cruise Control. An hour just isn't enough to convey how bad things got. I'm sure Cruise Control didn't say the worst parts of her behavior, since she can't recognize them herself. "My son and his wife wouldn't let me crash on their couch for a few weeks and it made me so depressed I stopped eating" sounds better than "I tried to manipulate my son and his wife into letting me move in 'temporarily' when I had no intention of moving out, and when it didn't work I threw a fit and went on a hunger strike." This is really important to DH and I'm going. We talked it over with our own therapist and agreed that we aren't going to expect this meeting to show any progress. If hasn't been that long and Cruise Control is really deep in her reality. All we can do is share our side of the story with the therapist to give some context and hope that it benefits Cruise Control's progress. She's lied and changed her story to her doctors so we assume she's lying to her therapist too. We told her at the beginning that we expect her to be honest with her therapist and that if we find out she's been lying, she's on time-out for six months. The fact that she wants us to see her therapist despite that means that she either hopes we won't stick to it or she really is trying with the therapist. We'll see. I'm afraid to walk in and be lectured by a therapist who has been lied to and believes that DH and I are abusing poor little Cruise Control. We will have no issue putting her on time-out if that happens, but it will suck for DH. He's been a little more optimistic than I've been. We decided that we should come in prepared with at least one thing we would like to talk about, but we have three in case time allows. In order; the fact that she makes DH hide half of his family from her. The fact that she refused for a long time to let us have free time without her and crashed several dates and day trips. The fact that her reactions to things aren't proportional to how serious they are (scream-crying if we don't let her attend our date with us.) We think these will give the therapist insight and things to discuss in future appointments with her. A little extra story for you all: we decided that we're dine catering our actual home to Cruise Control's sensitivities. Remember how she acts like she's been betrayed if we even mention DH's awesome stepsisters and stepmom? We finally printed some pictures with them and added them to our picture wall. We had some upstairs in the hallway, but now they're prominently displayed in our living room. Went to therapy with Cruise Control and it was ehhh 16 Jun 2018 This was a while ago but I waited to post it because it took DH and I a while to absorb it and talk it over. Our own therapist that we've been seeing (who we really like!) gave us the advice that we should act businesslike and refuse to give hugs or make small talk. Not to be mean, but to make sure that therapy with Cruise Control doesn't become a way for her to sneak around LC and force interaction. We needed to set the tone for serious work to be done rather than rug sweeping. So of course we show up and Cruise Control fucking leaps at us. DH and I dodged her and DH said "Mom, this is not the time nor the place. We all need to take this seriously." She said "not even a hug?" and he replied "Not even a hug." Go DH! We had emailed the therapist beforehand but we also brought a hard copy of our list. Therapist asked us if we had anything to say before we got started. DH piped up and said "yes, I want to address what just happened outside of the office so that Cruise Control understands our reasoning." We spent a few minutes on that and Cruise Control said she understood. The therapist said that she was going to focus on the bullet points on our list that involve the three of us rather than those that are observational about Cruise Control's behavior (understandable) and she went straight for the moving-in debacle. I was glad because we still don't understand what was going on and we can't be 100% sure that she wanted to live with us permanently. When it was time for Cruise Control to start talking she was tearing up. She said that she hated her apartment and wanted to leave, it was too dark and it makes her depressed, and she had decided to live on cruise ships for half the summer. DH said "you told us you would be doing it for four months and now it's one month?" And she said that she had other plans for the middle of the summer that she couldn't tell us about because she felt that DH's feelings would be hurt. We had no idea what she was talking about. I can't think of a vacation she'd be able to go on that would hurt our feelings, other than crashing our own.... The therapist said that if feelings are going to be hurt, therapy is a good place to process that. She sighed and said okay, and then she tells us her "real plans" that I still think are sketchy as fuck. Now her story is "I felt that you would be lonely without me all summer so I wanted to stay with you for a while so you know I still care about you! I met a man online who lives in (vacation destination) and we were going to spend a month together. I was going to take a cruise before and after the trip to see this man so that I could say that I met him on the cruise by accident. I just didn't want you to feel abandoned." We were just like WTF? Why would we care if you're dating? We'd both be ecstatic! DH reminded her that he has a close relationship with his stepmom and dad. I said that we'd be happy to see her find someone to spend time with because she seems lonely. Cruise Control REFUSED to accept this. She believed we must be lying to her and that DH would have been distraught if she moved on from her divorce in the late Cretaceous era. Therapist kept saying to Cruise Control that we seemed pretty genuine. Now that we were on the subject, we spoke for a while about what a burden it is to be 100% of her social calendar and how we would love to see her find some friends or a hobby. DH said that he was worried about the new job and whether it was real and hoped she was going to be okay, because we can't take her in if her employment doesn't work out. When asked if the job is real, she just said "the job is there if I want it." She couldn't give us a yes or no. I am terrified that she's going to suddenly become desperate for a place to live and neeeed us to help her. The last thing we did was state our boundaries. We said she cannot live with us EVER and that's a hard boundary. We said we'd do therapy with her no more than twice a month and that we would stop if we suspected she was lying to the therapist or using therapy as a way to get her DH fix instead of working on herself. We also said we were unwilling to let visits get to the point they were ever again. We understood that "weaning her off" might be good for her but it would be very very bad for us. We also shared a list of things we'd like to see from her, like an apology, genuine attempts to find new people to socialize with, honesty, and for her to get used to the fact that DH's stepfamily is a huge part of our lives. We haven't agreed to go back and we haven't been asked. All we can hope for is that we gave the therapist some things to ask Cruise Control about. She needs a diagnosis like yesterday. We haven't been seeing her in person. We have a policy she doesn't know about, which is that she can call all she wants but we will only pick up twice a week. If she calls more than once in a day she's on a secret time-out. She hasn't tried to "drop by" because she knows that means time out for a long time. We've been seeing my family and DH's dad/stepfamily a lot more, which has been wonderful. My Just Yes mom is helping us see the light about Cruise Control 24 Jun 2018 My parents are pretty neat in general but my mom and I are especially close. She has this really cool ability to translate what you're trying to say when you can't find the words. This has been coming in SUPER HANDY because so much is just so, so wrong with Cruise Control. DH and I are a bit thrown by the weird therapy session where we're 90% sure she lied her ass off after being told over and over "a condition of your time-out parole is not fucking lying anymore." She seems so confident that it makes you question reality a bit. There are severe consequences for the lies, so why lie??? You could just say sorry??? We're TRYING TO WORK WITH YOU YA DUMB CANKLE! I am just flabbergasted... and a bit tired. We can't prove she's lying just