What do you do to stay motivated on diet/exercise?

[MrsEnglish]

For months I've been saying that I'd get my sh*t together and buckle down on diet and exercise. Once I stuck to it for about a week.

People who have stuck to a diet for a month or more: please share your tips!

[Ohdeer]

Allowing yourself the cheats! Helps you stick to the diet long term because you don’t feel deprived. I also let myself go more at the weekend because this helped me manage in the week. Overall there were several days where I was over limits (mainly on fat!) but within the whole scheme of things those were the days that helped me to keep to it the rest of the time. I didn’t do exercise so can’t help you there, just couldn’t fit it in. But it is hard, I do sympathise. Especially after a long day at work when you just want sugar!

[ksmom]

^^What she said! CHEATS! Now I don't mean go crazy for a week then back on LE then go crazy again, but every so often it's fine to "treat" yourself and go over on limits or have something you may not normally have like a big juicy steak or a giant bowl of ice cream with all the toppings. I think when people struggle with diet, it's because they're being too restrictive. Remember all foods are allowed within limits! It's funny because I did LE for a year which I never thought I'd ever be able to do given how much I freaking love food. LOL But, even now two years later, I still find myself sticking to some old LE habits.

As for exercise, that's a toughie. I am not an exercise person...at all! However when I started swaying I just started doing cardio on my bike every day while the boys napped and I watched some favorite shows/movies. I just kept telling myself it's only an hour of my day and within a few months of doing it, I was hooked. I loved exercise by that point. I think it's important to choose a form of cardio that you actually like and make something fun about it. So maybe you have a favorite nature path to walk, or a fave show while you run on the treadmill or maybe you love dancing and take up zumba. If you absolutely hate cardio and it's a chore to include it, then skip it. It's not worth losing your sanity over. I do really recommend it though if you can do it!

[atomic sagebrush]

People get into this vicious cycle where they are too overly strict on themselves, then they mess up and overeat (and instead of just eating a little more, because they're in starvation mode they will basically binge eat anything they can get ahold of), then they try to starve themselves to make up for it. It ends up being this awful binge/starve cycle and it sets you up to fail.

A huge percentage of what most of you guys do for swaying is NOT NECESSARY to success. When you read about these other ladies who live on rice cakes and a shot glass of skim milk every other day - they are not doing the diet right! Just follow a diet that YOU can stick to regardless of what others are doing. All you need to do is eat more LE than you were doing recently and to a lesser extent, before you got your boys (if you have them, which you don't!!)

I have more about all this in this thread on cheating on LE Diet! https://genderdreaming.com/forum/gender-swaying-general-discussion/62454-guide-cheating-blue-pink.html

[4blue2pink]

i try to keep my cheats vegetarian if i can, but if for example ive cooked our sunday roast and fancy a bit of the chicken then i'll have it, no big deal :) same for sweet stuff ive basically cut out all processed sugar on the PCOS diet which is a HUGE change for me!! **confession time.. sugar makes me ill but i stupidly still ate loads of it :-/ and would just suffer the bad stomach issues afterwards because i :heart: sweets (dumb i know)

im feeling so so much healthier on this diet i really am thankful :) but i wont lie.. dh often brings back a packet of cookies or some chocolate biscuits after work, before i would of ate them (and bin ill) without giving it a second thought but now im avoiding them id honestly say over 90% of the time because i just dont want them anymore (dh is like "who are you?" haha) but in the 10% where i think i really do fancy a cookie or a biscuit then i'll have one, and then im not bothered about them any more. i can walk past the packet sitting on the side and have no urge to have any. but if i denied and denied myself then id end up wanting them more and more and then probably end up eating half a pack!! and when i look at it that way 1 biscuit now and then is better than binge eating half a pack.

exercise wise im just walking the dog for an hour, nothing crazy :)

[Linni]

Honestly I recently gave up tracking my foods.
This made me sooooo crazy, seeing that with every meal my intake for the day shrinks more and more, and when I was still hungry at night but my limits were reached, I felt miserable!! Either I went to bed hungry or I binge ate every sweet and fatty food we had at home.

Oh yeah. And at the end I stopped ovulating. Obviously my body felt too much restriction and thought „Oh. This woman is still breastfeeding- I can’t do both, the older baby and a new one, I have to chose“ and shortened my luteal phase first and this last cycle I didn’t seem to have ovulated at all. At least my gynecologist couldn’t see any signs for a happened ovulation.

Now I do a vegetarian diet without overeating, try to eat only 3 meals and of course I got a feeling for what’s too much fat/protein, but I eat until I‘m satisfied.

Cardio...my 4 and my 1 yo are my cardio, and I try to walk an hour with the stroller as often as I can. That’s it! :))


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[MrsEnglish]

Thanks for the advice everyone.

For me vegetarian is super easy since I don't like the taste of most meat. My problem is I should be doing PCOs diet and I get tempted by sugar and simple carbs. Also I want to lose 5 lbs but my weight has not budged since January.

The cycle I got pregnant with my daughter was the cycle that I had successfully did PCOS diet and used Clomid. Since postpartum I've done 3 Clomid cycles and ivulated each time but haven't gotten pregnant, so it's possible that the diet is a vital part. But pancakes.

[atomic sagebrush]

The thing I want you guys to be really careful about, when not tracking, is cutting back TOO far. That is the pitfall of not tracking (and actually contrary to popular belief, this is the ONLY reason I like you to track) People start off eating a fairly sensible LE Diet and then over time, their mind plays tricks on them and they start cutting back more and more and more. I have seen it time and again...you can basically end up giving yourself an eating disorder if you are not tracking because while normally people underestimate the amount they're eating, when swaying it happens that people start OVERestimating the amount they're eating. They start dropping things like salad dressing, cheese, cream in their coffee, etc and end up on a starvation diet which is NOT LE DIET. You are only doing LE Diet if you are within the parameters and the lower limits are by far more important than the upper ones are. People don't always realize this and end up eating 800 calories a day, 20 g protein and NO fat at all and that is a recipe for delayed or stopped ovulation, and you end up having to basically sway blue just to get ovulation going again!!!