u/NeighborhoodFresh315

I want to tell a quick story because I see the same post in this sub like four times a week and I've been there myself.

When I first started trying to lose weight I weighed myself every single morning. Sometimes twice. Once before bed too because I had read somewhere that you can track water retention that way. I had a notebook. I had a spreadsheet. I had a little graph I would update on Sunday nights like I was running a small business.

For the first three weeks the scale went down. I lost about four pounds. I was thrilled. I told myself this was going to be easy.

Then week four happened.

Monday I was up half a pound. Tuesday up another pound. Wednesday up two pounds from where I started the week. I had not changed anything. I was eating in a deficit, I was walking every day, I was being honest with my tracker. The scale was just going up and I could not figure out why.

I remember standing on the scale on a Thursday morning before work and almost crying. Like, fully fighting tears in the bathroom because a number had moved in the wrong direction. I went to work and I was in a bad mood all day. That night I ate way more than I should have because I figured what was the point. The next morning I was up another pound. Obviously. I had eaten three sleeves of crackers the night before.

I did this for about two more months. Up, down, up, up, down, down, up. I would have good weeks where I was "winning" and bad weeks where I felt like a failure. My entire mood was being decided by a piece of plastic on my bathroom floor before I had even brushed my teeth.

The thing that broke the cycle was honestly an accident. I went away for a long weekend to visit my sister and I forgot to pack the scale. I had been planning to bring it which, in hindsight, is also insane. I was gone five days. I ate normally, I walked a lot because we were sightseeing, I didn't think about my weight once because I had no way to measure it.

When I got home I almost ran to the scale. Down 1.8 kilos from before I left.

Here is what I figured out from that. Your weight on any given day is not really your weight. It is your weight plus whatever water you are holding, plus whatever food is still in your digestive tract, plus how much salt you had yesterday, plus where you are in your cycle if that applies to you, plus a dozen other things that have nothing to do with fat. The scale on a Tuesday morning is not a verdict on your effort. It is one data point in a noisy dataset.

What I do now and what I tell everyone who asks me is this. Weigh yourself once a week. Same day, same time, after using the bathroom, before eating or drinking anything. Write it down. Do not react to a single weigh-in. Look at the trend over three or four weeks. If the line is going in the right direction over a month you are winning, full stop, even if two of those four numbers went up.

Take photos. Take measurements with a tape measure around your waist and hips. Notice how your clothes fit. Pay attention to what you can do physically that you couldn't before. The scale is one tool and it is honestly not even the best one.

I lost the weight I wanted to lose. It took longer than I thought it would, it was not a straight line, and the version of me who was sobbing in front of the scale on a Thursday morning was making it so much harder than it had to be.

If you are weighing yourself every day and it is wrecking your mood, please just stop. Put the scale in a closet for two weeks. Trust the process and trust the deficit. The number will come down when it is ready and you do not need to watch it the whole time.

You are not going to weigh yourself thin. The work happens between the weigh-ins

I'm writing this from my kitchen at 11pm because I cannot sleep and my partner is already in bed and I have to put this somewhere.

Some background. I've been at my company for almost three years as a senior accountant. There's been a manager position open on my team since January. I applied internally the day it was posted. My boss told me I was the obvious choice. His exact words were "this is yours to lose."

I did the internal interview process. Two rounds, a case study, a meeting with the department head. Everything felt smooth. The department head told me at the end of our meeting that she was "looking forward to working with me in a new capacity." Those words. I wrote them down in my notes app on the way back to my desk because I wanted to remember them.

Three weeks later they announced they were going with an external hire. A woman from a competitor. I was told they "appreciated my candidacy" and that there would be "other opportunities."

I was crushed but I tried to be professional about it. I congratulated the new hire on LinkedIn. I helped onboard her. I am a grown adult and I told myself this is how it goes sometimes.

Tonight I went to a baby shower for a coworker. Not someone on my team, someone from a different department I've gotten friendly with over the years. There were maybe fifteen women there. I knew about half of them.

At one point I'm in the kitchen helping carry stuff out and I'm standing next to one of the women I don't really know. She works in HR. We're making small talk and she asks what I do at the company. I tell her. She tilts her head a little and goes "oh wait, are you the one who applied for the manager role on the controller's team?"