yet and we haven't chosen how to proceed. We're talking it out with our therapist. Currently the thought is "let's cut her off for a year and let her sink or swim, and after a year hopefully she'll have found something to fulfill her needs and won't try to down us again." I like this idea. We have had ONE meeting with her since the therapy appointment. We met at a Starbucks for half an hour to talk about her therapy progress. We asked her to consider seeing a psychiatrist. She agreed (anything to appease us!) and that means nothing because she says what she thinks we want to hear. She reiterated that everything she said in therapy was true and we expressed that we are skeptical. She said that hurts her feelings but she understands. Every interaction we have with her is fake fake fake. We're at a standstill until we choose how to go forward. We visited my parents yesterday and vented about the lies, the stranglehold Cruise Control has had on our lives, and how we don't see a way forward because she's incapable of being genuine. DH was trying to explain how her manufactured drama used to feel so normal to him. Now that he's had a break from it he can see how ridiculous it is, but he still feels the training kick in and automatically thinks "how can I make this better?" until he realizes "wait, that's not my job." He was trying to explain how he knows she is really upset and feels like the world is ending, but from the outside looking in he has secondhand embarrassment from her behavior over inconsequential bullshit. My mom summed it up beautifully. She said "she gets frequent and sudden cases of 'the fee fees' doesn't she?" DH giggled at that way of putting it. Somehow hearing Cruise Control's behavior summed up as "poor widdle fee fees" rings truer than "she is probably experiencing separation anxiety" or "perhaps she is having a manic episode." Holy shit guys, it felt so good to not use therapy talk and be gracious and polite about how screwed up she is. We all sat around and shared Cruise Control stories. I think we're both starting to think that we've been taking Cruise Control too seriously. She is a ridiculous, silly person. We're going to start regarding her as such. She gets to be treated like an adult when she acts like one. My mom had a Cruise Control story that I hadn't even heard before. Back when we thought we might get to have a normal wedding (ha!) my mom was invited to go shopping for MOB/MOG dresses by Cruise Control. She went even though the wedding was barely in the fetal stage. It was a wedding zygote. No details other than yeah, we'd like to do this sometime. My mom humored her and they went shopping because she thought it might be good to get to know her better. Cruise Control spent the whole day finding ways to mention her own wedding to FIL a million years ago and cry. They'd look at pink dresses and it would be "oh, this color reminds me of the color of the sunset on the day I got married... I'm so sorry, I don't know why I'm tearing up... it's just so hard to think about!" My mom was nearly crying with laughter when she recounted that Cruise Control had picked up an ivory dress and said "ohhhh, this is just the color of the cake at my wedding... sob... sob... it was hiccup AH-HA-HA-HAAALMOOOND... sob sob sob!" She also kind of told us, in her very sweet but holds-no-bars way, that as a mother she would be appalled at herself if she did any of the things that Cruise Control does, that she is full of shit, and that we can call her anytime she is causing trouble and she'll take care of her. She said "DH, if you need to pick up the phone and ask a mother's opinion if she's over the line, you can always do that. The answer in that case is probably yes, but call anyway. We love to hear from you." [Edit: this is continued in the comments. It's not over yet! There is a link below] Once again, I am not OP, this is a repost sub Continued in comments submitted by /u/Sarai_Seneschal to r/BestofRedditorUpdates [link] [comments]

Edit: Thank you for all the awards I very much appreciate them. I also added a quote from a diet I met and thought it would be cool to add. Edit 2: I removed the intro about me as since its been a while for this being up and the original guide isn't pinned anymore it will save a lot of extra reading/skipping text and again thank you for all the awards given I do very much appreciate them DISCLAIMER: At the end of the day I am just a bloke on the internet, I have my bias and opinions, my knowledge isn't perfect nor is my ability to write it down, I am not a dietician, I can not tell you what foods to eat, I can advise on calorie intake and macro intake but that's it. If you want a food plan then I advise seeing a dietician that is registered with a governing body as a lot of nutritionists claim to be dieticians and aren't. Also if you have any doubts at all about your health, have any preexisting medical conditions or injuries then you need to go see a doctor for the OK first. Also any exercises I put on here are suggestions and I can not be there to check your form. If you are sure about form on any exercise here, research it or film it to see where you are going wrong. There are a lot sub reddits here that you can submit videos to check form and get friendly advice. ​ -------------------- The general guide you need to start your weight loss journey that answers most questions people put on here: Attempt 2! -------------------- ​ KEY NOTES if you don't wanna read it all. -------------------- ​ It’s all about having a healthy calorie deficit applicable to your activity if you want to lose weight. SCALES ARE NOT THE END ALL AND BE ALL OF WEIGHT LOSS! Work out your TDEE for your calories and be realistic about your activity. Less than 10km distance walked/traveled/moved around each day is a sedentary lifestyle. Keep that in mind when saying how much you workout if you do. SCALES ARE NOT THE END ALL AND BE ALL OF WEIGHT LOSS! The times of day/night you eat doesn’t matter. SCALES ARE NOT THE END ALL AND BE ALL OF WEIGHT LOSS! Taking body measurements and a photo journal is a must. Have one photo in just underwear and one in with an outfit on. Sometimes your critical eye will not see what actually changed where the outfit will. SCALES ARE NOT THE END ALL AND BE ALL OF WEIGHT LOSS! You don't have to exercise to lose weight but it helps a hell of a lot. SCALES ARE NOT THE END ALL AND BE ALL OF WEIGHT LOSS! Just move! Whatever exercise that you will do regularly is good exercise. But be aware doing yoga everyday won't burn the same as a CrossFit class. SCALES ARE NOT THE END ALL AND BE ALL OF WEIGHT LOSS! This process takes a long time and if you are not consistent in you efforts then don't expect a change. SCALES ARE NOT THE END ALL AND BE ALL OF WEIGHT LOSS! They measure you gravity to the ground. That's it. There are other factors of changing body composition that are far more important and a end goal weight isn't a bad thing but shouldn't be gospel to how well you have done so far. ​ Now to the long winded stuff! -------------------- CALORIES -------------------- To lose weight it is a very simple principle of energy expenditure. You must expend more than you consume and that's it, a simple calorie deficit. Do that correctly and you will lose weight. Even if you suffer with something like PCOS it will work. Sometimes I noticed with clients is that it worked but was slower but it wasn't an excuse for it not to work. ​ For an adult I recommend 250-500 calorie deficit of your maintenance calories. for 12-16 year olds I recommend no more than 150-200 calories as they are still growing so a small deficit is better for them and increasing a kids physical activity can a lot of the time be all that's needed for children with no deficit added at all. A slow weight loss is usually a sign of good weight loss where good habits are being ingrained into your life and you have a healthy calorie deficit so for the average person going over 500 calorie deficit is pretty pointless and usually not sustainable with the exception of a doctor's recommendation or you are a bodybuilder. Now if you are morbidly obese you may likely need to do a bigger deficit than 500 calories of what you normally eat but I would advise you to calculate your calories for maintenance then compare it to the calories to what you have been eating so far and bring it down to maintenance calories first for 2-4 weeks as you adapt to a healthier level of calories before adding a deficit as