Yes, your approach sounds correct, you should aim for 1–2 pounds lost per week. Eating healthily will cause you to lose weight. But if you go back to your old eating habits once you’ve lost the 8lbs, it’ll all come right back on, and maybe even a bit more if you overeat because you missed ice cream, etc.
What would be really great is increasing your exercise each day. Even a 30 minute walk around your living area each day is enough to remove another few pounds of weight. A yoga class, martial arts, even cleaning your house is exercise. Strive to find something you love and will stick with for your life. I have found my kettlebell workout to be this exact thing. Exercise is never a chore for me (yes even getting up at 5am for the 6am class isn’t as bad as it was when I started), it’s something I love to do cause I can see myself improve!
Since you’re new to dieting, let me make this as clear as I wish someone had made it to me: dieting only works while you stay on the diet. The minute you go off the diet, you’ll go back to your old habits and become the unhealthy person you were, only less however much money you spent on the book and the special food. Going on and off diets constantly is known as yo-yoing, and is pretty bad for your body and might increase the chances of later diets failing. Now I don’t know about you, but I sure couldn’t go through life with no ice cream ever! And I know if I followed a diet where I was not allowed ice cream, I would eventually eat ice cream, and probably feel bad about it. That’s not a healthy approach to food at all. Which is why instead of dieting, I advocate living a healthy life. A bit of ice cream is fine, the entire tub is not. Even fried food is OK for you so long as you watch your portions and only eat until you’re not hungry, not till you’ve licked the KFC bucket clean.
I find it’s easiest to think of it like this: your body is a machine. Food is the energy it needs to keep going. Your body spends a certain amount of this energy in simply living, breathing, blinking, etc. By exercising, you can push your energy usage beyond what you eat each day, and cause your body to start using its stored energy, aka fat. But you need to eat healthy – eating nothing or very little will cause your body to throw on the brakes and STOP burning fat (cause it thinks you simply cannot find any food and thus need to ration out your stored energy), you’ll be groggy and cranky and you’ll see no results – not the way to go at all.
I recommend Spark People linked above, but beware they will flood your inbox with messages all the time (I set up a filter to deal with them). It has a great food tracker, but more importantly a strong community to answer questions or offer support and guidance. I stopped using it because I really got annoyed with their constant emails. Now I’m using a Nintendo DS program called My Weight Loss Coach which I highly recommend if you have a DS. It comes with a pedometer that tracks your steps, all the advice has been written with a nutritionist, so it’s really down-to-earth and realistic, things like drinking more water, making small changes and how they count, advice on preparing and buying food from grocery stores so that you don’t end up buying take out all the time, etc.
Good luck, never lose your motivation, keep at it. Strive for success and you’ll be met with success.
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