I said yes.

She goes "oh my god, I'm so sorry. That whole thing was such a mess."

I just looked at her.

She kept talking. I don't think she realized I didn't already know. She said the department head had wanted to hire me. The hiring manager wanted me. But there's a VP I have barely interacted with, maybe three meetings in three years, who pushed for the external hire. Apparently he and the new hire know each other from a previous company. He vouched for her in a senior leadership meeting I obviously was not in. He said something to the effect of "we need fresh perspective, not someone who's already absorbed our bad habits."

That was the deciding comment. A man who has spoken to me maybe four times total said I have "absorbed bad habits" and that was the end of my promotion.

The HR woman realized halfway through that I didn't know any of this and started backtracking. "Oh I thought they told you, I'm sorry, please don't say I said anything." I told her of course I wouldn't. I went back into the living room and watched my coworker open onesies for twenty more minutes with a smile on my face.

I have been at this company for almost three years. I have never had a negative performance review. I have never had a single piece of critical feedback about "bad habits." My boss has told me on multiple occasions that I am one of the most reliable people on the team. And one comment from one VP in one meeting I was not invited to ended my chance at a job I had earned.

The thing that is keeping me up is not even the unfairness. It's that I will go to work on Monday and I will sit in meetings with this VP and I will smile at him and he will have no idea that I know. He gets to walk around having torpedoed my career while I have to act like nothing happened because the only person who told me asked me not to say anything.

And the new hire is genuinely fine. She's nice. She's good at her job. I cannot even resent her. She didn't do anything wrong. The person who did this to me is someone I cannot confront, cannot question, and cannot avoid.

How do people stay at companies after finding out things like this? Because right now I feel like everything I have done here has been for nothing and the people deciding my future are having conversations about me that I will never be in the room for.

Is this just how every company works? Are we all just one offhand comment away from losing things we earned, and we only ever find out by accident at a baby shower?

I feel like I've been playing chess against people who were playing a different game the entire time.

I know the gym can be intimidating when you're starting out, and I genuinely respect everyone who shows up and puts in the work. We've all been the new person at some point.

But please, please wipe down the equipment when you're done. Even if you don't think you sweated that much, you did. Your forearms touched the handles, your back touched the pad, your hands gripped the bar. Sweat carries bacteria, and gym equipment is one of the dirtiest surfaces you'll touch all day. Staph and other skin infections spread this way, and they're not something you want to deal with. A guy at my gym ended up with a nasty boil on his shoulder last year that required antibiotics. From a bench.

I'm posting this because today I went to use the lat pulldown and the seat was literally damp. Like, visibly wet. The guy who used it before me just got up, grabbed his water bottle, and walked off to the next machine. Didn't even look at the spray bottle that was sitting three feet away.

It takes ten seconds. The gym provides the spray and the paper towels for free. Just do it.

I need to type this out or I'm going to spiral all night.

Six weeks ago I got a verbal offer for a senior project manager role. Good company, 30% salary bump, fully remote. The kind of job you tell your family about.

The recruiter called me on a Thursday afternoon. She said "we're very excited, we're just going to do a quick reference check and then we'll send over the formal offer package, should be early next week."

I gave them three references. My former direct manager Lisa. A colleague I had worked closely with for two years. And my old skip-level from a previous company who I thought loved me.

Early next week came. Nothing.

I followed up. "Still working through the reference process, shouldn't be much longer."

Another week. "We're finalizing things on our end."

Then the email. "We've decided to move forward with another candidate. We wish you the best in your search."

I was devastated but I told myself these things happen. I moved on. Kind of.

Fast forward to yesterday. I'm at a birthday dinner for a friend. Her husband works in HR at a completely different company, we've always gotten along. A few drinks in he asks how my job search is going. I tell him the story about the offer that disappeared.

He asks which company. I tell him. His face does something weird.

He goes "oh that's funny, I know someone who interviewed there a few months back and had a similar thing happen." He pulls out his phone. Shows me a LinkedIn message in his inbox from a recruiter at that exact company. A recruiter he knows professionally.

The message is asking if he knows anything about a candidate. My name is in the message.

He had never responded because he didn't know me well enough at the time and didn't want to comment either way.