well. Typically most people I helped were eating to excess of 2000 calories plus of what they should've been eating just to maintain their current weight. ​ -------------------- Calculating Calories -------------------- https://tdeecalculator.net is my recommended calculator for this. Its not perfect but as calculators go it does the job reliably enough to be the one I recommend. Your Total Daily Energy Expenditure (TDEE) is an estimation of how many calories you burn per day with exercise is taken into account. It is calculated by first figuring out your Basal Metabolic Rate (BMR which is basically the calories your body requires to function healthily), then multiplying that value by an activity multiplier. Since your BMR represents how many calories your body burns when at rest, it is necessary to adjust the numbers upwards to account for the calories you burn during the day. This is true even for those with a sedentary lifestyle. ​ Don’t freak out that they are higher than what you expect, remember slow steady weight loss is best. ​ When choosing your activity levels, my personal belief (and how I was taught) is that if you don't travel 10km a day (i.e. you have covered 10km with your feet walking in some format that isn't exercise) then your general activity is sedentary. So if you don't cover that distance drop your activity by one level as you may workout 6 times a week (heavy exercise) but if you sit on your butt all day in an office job then a moderate exercise choice is probably wiser. ​ With any calculation the more info you put in it, the more accurate it will be. So with that in mind if you are able to put your body fat percentage in, the calorie suggestion will be more accurate for you. For preferred methods of measuring body fat, I like the 9 point caliper test but you do need someone that knows how to do it or it will not be very accurate and even then if they do know how to it properly there is a +/-3% variable even still. I do not recommend bio-electrical impedance as it can vary widely depending on your body shape (think pear shaped people) and your hydration. I take my Fitbit aria with a massive pinch of salt and wait every 4 weeks when I can see my mate that knows how to do the 9 point test. I wouldn't worry too much on figuring your body fat percentage out though as how your general body composition is as you go along is more important and whether it is changing for the better. For kids (12-16yrs) don't worry about measuring it at all unless a doctor has requested to be aware of it specifically. ​ If you use a calculator to workout your TDEE then do not follow your fitness tracker. TDEE takes your daily life and exercise you do into equation so you don't have add "exercise calories" to your allowance as that has been done already, so keep to your TDEE not your trackers. ​ Also be aware that as you lose weight you will need to re-check your TDEE. If you lose 2-3kg that can be enough to need to re-work your TDEE so do be aware of that if your weight loss slows or plateaus. ​ -------------------- How to track what you eat? -------------------- These days the main two apps/websites are MyFitnessPal & Loseit. Both are good and regularly corrected and updated. I personally use MyFitnessspal myself. It's quite simple log in what you eat (preferably at the time of eating so you remember it properly or when you food prep it) and I mean everything including that biscuit one of your work colleges offered you in passing. ​ Also be aware of logging liquid calories as well. If you drink a lot of smoothies, cordial, fruit juices, soda or coffee. Milk and sugar are still calories (especially if you like lattes) so make sure these logged in as well as so many times you "eat well" but all those liquids are ruining your progress. I have genuinely had past clients change nothing to their food apart from drop all drinks apart from water and lose 2-4 kg in a month so please look at everything that goes in you. ​ In conjunction of using one of the apps you will need a good set of scales (preferably digital in my opinion) as if you don't accurately put in what you eat, then there is a high chance of you over eating and not being in a proper deficit. If you don't accurately log what you eat then you can't ever say you are being accurate with your diet. Studies have shown time and time again we as people underestimate what we eat greatly. ​ I would not trust portion sizes of packaging that well as 99.9% of the time they don't match what has been put in the packet for example a plain wrap could say 62g a wrap (187 calories) on the packaging but end up being a 72g serving so be 224 calories. Not a lot of difference (35 calories) but it can build up over multiple meals easily. 3 meals over a day x 35 =105 calories and that can be the difference of real changes especially of your planned deficit is only 250 calories. ​ There are some communities that say that tracking food causes eating disorders but the realistic truth is that if you don't keep track of what you eat in some way with reasonable accuracy, the chances are you will overeat and not lose weight. That is not the fault of diet culture or anything like that, it is your responsibility. ​ Once you have a pretty sensible diet that is working for you and gotten used to it and know it inside and out then you can start to eyeball your portions as no one wants to be stuck to a scale each time they cook forever but I recommend doing this with high volume low calorie foods or if you have an object that you use and will know within a reasonable amount of accuracy it will be that amount. I have a tiny measuring jug that i can do portions of rice or pasta and I know what level is going to be right +/- 5g uncooked but I also admittedly allow for that inaccuracy in my diet and have an assumption any eyeballing is always the overestimate to cover myself and stop any disappointments. ​ -------------------- Diet -------------------- ​ I can't iterate enough that the one that you can sustain is the best diet! ​ It honestly doesn't matter if you follow slimmers world, keto, intermittent fasting (I kinda do this one) or anything thing else as like I said before if you are in a deficit you will lose weight. A healthy balanced diet is preferable but not wholly necessary when it comes to losing weight but again recommended. Personally I think the best thing for your food is once you have your calories worked out is to use a macro break. That’s the breakdown of how much protein, fats and carbs you eat (apps can track that for you). If adding this seems overly complicated and feel too much then don't bother with it but I do think it is a good idea to do especially if trying to some form of exercise to 'tone' your physique. I would go for a 40% Protein, 40% Fats and 20% Carbs as a break. Protein and fats help you feel fuller for longer and generally more satisfied when eaten. Protein also helps keep your muscle mass while losing weight (that is a bit bro science but also kinda true) especially if exercising regularly. I for the most part make sure I eat my quota of protein and don’t worry too much about the break of fats and carbs as long as I hit my calorie goal. Admittedly though I always feel the most satisfied when I keep to the macro break stated. I used to fast 19-20 hours a day and re-feed over 5-4 hours but with my girlfriend and her little one that doesn't really work well and though quite often I don't eat what they eat (they're vegetarian and I was told to never be one but that's another story) I like to be able to sit, eat and chat with them at the dinner table instead of sit there like a pleb or away on the sofa. so typically now I'll have a small lunch, biggish evening meal and snack a little while after. It a rough version of intermittent fasting but it works for me. A dietitian I met had a cool chat with me and he said to add this to my guide to clear some things up and “I could tell you to eat this or that and don’t eat this or that which, is kinda my job to do. But at the end of the day all I do is make a food plan that puts them on a calorie plan to lose weight, maintain weight or gain weight depending on what you medically need (deals with a lot of NHS work). In a perfect world I’d tell you to never eat bacon as it’s pretty bad for you but it’s f**king delicious and so I know you’re gonna eat it too like me but if you eat 2 slices of it a week, it won’t kill you. A little of everything is fine and excess of anything is bad. Stop over