This is such a lovely thread. Someone started a thread a week or two ago about how she had decided to stop trying fruitlessly to lose weight after years of disordered eating and just try to be healthy and everyone piled in to attack her because of the way she'd phrased her original post. So it's really nice to see more people advocating a bit more self-love when it comes to weight loss.
I don't know if what I'm currently doing will lead to me losing weight, but I'm fairly sure it will. I was ill last year, and realised that if I carried on the way I was, I would, at some point, be ill a lot of the time.
So I started making little changes. My first change was to get enough sleep - no phones after 9pm, camomile tea and a bath or shower before bed, bed at ten and lights out at half past. I haven't given up sugar or alcohol or white flour altogether, but I tell myself that I avoid them - they are things I will eat only if I really, really want them, and it turns out that often I don't.
I have started doing Crossfit classes, which I love. They are really good exercise, I feel great after each class, I feel motivated to get better, and I get to spend time with a load of super-fit people, which is quite inspiring.
I still need to work on portion control and stress/tiredness eating, but I'm making my changes in small steps. I'll be doing a Whole 30 in May, so I'm going to see what I find hard from that.
I've stopped keeping things like crisps in the house, although I make kale crisps on Fridays which is the children's crisp day at school, so I still get my crunchy treats, just in a more nourishing form.
And I'm finding that by thinking not about weight loss but about nourishing my body, and treating it well, and waiting to see what I really want after the first craving for rubbish (the answer is almost always that what I really want is to go to bed and have a rest), and what me make feel good ready for my exercise class the next day, I am choosing to eat less and more healthily. And when I don't do that, I'm better at thinking of it as learning experience rather than a horrible failure. Mostly what I've learned is that to lose weight, I will need to sleep and rest a ridiculous amount. And I'm OK with that - I lost a huge chunk of last year to a series of chest infections followed by post-viral fatigue. As I get healthier, that might change, or it might not, but I've stopped thinking of getting enough rest as laziness and started thinking of it as vital self-care.