But he scrolls up and shows me the full message. The recruiter had reached out to him cold because he was listed as a former colleague on my LinkedIn. He was not one of the references I gave them.

The message says "we're doing due diligence on this candidate before extending a formal offer. Any concerns?"

He said he never replied. But someone else they reached out to apparently did.

I sat there with my wine glass halfway to my mouth just completely still.

They didn't just call my references. They went off-list. They found people I didn't choose and called them. And someone I didn't pick, someone I had no idea was in this process, said something that killed my offer.

I have a pretty good idea who it was. There's one person from my LinkedIn history who I had a difficult working relationship with three years ago. We were never enemies exactly but we were not friends. I would never have given her as a reference. But she's listed as a former colleague and her profile is public.

I have no proof. I will never have proof. I cannot call the company and ask because they will not tell me. I cannot confront her because I have no confirmation and it would make me look unhinged.

I just have this sick feeling in my stomach and a job offer that disappeared after a verbal yes.

The thing that's making me crazy is I did everything right. I prepared. I interviewed well. I negotiated professionally. I gave good references. And none of that mattered because they went around me and found someone I didn't even know was in the room.

Does this happen more than people realize? Are companies routinely going off-list and calling people you didn't choose? Because if so nobody talks about this and they absolutely should.

I feel like I've been playing a game where I didn't know all the rules.

i'm a 32 year old woman who spent about 8 years being overweight, tried everything, failed most of it, and then finally figured out what actually works. i lost 64 pounds over two years and kept it off. i'm not a trainer or a nutritionist, just someone who learned the hard way so maybe you don't have to

i see a lot of people on here asking the same questions over and over and making the same mistakes i made so here's everything i wish someone had told me clearly at the start

FIRST. you cannot out-exercise a bad diet. stop trying

this was my biggest mistake for years. i'd go to the gym, feel virtuous, come home and eat way more than i burned because i felt like i'd earned it. weight loss is probably 80% what you eat and 20% everything else. you can walk 10000 steps every day and still gain weight if you're eating too much. the gym is important and you should do it but it will not save you from a diet that puts you in a surplus

the first thing you need to do is figure out your TDEE. google TDEE calculator, put in your stats, and set your activity level honestly. if you sit at a desk all day even if you work out, pick sedentary or lightly active. people always overestimate this and then wonder why they're not losing. your TDEE is how many calories you burn in a day. eat less than that number and you will lose weight. it is genuinely that simple even if it's not easy

to lose about 1 pound a week eat 500 calories less than your TDEE per day. that's it. that's the whole formula

SECOND. track everything you eat. no seriously everything

download myfitnesspal or any calorie tracking app and log every single thing that goes in your mouth. the splash of cream in your coffee. the handful of whatever you grabbed from the cupboard. the bite you finished off your kids plate. all of it

i know it feels obsessive. do it anyway, at least for the first month. most people have genuinely no idea how many calories they're eating and they're usually way off. i thought i was eating around 1800 calories a day. i was eating closer to 2800. that gap right there is why nothing was working and i had no idea

once you've been doing it long enough that you know roughly what things cost without looking you can start to relax it a bit. but in the beginning just track

THIRD. stop drinking your calories

this one is so simple and so ignored. juice, flavoured coffee drinks, smoothies, alcohol, soda. all of it adds up fast and none of it fills you up the way food does. a large latte, a glass of juice with breakfast and a couple of glasses of wine at night could easily be 600-800 calories and most people don't count any of it

switch to water as your main drink. if you're addicted to soda and can't quit cold turkey switch to diet soda, zero calories and it scratches the same itch. it's not perfect but it's a lot better than regular soda every day. just drink more water generally, a lot of the time when you think you're hungry you're actually just dehydrated

FOURTH. eat foods that fill you up without costing you a lot of calories

this is the actual secret to not being miserable while eating less. some foods are very high in calories for a small amount. some foods are very low in calories for a large amount. you want to build your diet around the second category as much as possible

a huge bowl of spinach or lettuce is like 20-30 calories. a small handful of nuts is 200. a chicken breast is filling and around 150 calories. two tablespoons of ranch dressing is 140 calories and does basically nothing for your hunger. swap the dressings and sauces for lower calorie versions, load up on vegetables, eat plenty of lean protein and you can eat a genuinely large amount of food while still being in a deficit

protein especially. eat a lot of protein. it fills you up more than carbs or fat, it helps you keep muscle while losing fat, and it's hard to overeat. if you're hungry all the time it's probably because you're not eating enough protein