complicating it, eat meat, veggies, fruit, nuts, fat, carbs, protein and junk. Just not a lot of one thing. Oh and stay hydrated, so many times people moan about being hungry all the dam time and they’re just dehydrated.” ​ -------------------- I don’t know what to eat for my calorie bracket and/or macro -------------------- ​ https://www.eatthismuch.com – for recipe help. Its fairly good and you can choose the amount of meals you want as well as snacks and it will come up with ideas as well. It even lets you get rid of foods you don't like mushrooms and choose diet plans like keto etc to help you as much as possible and as far as I'm aware still free. ​ Again I am not a dietician so I cannot say to you what to eat so please ask a government body registered dietician for something like that. Otherwise the link above has pretty good reviews with my peers and old clients. ​ -------------------- SCALES AND WEIGHT LOSS MEASUREMENT -------------------- ​ SCALES ARE NOT THE END ALL AND BE ALL OF WEIGHT LOSS! ​ They really aren't, they are a good guide to help show a downward trend but do not dictate your successes or failures of you and how well you are doing. Scales are the equipment that measures your relation to the earth's gravity that forever make us cry ourselves to sleep. Use them with a pinch of salt please I beg you. Don’t aim to lose a certain amount each week. Just aim to lose and accept it’s not a temporary measure it’s a lifestyle change and going to take a long time. Accept that, plan for the long term and screw beach body ready crap. ​ Along with scales I recommend taking a photo in just your underwear and also a photo in one particular outfit as well as taking body measurements with a tape measure. This youtube is old and cheesy but explains how to use a tape measure pretty well but ignore the calipers section as that's pretty naff. ​ With how regular you take measurements, I would recommend going on the scales and taking a photo of yourself in your underwear once a week at the same time of day and the same day each week as if you stand on the scales repeatedly throughout day you will find your weight fluctuates so much in 24 hours. ​ As for taking measurements with a tape measure and photo with your selected outfit I would recommend taking them every 2-4 weeks but try to always keep the intervals the same for consistency. Ladies your natural cycle can affect your weight greatly (you probably already know this) so try not to forget it if the scales mess you around a bit. https://www.reddit.com/r/WeightLossAdvice/comments/cm8hlt/one_for_the_ladies_who_i_see_posting_about_lack/ Explains this better than a male like me so I will leave the ladies to read up on another trainer I respect. ​ -------------------- SPEED OF WEIGHT LOSS -------------------- It is unfortunate but the truth is weight loss is not fast at the best of times and plateaus are often so strap in for a long haul. Some weeks will be 1kg loss, some 0.5kg and sometimes even a 100g (which will barely register on most scales) but you have to remember it is still a downward trend no matter how small. If things are plateauing don't freak out, breathe and look at what you have been doing during the plateau. Look at your past measurements and photos and see how you have changed (especially from the beginning). Look at how well you have been eating or how accurately you have been tracking what you have been eating as a common issue is your eyeballing skills have been off on regular foods you have been eating. Has your physical activity dropped as of late? Life and work can get in the way sometimes and you need to re-evaluate your TDEE temporally while your activity is lower. Or the one good cause for a plateau is that since you have lost weight and your TDEE has dropped because of this. This can be the most common reason as when you lose weight (2-3kg) your TDEE will drop and it's normal. Weight loss is a fluid thing and so are your calories, be aware and adapt as necessary. ​ -------------------- Exercise -------------------- To be honest do what exercise you enjoy and will do regularly. This is the most important thing about exercise as if you don't enjoy it 90% of the time, then you won't keep it up. It's as simple as that. Just be aware that yoga won't burn as much as a crossfit class. ​ Now if you are stuck for ideas of what to do, here are some simple circuits you can do that don't require a lot of space. I would advise making sure you are warmed up before you do any exercise. I recommend doing this followed by this one as they are quick, easy and get the job done (I recommend darebee for workout ideas in general if you're ever stuck for what to do). The following 4 workouts are pretty simple and follow the same format: Try to do 10 circuits with 1-2 mins rest between circuits. It doesn't matter if you can only do a couple of circuits at the start just do what you can do. ​ Workout 1 Exercise REPS Squat 15 Reverse Lunge 16 Press Up 15 Tricep Dip (off a chair or similar stable object) 15 Jump Squats 15 Plank Hold 60 secs ​ Workout 2 Exercise REPS Walking Lunge 16 Jump Squats 15 Step Ups 16 Press Up 15 Sprint on the spot 30 secs Ab Crunch 15 ​ Workout 3 Exercise REPS Burpee (try to include a press up) 10 Plank 60 secs Press Up 10 Squat 15 Bicycle Crunch 16 Jump Lunge 16 ​ Workout 4 - This one is a bit harder than the rest but see it as a challenge Exercise REPS Burpee 15 Press Up 15 Jump Squat 15 Tricep Dip (off a chair or similar stable object) 15 Walking Lunges 16 Sprint on the spot 30 secs ​ With any exercise please look each up properly and make sure you know how to do it properly. Don't be afraid to make an exercise easier (or harder) if need be. ​ After any workout you should make sure you cool down and stretch properly this should be enough to cover most muscle groups. ​ -------------------- Supplements? -------------------- Long story short, you don't need them. Some protein powder to help you get the protein quota and a good multi vit but keep it to that. ​ Fat burners, fat metabolizors, fat removers are all crap. If it says it will help you burn fat, chances are it will be a waste of your money and you will be better off spending it elsewhere. ​ When it comes to supplements I don't have much more to say on it to be honest. I don't think there is a need to go much more into them than that. Unless you are training for something specific don't bother to look into them unless you have a trainer that you use personally to advise you otherwise or ask some of the nutrition or supplement reddits here for more info. ​ ​ Ouff well that is a lot of text and I hope it's better than my old one and it explains things a bit more clearly and the grammar and spelling wasn't awful (probably is but my dyslexia and English don't mix lol). ​ Thank you very much if you could manage to drag yourself this far with my terrible writing skills and I hope it helps you submitted by /u/bearsandbarbells to r/WeightLossAdvice [link] [comments]

This is going to be a long post. I’ve been dreaming of making my “goal completed” post for over 2 and a half years. It’s really hard to summarize 2 and a half years into one small post. I have so much to say! I’ve included a TL;DR at the end for those who don’t feel like reading a novel and progress pictures right now because I know that’s what most people actually click for, lol. (Removed the link to my progress pics, sorry y’all) (NSFW as I’m in a sports bra and underwear) I remember taking my “before” photo and sitting on my bed afterwards and feeling awful. My gut was huge. I am so glad I took those pictures though and I cannot recommend taking progress pictures enough. They helped me see a major difference when I couldn’t notice a difference in the mirror. Even while I was taking my “after” photos I was thinking to myself “hmm these aren’t turning out so great” and then i compared them to my “before” pictures and holy hell. Big difference. Background I was not overweight as a child. I was actually really active and skinny. I had played soccer since I was 6 years old & for some years I also did volleyball and basketball. I enjoyed being outside riding my bike and being with my friends. When I was around 15 I quit soccer and started spending way more time on the computer. I had always been on the internet a lot (ever since the Neopets days) but I was still really active to compensate. Well, when I was 15, my activity level went down but my eating habits didn’t. I went from 110lbs to about 