Hi there SJay
Congratulations on your 38lb loss!!
I did the 8 weeks back in summer 2016 and am still fitting in the clothes I had to buy for myself then, 3 years plus later!
I lost a total of >20 lbs, but I didn’t have a huge target loss. My biggest success in hindsight was to see the spare tyre vanish from round my middle and – as I was often saying here – that wasn’t so much about actual weight loss as body shape change.
I’ve stayed reasonably close to the same weight as I was then by I suppose a few key focuses:
1. Knowing how many calories I need:
I looked myself up on this website https://keto-calculator.ankerl.com
This lets you type in your weight, your height, and how much exercise you usually do in your daily life.
That then throws out your base metabolic rate and how many calories you ‘need’ per day.
You can progress to looking at recommendations (and body fat etc), but you don’t need to. I just found it very interesting to know how much I needed to take in to be healthy.
2. Being aware of how many calories I’m consuming (and what sort of calories they are – ie sugar/refined stuff)
Knowing how much you actually ‘need’ in terms of calories is very interesting, especially if you use an app like MyFitnessPal to see how much a meal adds up to. And how much you might add in terms of calories with a sneaky ‘snack’ which none of us regards as really ‘food’.
And on the diet I got used to having little or no bread, replacing that with more vegetables (beans/pulses if I felt I wanted more ‘bulk’), and avoided refined foods such as rice and pasta. I found chillis a great addition to food and have now become quite an accomplished curry cook ;-). When I do a curry, instead of rice I have roasted aubergines and guests really like that – it goes very well.
I suppose what it is, is being aware of what you eat. If you have a ‘treat’ doughnut, then it’s great to avoid having a very large supper too.
3. Trying to have a good long gap between meals
And the other thing that’s really worked for me is not having breakfast (just 155 calories with two cappuccinos), and starting eating after 12 noon so that I have a very long period between my last meal on one day and my first meal on the next.
Different things suit different people, I think. But keeping aware of how your clothes fit is sometimes better than weighing (because those kilos do go up and down quite strangely). If your target jeans fit – that pesky waist measurement again – then absolutely fab.
Good luck. If I can do it, you most certainly can ๐