FIFTH. one bad day is not the end

i used to have one bad meal and then decide the whole day was ruined so i might as well eat whatever and restart tomorrow. then tomorrow became monday. then monday became next month. i lost years to that pattern

one bad day in a week where you're otherwise in a deficit does very little damage. it's the five bad days that follow the one bad day that actually set you back. eat badly one day, pick straight back up the next meal, move on. don't make it a bigger thing than it is

SIXTH. the scale will mess with your head if you let it

your weight fluctuates every single day based on water, salt, hormones, digestion and probably the weather. do not weigh yourself every day and do not make any decisions based on a single weigh in. once a week, same morning, same conditions, look at the trend over several weeks not individual numbers

also take photos and measurements. there will be weeks where the scale barely moves but your measurements change and you look different in the mirror. the scale is one tool and not even the most useful one

finally

nobody is coming to do this for you. no supplement, no tea, no wrap, nothing. it's just you making better choices more often than you make worse ones over a long period of time. that sounds boring because it is but it's also the thing that actually works

you don't have to be perfect. you just have to be consistent. and consistency over months beats perfection for two weeks every single time

you can do this. drop any questions in the comments and i'll help where i can

so i (28f) started actually tracking calories for the first time like two weeks ago and i am not okay

some background — i grew up in a household where nobody counted anything ever. big family, big portions, food was love, you ate what was put in front of you and you finished it. i never thought about calories because nobody around me did. it just wasn't a thing

so i'm an adult now, living on my own, finally trying to actually do this seriously for the first time and i downloaded myfitnesspal and started logging everything

i want to talk about what happened when i logged the rice

so in my house growing up rice was just... a side. like the thing that went next to the actual food. you'd pile it on the plate without thinking because it's just rice right. it's basically nothing. it's what you eat when you're trying to be healthy

i made rice the other night and before i put it on my plate i weighed it like i've been doing with everything. one normal serving, the amount i would have considered a smallish portion honestly, not even a big scoop

480 calories

for the SIDE

and this wasn't even the amount i would have actually eaten before. before i started tracking i would have had probably twice that easy and not thought twice about it because again. it's rice. it's healthy

i just stood there in my kitchen staring at the scale for like 30 seconds

then i looked up the other things i used to eat normally. the big bowl of pasta i'd make when i wanted something "light". the smoothie i used to have for breakfast because fruit is healthy. the handful of mixed nuts i'd snack on because nuts are good for you

i think i was eating somewhere between 3500 and 4000 calories a day without realising it and i genuinely thought i ate pretty normally. not great but not crazy. just normal

the smoothie alone was probably 600-700 calories and i was having it thinking i was being healthy because it had spinach in it

the thing that really got me was the olive oil. i've been cooking with olive oil because it's supposed to be good for you and yes it is but one tablespoon is 120 calories and i was doing like four or five glugs into the pan which is definitely not one tablespoon and i was doing that every single day sometimes twice

nobody taught me any of this. nobody in my family talked about it. we just ate and this was normal and i genuinely had no idea

i'm not even mad about it i'm just kind of shocked at myself for being surprised that things weren't working when i tried to lose weight before. i wasn't eating badly necessarily i was just eating absolutely enormous amounts of everything and had no frame of reference for what a normal portion actually looked like

anyway if you're just starting out and you think you eat pretty normally i would strongly suggest tracking for just one week before changing anything. just to see. it was a wake up call i really needed even if it did make me feel a little insane

does anyone else have a specific food that absolutely floored them when they looked up the calories? because i feel like i need to know i'm not alone in this

i'm writing this because when i started i was reading posts like this at midnight desperately hoping something would click. so if that's you right now, hi, this is for you

quick thing first — go see your doctor before you start anything. not because i'm being overly cautious but because i wish i had done it sooner. turns out some of the generic advice floating around the internet is genuinely bad for certain people depending on what's going on with their body. get your bloodwork done, know your numbers, then start. saves a lot of guessing