153lbs within a few years and I hated it. I started noticing all my stretch marks and cellulite and it killed my self esteem. My First Weight Loss Attempt I asked my dad if I could get a gym membership and we got one together when I was 15. It was really great having a workout partner because we would motivate each other to go. Around this time I also heard about MyFitnessPal, signed up, and started counting my calories with 1200 being my goal. I began losing weight and I was so happy. Unfortunately, I didn’t understand things like TDEE at the time so I felt like 1200 was my hard limit for eating. I felt awful every time I ate back my exercise calories or went over 1200. I didn’t have a food scale or even cook so I would usually overestimate the calories I put into MFP, which resulted in me actually eating less and being hungry. I would feel so restricted which eventually lead me to binging. I would have “cheat days” on Sundays where I consumed an enormous amount of calories. I started limiting my calories to 1000 but really shooting for 700. I felt terrible every time I went over 1000 and I would compensate by spending an hour on the elliptical at the gym. This was such an unhealthy and vicious cycle and I think because of this hardcore restriction is why I still struggle with binging to this day. Eventually the motivation to work out died, and since I hadn’t taught myself anything about eating, I ended up gaining all of my weight back (and more!). I felt terrible. Throughout the years more half-hearted weight loss attempts would follow that would end the same way. I simply just didn’t understand how to lose weight. There was (and still is) an abundance of conflicting weight loss info out there. Cut out carbs! (My dad is a type II diabetic that followed low carb and I knew I didn’t want to do that) Eat low fat! No sugar! Don’t eat after 8pm! No snacks! STARVATION MODE!!!!! None of these sounded sustainable to me. I thought you had to eat bland salads and exercise for at least an hour every day to lose weight which were both things that I hated. I thought I would be overweight for forever. New Weight Loss Attempt But 2 and a half years ago on October 18, 2015, I saw a registered dietician at my university. This was something that my doctor suggested as she knew I struggled with my weight. It was free for all students (included in our tuition) so I decided hey, why not. At that time I still didn’t know how to cook and I was struggling with knowing what to eat. The dietician and I brainstormed a list of foods that were nutritious and were things that I actually liked. I had a cafeteria meal plan at the time so she suggested that I can continue to get one thing that I like (which for me was pizza) but to just fill up the rest of my plate with veggies and fruit. That sounded easy enough and sustainable to me so I did it. How nice to know I didn’t have to cut out pizza, I just had to cut back a bit! After that appointment I felt so motivated. October 18, 2015 is when I feel like this weight loss journey truly began. I went out that weekend and bought a whole bunch of foods that were on that list that we brainstormed together. I decided I would finally learn how to cook so I scoured tons of YouTube videos and would message my mom a lot with questions, lol. I remember when I cooked a boneless skinless chicken breast with some baked beans and veggies on the side and how accomplished and proud I felt. I started my weight loss journey weighing in at 168.8lbs. I was borderline obese and one of my previous doctor visits had me at 175lbs so I actually had reached obesity at least once. Just by beginning to eat better I lost 4lbs in the first month because I was nourishing my body with protein and fiber which kept me fuller longer. I found out that my university gym offered group exercise classes for free for students and I decided to try out Zumba. I had a BLAST. I downloaded the schedule for group classes to my laptop and started going to ones regularly that interested me. Around that time I discovered this lovely subreddit after searching for weight loss related subreddits. I read the beginner’s guide and soaked up all of the information in the sidebar like a sponge. I felt extremely motivated. I saw CICO touted here over and over. Could I really eat whatever I wanted with no exercise required as long as it was within my calorie goal and TDEE!? No way, that goes against everything I had ever heard about weight loss. I remember watching The Biggest Loser and hearing Jillian Michaels state that you could NOT lose weight without exercise. I was really against the idea of calorie counting (for myself) because of my bad experiences with it. I saw it recommended here over and over again though so in early November I downloaded the MyFitnessPal app to my smartphone. I decided that for one week I would just track my intake. If I became obsessive over it then I would immediately delete the app. Well, I ended up loving it. I don’t believe there was an app for MFP when I was 15. At that time smartphones just weren’t really popular yet in my area so I mostly used the website version when I was younger. I found the app SO much easier and convenient to use. I loved the daily login streak so much. I decided to aim for a week of logging, then a month, then 2 months, then 6 months, then a year, and so on! At the time of this post, I have logged for 889 days. Not every single log has been perfect (I didn’t even do a full day on the first day) but I have almost always logged at least something every day. I have also added quite a few of you from the Track with me Thursday posts and it’s been really motivating. Even just a single “like” goes such a far way and I feel like I get to share my journey with everyone. I also created a weight loss related Instagram account and follow many of you there as well. It has been extremely motivating and I use it way more than my personal IG, lol. Shortly thereafter I purchased a food scale from Amazon for $12 after, once again, seeing it recommended on this sub (see a theme here?). I was eating a lot of quesadillas at the time so I figured it would be good to weigh my cheese. How exciting it was for me to see that I had actually been over-estimating how many calories my serving of cheese was and I could actually eat more of it! I use a food scale for almost everything now and it’s some of the best $12 I’ve spent. It is so simple and convenient to use and actually makes calorie counting much easier for me. Someone made a comment here one time that’s always stuck with me along the lines of how losing weight can have a domino effect on your life. Once you start getting your health and weight in check, often you start getting other parts of your life in check too. The discipline I gained from counting my calories unexpectedly carried over into other parts of my life. I opened up a savings account and every week an automatic transfer from my checking to my savings is made. Every tax return that I get every year, I split it in half and automatically move half of it to my savings. I got a secured credit card that I use for gas and went from a non existent credit score to a score of around 700. I downloaded the Mint app and actively keep track of my budget and spending every month. My self-care has improved, too. I actually make the effort to shower every day, floss twice a day (used to be once every other day), I make time to stretch, I created a basic skincare routine that I follow every day, I enjoy applying makeup to enhance my features rather than feel like I need it, and so on. On Christmas Day 2015 I got a Fitbit Charge HR from my parents which was another game changer for me. I wanted to get an estimate of how many calories I burned after a workout and during the day. I found it to be so incredibly motivating because I wanted to reach my step count and I wanted to work out. I have the Charge 2 now (I went from a size large band to a size small band!) and I have actually found mine really accurate. I still wear it daily and love it. 2016 In May 2016 I graduated college with a bachelor’s degree. By graduation day, after 7 months of losing weight, I had lost 33lbs and I felt fantastic. I had already reached a healthy BMI (a major goal of mine) and was now working on my “vanity pounds.” I had my senior photos taken and I felt amazing in them. I looked at pictures of me from graduation day and instead of cringing at them, I remarked at how beautiful, confident, and happy I