caloric intake

I have good news for you: you can cut that to save money and get, well, cut.

Diet in this case doesn't mean eating less necessarily. It means getting the macronutrients that you need and cutting out empty calories if you aren't in a bulking phase. Even if, as you are, you're just trying to lose weight, doing so with good nutrients will only be positive to your goals

well they say abs are made in the kitchen. ive been on a weight loss journey for a few years now and its really fucking hard. i love sweets so much and they're so dense with calories.

one important thing ive learned is the importance of refeeds. basically if you are in a caloric restriction for a while your body will go into starvation mode, so to speak. it starts cutting down on energy expenditures to prevent you from losing more weight, and this is what people are experiencing when they hit a plateau. the mistake they make is trying to cut calories more, which works a little, but pushes their body further into starvation mode. that isn't sustainable and you end up thinking about food all the time, in an unhealthy way, and eventually your food impulse will get so strong you cant ignore it and you binge. lots of people quit at this stage and end up gaining back all the weight, if not more because their body is still in starvation mode.

the solution is to refeed. basically you take a couple days to eat a normal amount, not quite a binge but enough that you feel satisfied, then go back to the restriction. this tells your body "hey everything is ok look we are getting enough food you dont need to freak out" so it stops with the starvation stuff, or at least lessens it. you do that every two or three weeks and it keeps your body from getting too starved. its also much easier psychologically because you get to have breaks and feel full sometimes. it works especially well with only a small caloric restriction, so you're consistently losing a little bit of weight over a long period of time, adding up to a lot of weight loss without much perceived effort in the long term.

the upside of dieting this way is that its much more sustainable. i lost ~20-30 pounds over the course of a year a few years ago, and ive been able to maintain my weight very consistently since then. i still want to lose a bit more for my own aesthetic goals, which has been hard recently for a variety of personal reasons, but being able to maintain any amount of weight loss has been huge for me.

the main thing is to be gentle with yourself and acknowledge that losing weight is not something that can be achieved through pure willpower forcing yourself not to eat. we evolved over hundreds of millions of years to have robust biological processes to prevent us from expending our energy stores unless absolutely necessary, and to compel us to seek out more. losing weight sustainably requires understanding your body and using that understanding to avoid getting in a wrestling match with your survival mechanisms.

Yeah you gotta keep truckin'. But you're gonna make it, you've got this!