what actually worked

stopping the all or nothing thinking

every time i failed before it was because i treated one bad meal like it cancelled everything. ate something i wasn't supposed to on a wednesday and by thursday i'd decided the whole week was ruined and i'd restart monday. monday comes and i'm back to square one having spent 5 days eating like it was my last week on earth. i cannot tell you how many months i lost to that cycle. one bad meal is like 800 calories. the four days of "screw it" eating after it is the actual problem. pick back up at the next meal. not monday. the next meal

actually tracking what i was eating

i thought i ate pretty healthy. i was wrong and the amount i was wrong by was embarrassing. not because i was eating terrible food just because i had absolutely no idea what portions actually looked like in real life. a serving of peanut butter is two tablespoons. i was doing like six and calling it a snack. start weighing your food, log everything including the bite you took off someone else's plate and the milk in your four daily coffees. all of it. it's annoying for about two weeks and then it becomes automatic

protein. seriously just eat more protein

i cannot overstate how much this changed things. i used to be hungry all the time and i thought that was just what dieting felt like. then i started actually hitting my protein goal and the hunger basically disappeared. it keeps you full, it helps you keep muscle while you're losing fat, and it's genuinely hard to overeat. if you take nothing else from this post take this: eat more protein

finding movement i didn't hate

i tried running. i hate running. i tried group fitness classes. i felt like an idiot. i tried the elliptical and nearly died of boredom. what i actually liked was lifting weights and walking. so that's what i did. five days a week, weights and walking. nothing revolutionary but i kept doing it because i didn't dread it. the best workout is the one you show up to. that's genuinely it

taking photos instead of living on the scale

the scale will lie to you constantly. it goes up when you drink water. it goes up before your period. it goes up if you had more salt than usual. none of that is fat. i spent years letting a number that fluctuates 3-4 pounds in a single day decide how i felt about myself and it nearly broke me every single time. once a week weigh in, same conditions every time, and even then i cared more about the monthly trend than any single number. the photos though. the photos don't lie. comparing month one to month four when the scale had barely moved was the thing that kept me going

what didn't work

cutting out everything i liked on day one

done this so many times. works for about three weeks and then you lose your mind and eat everything in the house. you don't have to eat perfectly to lose weight. you have to eat less than you burn. if that includes some chocolate or some chips or a glass of wine then fine. build a way of eating you can actually live with long term or you will quit. you will always quit

doing it quietly with no accountability

i tried to lose weight in secret for years because i didn't want people to notice if i failed. which meant when i did fail there was no one to help me get back on track. telling one person who actually cared made a bigger difference than i expected. you don't have to announce it to the world but having someone who checks in on you is worth a lot

relying on motivation

motivation is not real. or it is real but it shows up when it feels like it and disappears the moment you actually need it. the days i least wanted to do anything were usually the days i most needed to. i stopped waiting to feel motivated and started just doing the thing anyway. it gets easier but it never fully gets easy and that's fine, you don't need it to feel easy you just need to do it

the scale every single morning

already mentioned this but it deserves its own section because i genuinely think daily weighing has ended more weight loss journeys than anything else. you will have a great week and the scale will go up and you will quit and it will be the scale's fault. weigh once a week or honestly even less if you can manage it

stuff nobody really tells you

the loose skin thing is real and it's ok and you deal with it. the comments from people who knew you before are weird and sometimes upsetting even when they're meant to be compliments. your relationship with food probably has stuff underneath it worth looking at. buying clothes that fit right now instead of waiting until you're smaller is not giving up, it's just being a person who deserves to feel good right now

also the mental shift takes way longer than the physical one. the body changes faster than the brain catches up. you'll still suck in in photos out of habit. you'll still reach for the bigger size in shops. you'll still sometimes feel like the person you were before even when you're clearly not. that's normal and it fades slowly

the thing i want you to actually remember

you're not going to be perfect at this. nobody is. the people who succeed at this long term are not the ones who never slip up, they're the ones who keep going after they do. one bad day, one bad week, one bad month even. it doesn't matter as long as you pick back up

you've got this. drop any questions below and i'll answer what i can, i'm not an expert but i've been through it.