looked. The rest of 2016 some big life changes happened. After graduation, I got my first full-time job (I had only ever worked part-time before) and moved in with my boyfriend of 2 years into an apartment. Things got more difficult as I had to learn how to balance my eating habits. My boyfriend wasn’t losing weight and didn’t need to so he would buy some junk food which was majorly tempting for me. I wasn’t meal planning really well so I would buy more food than I needed or just not count it really accurately. Weight loss was slow but by the end of the year I had lost an additional 8lbs since May. 2017 2017 was an unintentional year of maintenance for me. It was really difficult as I would lose 5lbs and then gain 5lbs and repeat. I struggled with my eating and I didn’t visit this sub as much as I used to. I would do really well at 1200 calories for a week and then I would binge. I wasn’t as serious about my calorie counting or exercise and was just feeling burned out. I was part of a fancy gym that didn’t offer as many classes as I liked so I rarely went. In June 2017 me and my boyfriend went to Las Vegas for a couple of days where we went to world famous buffets every night and walked along the strip all day. By the time I came back I had gone up from 125lbs to 131lbs. I slowly lost those pounds over the next few months but then in October 2017 I decided to go on “holiday maintenance mode” because I didn’t want to restrict during the holidays. It’s my favorite time of the year and I wanted to indulge and enjoy in plenty of pumpkin spice lattes, festive desserts, big meals, and so on. I was enjoying it though and planned on going back to my normal routine in January 2018. During this time I was still continuing my regular gym attendance at a new 24 Hour Fitness gym that I joined in September 2017 which was $30 cheaper than my previous fancy pants gym, much closer to my apartment, and offered a ton of group classes. 2018 Well, when January 2018 began I was 9lbs heavier since October. I started 2017 at 127, got down to 120 in October, and started January 2018 at 129. I felt uncomfortable in my body again as my clothes were beginning to feel tighter. “Maintenance mode” kind of failed but I was fine with it and decided I would finally reach my goal weight this year. I started meal prepping better and actually planning out my meals (I cannot recommend Skinnytaste.com enough! Most of my recipes come from her and Pinterest). Each week I decided what I wanted to eat and I added the items I needed to my grocery list. I would ONLY buy those items and nothing else. This prevented a lot of food waste and saved me a lot of money. I have had salsa chicken every single work day for lunch (around 24oz of boneless skinless chicken breasts, 10oz of salsa and some taco seasoning in my Instant Pot. Usually around 165-170 calories per serving) for probably 4+ months now and I still genuinely enjoy it. Dinner I usually change it up every week. Things were going pretty solid until Super Bowl weekend in February. Me and my boyfriend went out of town to visit some friends and I ate SO much food. I remember my stomach beginning to hurt and yet continuing to snack, consciously aware that I felt awful both physically and mentally. When I came back I decided, after 2 years of calorie counting at 1200, to raise it a bit to 1300-1400 and just accept the slower weight loss. Snacking in the evening was a big problem for me as well so I decided to try something that I had always been against for myself...Intermittent Fasting. I don’t do full-blown Intermittent Fasting so now I kind of just consider it “skipping breakfast” :). I always figured I would be way too hangry in the morning to even attempt this. I start work at 6am and don’t usually get my lunch break until 11:30am. Previously I would usually have a small breakfast and medium sized lunch, however I never had many calories left over for dinner or snacks and it lead me to feel really restricted in the evening which eventually lead to a binge. Now, I have 2 cups of coffee in the morning with 2 tablespoons of Califia’s Better Half (15 cals for 2 tablespoons). For lunch, I usually have salsa chicken, a mandarin, sliced up cucumber with hummus, and flavored sparkling water. It’s usually around 250 calories total, so when I get home that gives me over 1000 calories to work with which has been AMAZING. I have a huge dinner and snack to my heart’s content. I really wish I would’ve tried it sooner because my weight loss has finally been consistent ever since I started skipping breakfast. Things aren’t always perfect. I still struggle sometimes with binging, but the biggest tip I can recommend is to just go back to your normal routine the next day. I would even log my binges because sometimes it showed me that it wasn’t that bad. On MyFitnessPal I look at my weekly net calorie averages to see how I’m doing. On Superbowl Sunday I had ate about 3000-4000 calories but by the end of the week I had a 1300 net calorie average because I just went back to my normal routine. It is so important to not give up after one bad day, or even 2-3+ bad days. What I Eat Now I follow CICO religiously and eat whatever I want. I never had to do low carb (I average 140-200g of carbs daily), never had to do low sugar (I do try and get my sugar from natural sources like fruit though instead of processed junk food), never had to cut down on snacking (I love snacking), never had to do low fat (fat is so satiating!), I never had to do anything that I truly didn’t want to in order to lose weight. That said, since my calorie goal ranges from 1300-1500 I do try and fill myself up with yummy nutritious foods. I am a volume eater and 300g of broccoli will fill me up much differently than 300g of french fries. If it visually looks like a lot of food then I’ll feel satisfied. I try and fill up on protein and fiber because these will help me to feel the most full. I probably eat healthier now than I ever have and I realized I actually have always enjoyed nutritious foods, I just didn’t know how to cook them. (Side note: I’m not trying to knock things like keto, paleo, whole 30, etc by the way. I think if you can find something that’s sustainable and works for you then that’s awesome! It’s the key to healthy and sustainable weight loss. My dad has type 2 diabetes and has been doing keto for over a decade and it works for him. I know plenty of people that love Whole 30. Diets with “off limit” or restrictions on foods are just a major trigger for my binge eating so I don’t attempt them because it’s unsustainable for me.) I cook every week now. For awhile I was using a crockpot and then in September 2017 my boyfriend got me an Instant Pot for my birthday. I love this appliance so much and use it every Sunday to meal prep my meals for the week. Some of my staple foods: Boneless skinless chicken breasts, ground turkey, fruit (apples, mandarins, bananas, strawberries, watermelon, red seedless grapes, pears, etc), veggies (roasted broccoli, mixed veggies, corn, peas, baby carrots, asparagus, etc), frozen veggies in general, salsa, beans, quinoa, whole wheat products, greek yogurt (Chobani flips are my favorite), romaine lettuce, eggs, Kirkland protein bars, potatoes, PB2 (especially the chocolate flavor), air popped popcorn, unsweetened almond or cashew milk, Yasso greek yogurt ice cream bars, and Halo Top pints. I genuinely enjoy all of these foods so it doesn’t even feel like “dieting.” I don’t eat bland salads like I used to dread because there are so many ways to dress them up with beans, shredded cheese, mushrooms, etc. I always look forward to the foods that I eat and changing meals up with different spices helps a lot. I went from eating fast food and takeout several times a week to only a few times a month, if at all. If I plan on having fast food then I look at the menu and just try and fit it into my calorie goal for the day. I usually prefer to just not spend the money but sometimes me and my boyfriend will go out for some In N Out, Panda Express, or Taco Bell. Mexican food is also my faaaaavorite so I’ll usually get a carnitas tostada, a taco salad, or sometimes I’ll treat myself and get an enchilada. For pizza, Digiorno’s thin & crispy pizzas have been life savers. I love the garden vegetable one because it’s a decent size and around 700ish calories total. Salty snack foods like chips, cheez it’s, pretzels, etc are my kryptonite. I can easily mindlessly snack from a box of these and I have many