Welcome!

There are success stories, but also stories of challenges – and then persevering to work through the challenges.

This WOE (way of eating) works, but only if you stick to it.

Yes, BillieJi, that’s how I feel, I don’t mind being hungry two days a week to meet my goal, I just couldn’t live long-term with being hungry almost all the time! I won’t kid you, it was hard work at times, especially getting myself to keep up the walking through the cold, snowy, icy winter we had where I live this year. My car started dying so I started walking for transportation. Boy, did people ever think that was radical, lol! But the fact that fasting *was* hard work really motivated me to make sure I didn’t over-eat on non-fasting days. I didn’t count all my calories, but did look up the calories of a lot of the foods that I like to eat, and started weighing out my portions of foods that I know I tend to go overboard on. One tip I have is to calculate your TDEE at your goal weight and think of the non-fasting days as days to learn how to eat that number of calories per day in a way that feels satisfying to you. Then when you get to your goal weight, you’ll be ready to maintain and let fasting one day a week take care of the extra calories we accumulate because of all the ‘occasions’ for eating that crop up in our social lives. Also I am someone who gets bored and restless doing the same thing over and over again, and I like to cook, so every month or two I would get a new cookbook, or some new kitchen gadget so I could cook something I hadn’t made before, or changed around the way I allocated my 500 calories, or did *something* different so I wouldn’t get that bored/frustrated feeling. One important thing to know is that your body can hold onto or suddenly let go of up to two pounds of water in either direction in a totally random fashion, so you can do everything right and still have the scales tell you that your weight went up. So it’s a good idea to take your measurements, too, and, if you suddenly see three pounds drop off when you weren’t expecting much, know that some of it was probably water and it will bounce back up for a while before going down for good. You really have to look at the long-term trend. Some people prefer to weigh once a month because of this. A pound a week doesn’t always feel like much, and then less than a year later, 40 pounds is gone!