Lost THIRTY pounds since last year!
Last year at this time weighed 287. I was headed to an aortic valve replacement, followed by the removal of my left kidney.
After the kidney operation I couldn't hold food down for four days and then while I still had no appetite I cut my food intake and lost 27 pounds while I did my cardio rehab physical therapy. I then signed up for a local gym but made the mistake of taking one of their balance classes. That pushed the L5 vertebrae which had been damaged over 35 years ago to being unstable and impinging on the nerves to my legs.
I stopped exercising - I couldn't even sit without discomfort - while I went to the best local back doctor for diagnosis. A month wait for the first appointment, six weeks for the MRI, and six more weeks to go back for the diagnosis while I lost all the conditioning from my earlier exercise and gained fourteen pounds. 
On Aug. 27 the surgeon told me I have to get down to 230 before he can operate. It is due to a limitation in the length of the instruments he uses for the minimally invasive procedure, not any prejudice of his. That day I weighed 273 pounds. He tried to sell me on a meal replacement plan his practice sells, but after looking at the details I found it to be expensive ($400 per person per month), not nutritionally sound, and something I would not be able to stick with. Aside from that I was concerned about how the high protein, no carb diet would load my single remaining kidney.
I'd signed up for MyFitnessPal.com before the heart surgery but I had not gone back to using it because I had been losing weight. So that night I went back to using the program. At first I was trying to stay under 1500 calories a day, with good success, but I had set a goal to lose the weight by the end of the year. So I dropped my goal to 1000-1200 calories a day.
I have not had a problem staying under 1200 calories. Mornings I have home made muffins (mostly banana spice) with a fruit cup; lunch, a half sandwich (pimento cheese or tuna), dinner is generally home cooked, under 300 calories, and two or three snacks. I get hungry but I am not hungry all the time plus I have enough energy to do what I need to do.
The snacks are usually a "magic" chocolate shake - 1 tbspn cocoa, 2 packets Splenda, 1 teaspoon Benefiber, 1 scoop chocolate flavored protein powder, and 1 cup of ice (with 1/2 tsp instant coffee if I want a boost) blended in my ancient blender until it is smooth - one ounce of a good cheddar cheese, or a frozen fruit bar (Outshine or Whole Fruit).
I use MyFitnessPal to check my recipes so I can change low cal ingredients for higher ones and check portions. Since I mostly eat at home, it is essential that I be able to calculate calories in my own cooking and this makes it easy.
This morning I was down to 256 pounds! Only 26 pounds to go by the first of the years!
Last week I went to the pain management clinic associated with the back doctor's practice and got a nerve block (steroid shot). Hopefully this will let me go back to doing at least cardio workouts on the treadmill. Adding in exercise should accelerate my weight loss. I'm already ahead of the curve that MyFitnessPal's two pounds a week maximum goal allows. Burning an extra 3-500 calories should help a lot!
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I’m sure this will be the hardest 5. But, eating all these veggies, it seems I’m pooping the weight off. Going about 4 times a day.
I think they dropped the price last year, pretty sure I paid 1200 the first year and it was a hard decision for me to make. Ended up totally worth it to me. I had been yelled at by a doctor trying to get my leg healed and he tried to send me to a local medical weight loss place. But when I called them I didn't actually have any medical problems and they wouldn't accept me. So I started looking around on line and found an article by Dr. Barardi that really resonated with me, having to do with counting calories or something and how inaccurate that is and I just liked how reality based it was. Looked some more - got really turned off by the contest stuff, went back and forth, couldn't find many reviews at all good or bad, and the few bad seemed more on the disgruntled side rather than actually anything wrong with the program itself so I got on the list for early registration figuring I could decide when that came up. For once in my life I had the money on hand (or at least available credit LOL) when the day came so I took it as a sign and went for it.
I disagree that it is not a good program for a beginner, at least for me - I was a total beginner (my only ever working out for the sake of working out was grade school PE and a few months of Jane Fonda on vinyl/vhs in the early 80s ) I also disagree about the book they offer at the end - it does in fact duplicate a lot of the material - it seems to actually be based on an even older version of PN when it was called Lean Eating or something like that. I bought it but I feel just kind of neutral about it - there is some reinforcing material but there isn't really anything new. Might be good for people that like paper and real books (which I normally do, but for some reason I just liked the on-line aspects of the program)
As to the web format, I really liked it and they upgraded to fix some of that reviewer's complaints last year (the owners manual was separated out and is a lot easier to search than the archives, which still require a lot of scrolling though it can be sorted to make it a bit less) I didn't get any 90s vibe from it. It is clean and easy to use.
I was in the July 2016 and July 2017 cohorts. In 2017 they changed the way they do the facebook stuff - put all the coaches and their coachees in one place so you could cross over and talk to anybody in the cohort and any coach, assistant or mentor (or anybody) could reply. I am not sure I liked the change, but I have issues with FB that biases me against it anyway. There are people from all over the world doing it (English only though) Australia, Asia, Indonesia, all over Europe, Mexico, I think there was even somebody from Russia last year. Mostly the US and Canada, of course. All the conference calls/videos were available to watch and you could still ask questions later on FB if not participate directly so that wasn't a big deal to me (and frankly I didn't find them that helpful anyway) I think you will get a smaller proportion of people that actively participate in these sorts of things no matter what. Some people are just readers/observers while others like to get right in there and ask for support, get high fives etc. Last year they had those zoom meeting at different times and some weekends so that is changed. As to locker room language...it was just rare enough to be effective (and funny!) not offensive to me at all - the person who wrote the curriculum is Krista Scott-Dixon and she has written some pretty damn funny things on her own, including a book called "Why Me Want Eat: Fixing Your Food F*ckedupitude" LOL.
For me it was the content of the lessons, deeper articles, and the format of getting a little reward via clicking that you read the lesson/did the workout/did the habit that was the thing that worked for me. I never thought about getting a little swag at the end and now that that person mentions it, yeah it would be a good thing for them to add. The shaker bottle is nice and comes at a good time. My coach also sent little things personally so maybe I just got one of the good ones. From what I could see on the various conference videos, they all seemed like good coaches so not sure what the gripe was there, mine would contact me when I didn't "show" up for more than a few days so ??? It may go the the variability of needing attention, personally I didn't need too much - an occasional question answered or the light nudge to get back on track if I hadn't been around. I tended to ask things like specific info for movements I couldn't do. The workouts were customized for my crap knees and beginner status, but occasionally I didn't know what the instructions meant (workouts would have written instruction plus videos to follow but sometimes they didn't seem to quite mesh and I can get bogged down in those kind of details instead of just doing something close LOL)
Tell me more about your free program, maybe I should check that out for a few months while I wait and decide about reupping to PN in January. I have made some good permanent changes to the way I eat, but working out regularly has not stuck (other than swimming which I love and do almost daily in the summer) and with the knees I sure as hell haven't been riding much anymore (one of my real goals - to get back to riding).
Response to csziggy (Original post)