Beginner

[italiangirl87]

I was always very fortunate to be a size 8 and eat what I wanted. Then I had two children and bam I'm at least 3 stone overweight. I'm down and determined to drop at least a stone by my birthday (September) can anyone give me some simple yet effective tips as a beginner pls

Count calories so at least you know where you might be going wrong. You can’t change habits if you don’t know what the problem is. I’ve been using MyFitnessPal for around 10 years, it’s free.

Agree with @orangegato

I tried lots of quick fixes and ended up very confused about what I should eat to lose weight,

In the end it came down to

If the calories you eat are less than calories used you get weight loss

A lot of the other noise around dieting eg low carb / vegan/ fasting etc are actually just different methods of reducing the calories in.

So I use MFP and log my calories (not religiously now, but certainly at the beginning I literally weighed/ measured everything.....(the shock when I weighed out the pasta suggested serving size was about 40% of my usual pasta serving size!)

If I eat lots of protein and some good fruit and veg, I find it much easier to stick to my calories than if I just end nutrient free junk, but that's more a long term thing I think. In the beginning for me it was 500 kcals a day deficit = 1lb of weight loss a week.

As @RelentlessForwardProgress mentioned, lots of fads about like low carb, intermittent fasting etc.

Don’t get sucked down the rabbit hole, none of that is sustainable or compatible with most people’s lives. Just expend more energy than you consume, so need to overcomplicate.

I used the Noom app. I just had the free trial version and it worked really well
I lost 3 stone, in about 6 months