times before. I have found that instead of just having a large box of these foods, I can bag them up into serving sized Ziploc bags and be fine. For some reason I can control myself with one little portioned out bag rather than knowing I have an entire box in the pantry. It’s helped a LOT. I reuse the same Ziploc bags. Exercise Exercise in general has just become one of my main ways of coping with stress and anxiety. It’s amazing. Group exercise classes changed my life. As I mentioned, I always hated exercising. I would spend 30 minutes on the elliptical and be bored out of my gourd. Group classes are so much fun to me and I attend them 3-5 times a week at my gym. I’m a shy introvert so they also give me that social interaction aspect too. I absolutely love my current gym (24 Hour Fitness) because it has so many classes available. Zumba is probably my favorite group class. I’m actually really good at it which I would’ve NEVER imagined lol. I also do yoga, U-JAM, boot camp, GRIT, and so on. I will never join a gym that doesn’t offer group classes because they have become such an essential part of my life, both for my happiness and mental health. If you’re interested in group classes I strongly recommend giving a class at least 2-3 chances with different instructors if you’re not happy with it before giving up on it. Every instructor is different. I’ve had both fantastic teachers and mediocre teachers. Just depends. My Fitbit helps a lot with my motivation to exercise. I always try and do small things like park further away to get more steps, always take the stairs, take a longer walking route, and so on. The Plan For Maintenance I’m a little nervous about maintenance. Weight loss, while frustrating sometimes, was also exciting. It was exciting to lose my first 10lbs. It was exciting to reach a healthy BMI and no longer be another statistic of an overweight American. It was exciting to go from high blood pressure to normal blood pressure. It was exciting to go from L-XL shirt sizes to XS-S and to go from size 16 jeans to size 4-6 depending on the store. It was exciting to have the weight on my driver’s license no longer be a lie and to break into the 120s after years of wanting to be there. It was exciting to hear the gasp that my doctor made when she looked at my previous weight and then my new weight when I had lost 15lbs and hear her enthusiastically congratulate me for it. I’ll just have to find a way to make maintenance exciting. I have always enjoyed cardio and my cardio health is excellent. Weight lifting, on the other hand, is always something that I’ve struggled with. I find it painfully boring and I get anxiety about entering the weight room by myself. For now I’ve gotten by with going to classes like Boot Camp and GRIT. I want to get over that and just do it though. Being an adult sometimes means doing things you don’t always want to do, and for me that’s weight lifting! I have the Strong Curves book in my bookshelf and I want to start it. In maintenance, I will continue to: - Calorie count. It’s just part of my normal routine now. I don’t want to lose my MFP streak either lol. I even purchased premium MFP early this year because I wanted to “give back” to the app that changed my life so much. My sedentary maintenance calories at 125lbs are 1600ish calories so I’ll eat around there. - Weigh my food with a food scale. I will continue to weigh out everything like I do already. - Regularly attend group classes. As I mentioned, they’re a huge part of my physical and mental health and I just really enjoy them. - Skip breakfast during the work week. I really prefer to save the calories for later. My eating is less scheduled on the weekends though and I usually have breakfast then. - Attend this sub regularly. This subreddit is amazing and so supportive. I almost always come here daily. I love posting in the SV/NSV daily thread, posting and answering questions in the daily question thread, posting the Free Talk Friday post every Friday, and just reading the posts here in general. I love how supportive everyone is and how everyone just understands what others are going through. We have all struggled before and we just get it. Also, bless this sub for teaching me that the dreaded starvation mode is a myth. In the past I noticed when I visited this sub less, I felt my motivation and discipline wane a bit. Visiting here is key. (Along with this sub, I also frequent /r/1200isplenty which has given me so many low calorie swap ideas, /r/EatCheapAndHealthy, /r/MealPrepSunday, and /r/xxFitness.) - Wear my Fitbit. I love my Fitbit. I love the app and keeping track of my sleep and getting an estimate of my total calories burned. - Meal prep! I actually enjoy planning out my meals and seeing how I’m nourishing my body. I like having a plan so I plan on sticking with it. It helps a lot with my grocery budget/spending too. I will continue to weigh myself but not with the same frequency. I currently weigh myself every weekend. I will probably weigh myself once or twice a month to see how I’m doing. I plan on maintaining around 125lbs because I’m comfortable around that weight. I chose 118.8lbs for an even 50lbs lost but it won’t be my end weight. Once I start getting close to the 130s then I will go back on a calorie reduction because I’m just not comfortable with my body when I get to that weight. This weight loss journey has been about making lifestyle changes and figuring out what’s sustainable for me. I truly feel like I have a sustainable plan and it’s exciting. I can’t believe I actually accomplished weight loss after years of hating my body and wishing I could lose weight. I wish I would’ve figured it out years ago but I’m glad I figured it out in my 20s at least! I never really did any “rewards” for each weight loss milestone (I’m too impulsive to wait lol) but I have been planning to get my hair cut and dyed and to also get a Dexa body scan! It’s not my first time dyeing my hair but I decided this year to wait until I reach my goal weight before booking my next appointment. It’s much needed! I’ve also always been curious about my body fat percentage so I’m going to get a Dexa scan once I find a GroupOn deal. And of course, I plan on doing a clothes shopping spree (probably at Ross and Old Navy, lol) :-) TL;DR: I found this sub and it changed my life. I learned about CICO and I follow it religiously with no food being off limits. I learned to cook and meal prep and found a love in exercise because of group exercise classes. Intermittent Fasting is an excellent tool if you struggle in the evenings with snacking like I did. Calorie counting and my food scale have been the 2 biggest helps and I strongly recommend them for anyone that’s just starting out. If you’ve actually read all of this, then thank you. If you just skipped to the TL;DR then I still thank you for caring enough to read that. This sub has been an amazing part of my journey and it’s taught me SO much. If you have any questions feel free to ask! EDIT: Thank you so much to whoever gilded this post (it’s my first ever Reddit gold!). There have been so many supportive comments and it’s been so rewarding to see so many people that actually like my post. I love this sub so much. ❤️ submitted by /u/HermionesBook to r/loseit [link] [comments]

*DISCLAIMER: Please don't take my dieting suggestions as legitimate medical or dietary advice. Before starting a new diet regimen, be sure to talk to your doctor. I know there are a glut of these "hey everyone look at me aren't I awesome cause I started giving a shit about my health" posts, but because of my history with others like me on Reddit as well as because this AMA was requested, I feel this is necessary for a couple of reasons. Firstly, I want to do this for myself. It feels good to finally succeed and I want to set an example for others. Touching on that last point- secondly, and most importantly, I am here to help. I want to show that no matter how overweight you are, no matter how hopeless you feel and how much you hate your situation or yourself, there is a way out. I am not here for compliments or pats on the back. I also don't have all the answers. I am simply here because I want to inspire others to make the same changes I have made, or if they need support, a friend with experience, or that little extra push to get the ball rolling.* Hey Reddit. A while back there was a fellow redditor that had a fairly popular post in WTF basically ripping on himself and others for being fat. I think it may have been spurred by the whole Kevin-Smith-kicked-off-an-airplane-for-being-too-fat thing. Regardless, at that time, I was almost done with a diet that changed my life and I felt the need to comment- to let those other overweight redditors that someone had been there and was about to be a whole new person- simply by changing eating habits. Before (422 lbs) After (186 lbs) About me: I am 30 years old, married and currently in weight maintenance mode. I have always been a fat person. I was the ass end of every joke in middle school and high school and I suppose the only time I truly enjoyed myself was when I was eating. I never really had any luck dating because I had no self confidence and spent a lot of my early adulthood in a self loathing funk. This ended up with me on a roller coaster of emotions of sorts, where I would spend weeks depressed, hating what I had become or what I had done to myself, only to be followed by weeks of obsessive dieting or fasting, and weight loss. Over the years, I tried every kind of diet out there. I had moderate successes and failures over the course of about a decade. Weight Watchers, Slim Fast, South Beach just to name a few. I had the most amount of success with the Atkins diet. I went from about 375 pounds to around 250 pounds over the course of about 6 months or so. It was around this time that my wife (then girlfriend) was doing a study abroad program in Japan. So, I went for a week and as you can imagine, it changed my life. I had a great time and will never forget it for as long as I live. However- you can imagine how difficult it was to continue a low-carb diet in Japan. Rice and noodles everywhere. After I came home, I became depressed again because I missed my girlfriend, hated my job. Because I am who I am, I easily fell right off the diet wagon. I found my solace in a box of donuts that night, and spiraled out of control for the next few years. I ended up at 422 pounds. In this time, I had some pretty awesome life changing things go down. I managed to get married and juggle several different jobs. I still battled with my old cycle of self-loathing and obsessive dieting though, which I was never able to beat. After a few years of worrying about my health and going to the doctor way more than I needed to, my doctor told me I needed to lose weight or I was going to die (yes, he actually said that). This of course caught my attention. His suggestion? Gastric Bypass surgery. As luck would have it, later that same week, I was visiting my dad and it was then that he told me he had Diabetes (a disease that runs in my family, which also terrifies me). After talking to my dad and going home and talking to my wife, we decided it was time for some major changes. I investigated Gastric Bypass at length and almost went that route. However, in my personal opinion, I felt the benefits didn't outweigh the risks. On top of all that, I never understood how Gastric Bypass legitimately fixes the problem of overeating or eating terrible things- I knew deep down inside myself that if I had Bariatric Surgery, I would still eat terrible foods and continue to be a fat, fat failure. After all, slicing up my stomach might force me to eat less or slower, but it doesn't satiate my need to eat to excess. No, this type of drastic action was not for me. It was a few weeks later when my wife and I were invited out for a dinner with some friends. When we all met up, a few of her friends had shown up, and were almost unrecognizable. They had lost a lot of weight, and everyone had noticed- including myself and my wife of course. We chatted and they told me about this diet that involves blood tests and tons of doctors visits and specific food combination's in specific measurements and a lot of other details. To me, it sounded fishy at best, but their obvious changes had made me question my undying skepticism. I went home and checked out the diet for myself. The program they did cost them money (strike one in my book). They sent their blood overseas to be checked out by a specific lab (this seemed especially weird to me at the time)- and then their diet plans were created specifically for them. Again, it seemed fishy to me, but even if the diet was total homeopathic, ripoff bullshit, their transformations were undeniable proof that it worked for somebody. After some deliberation, I decided to give it a shot. What did I really have to lose? At the very least, I knew I had to do something, and this was a new system I had never tried. So, with that, I sent away for the program, had a shitton of blood drawn, got checked out by my doctor and waited for my diet plan. The Diet Essentially, how it worked for me was like this: Basic Diet Guidelines 1. You must eat three meals a day. 2. All meals are to be spaced five hours apart. 3. You must drink at least 2 liters of water daily. 4. Snacking is not permitted. If you positively have to snack, eat an apple or chew sugar-free gum (no fruit flavors, only mint). 5. No meal should be eaten after 9pm. However, eating a meal late is much preferred to skipping meals. Skipping meals is not permitted. 6. Do not deviate from the foods listed in the diet plan or the quantities of the foods. 7. Weigh yourself daily, in the morning after urination and record your weight. 8. This food is your medicine. Treat it as such. The foods permitted in my diet plan Proteins- Lean beef, white fish (like tilapia), lean chicken, non-fat yogurt, low-fat mozzarella, low-fat ricotta, eggs. Vegetables- celery, mushrooms, tomatoes, zucchini, spaghetti squash, cauliflower, lettuces, garlic, onion. Fruits - apples, oranges, kiwi, cantaloupe. Carbs - RyKrisp Crackers (2 per meal), Saltines (4 per meal) Spices - garlic powder, black pepper, salt, cumin, coriander, curry, vinegar. ETC - sugar-free gum (mint flavor only), diet sodas, coffee. If the food is not listed in the above list, it is not permitted. This includes the consumption of alcohol, processed foods, sugar in any form, bread or milk. Other notes I visited my doctor almost monthly for metabolic blood panels and checkups, just to make sure stuff was actually improving. Indeed, my situation was improving dramatically, and very quickly. My blood panels got better and better and I was dropping about 5 pounds a week. Visible improvements made the diet much easier to stick to. As long as my primary care doctor knew what I was doing and saw changes for the best, we were charging forward with it. So, with the support of my wonderful wife, friends and family, as well as the desire to achieve what I perceived as unachievable, I succeeded in becoming relatively normal sized in just over a year. I have a lot more work to do physically and mentally, but I have taken the first small step into a very different world. AMA. TL:DR; Fatty starts giving a shit; posts pics on reddit. AMA! **7:52pm PST - Hey guys, I am here, catching up on questions now. I promise to respond to everyone. Thanks for your patience :) If you want the specific website the diet details are on, shoot me a PM ad I will be happy to pass it along. Keep in mind: unless you are morbidly obese and have run out of options and you feel like youre at the end of your rope, this diet isn't for you. Regarding the hairstyle: I like it & don't plan to change it anytime soon. Please don't derail the thread with comments about how awful you think the hair is, I appreciate it.** My Wife: She was overweight as well. She did the diet with me, but finished long before I did. She went from 225 pounds to 135 pounds, and she looks and feels amazing. No I wont post pics, and no she isn't a redditor. Here is the meal plan I taped to the wall in my kitchen to give you a solid example of what my diet looked like: Menu! Basically, I would choose a column, then I would choose a row within that column to select a meal. So for instance, if I wanted to have chicken for dinner, I would look at what measurements were permitted in column 3 of the chicken row and work from there. Mint Gum: According to the diet planners, fruit flavored gums trigger appetite. This may or may not be true scientifically, but I honestly feel like its most likely a person to person thing. I avoided it regardless. 12:08pm 04/27/10 PST: Still here everyone, and still diligently answering questions. I apologize for the wait, but I am determined to answer everyone. Thanks for your patience and for asking questions in the first place. :) submitted by /u/rival13 to r/IAmA [link] [comments]