I was a hiring manager for 6 years. I never told candidates what I'm about to tell you.

I was on the other side of the table for six years. I hired over 200 people across three companies. I sat in the rooms where decisions were made. I watched candidates get rejected for reasons that had nothing to do with their qualifications.

I never talked about this publicly. I felt a little guilty about it honestly. But the market is brutal right now and I think people deserve to know.

So here it is.

The "maybe pile" is where careers go to die.

Every hiring manager has three piles. Yes. No. Maybe.

Everyone talks about getting into the yes pile. Nobody talks about the maybe pile. The maybe pile is the most dangerous place you can be.

Here is what happens to the maybe pile. We review the yes pile first. We schedule interviews. We get busy. We forget about the maybe pile for two weeks. Then HR reminds us the position needs to be closed. We look at the maybe pile. We pick one or two people if we still need them. Everyone else gets a rejection email that says "we decided to move forward with other candidates."

You were qualified. You just were not obvious enough in the first ten seconds. So you went into maybe. And maybe killed you.

The difference between yes and maybe is almost never talent. It is almost always clarity. The yes pile candidates made it immediately obvious they could do the specific job we posted. The maybe pile candidates made us work to figure that out. We did not have time to work. So we moved on.

I used to ignore cover letters completely. Then I started reading them. I wish I hadn't.

For the first four years I never read a single cover letter. I told candidates to submit one but I never opened them. Most hiring managers I know do the same.

Then one quarter we were hiring for a senior role and I was really struggling to choose between two finalists. My colleague said read their cover letters. So I did.

One of them had written a cover letter that was clearly a template. "I am writing to express my interest in the Senior Marketing Manager role at your esteemed company." It had the wrong company name in the second paragraph. They had forgotten to update it.

The other one was two short paragraphs. No formal greeting. No "I am writing to express." Just: here is the exact problem you are trying to solve, here is the one time I solved that exact problem, here is the result. Done.

I hired the second person. They were outstanding.

Here is the thing though. That cover letter barely mattered. Because by the time I read it I had already decided she was a finalist. The cover letter just confirmed what her resume already showed. Her resume was so clear and specific that she never ended up in the maybe pile.

Cover letters do not save bad resumes. They can only confirm good ones.

The conversation that happened after you left the interview.

I want to tell you what happens in the room after you walk out.

You finish your interview. You shake hands. You leave. Then four people sit around a table for fifteen minutes and talk about you.

Here is what they actually say. They do not say "her Python skills were impressive." They say "could you see her doing this job." They do not say "his resume had great metrics." They say "did he seem like someone you would trust to own this."

It is emotional. It is gut based. It is not fair. But it is real.

The candidates who make it through are the ones who made the interviewers feel something specific. Confidence. Calm. Clarity. Not nervousness. Not trying too hard. Not over-explaining every answer.

The number one thing that killed candidates in my debriefs was rambling. Someone asks you a question and you talk for four minutes. By minute two I have stopped listening. I am just waiting for you to finish. Then I write "unclear communicator" in my notes.

Answer the question. Stop. Wait for the next one.

Why we ghosted you. The honest answer.

I am not proud of this.

Sometimes we ghosted candidates because we filled the role and HR forgot to send the rejection emails. That is a process failure and it is on us.

But sometimes we ghosted candidates because we had a conversation internally that we did not want to put in writing. Something like "she was great but she seemed like she might leave in a year." Or "he was technically strong but I'm not sure he would fit with the team lead." We could not say those things officially. So we said nothing.

I know that is awful to hear. But silence is sometimes the answer that protects the company legally while also being the most human thing we had left to offer. We did not want to lie to you. We did not want to open a conversation we could not finish honestly. So we went quiet.

If you got ghosted after a final round, it was probably something said in a debrief that nobody could put in an email. It almost certainly was not about your skills.

The thing I started doing differently in my last year.

In my last year as a hiring manager I changed how I ran the process. I was tired of watching good candidates disappear into the system.

I started looking at rejected applications myself once a week. Not the ones the ATS filtered out. The ones that made it through but got sorted into no by my team. I found three people we had rejected who I thought were clearly strong. I called them. I interviewed them. I hired two of them. They were both excellent.

The system missed them because their resumes did not match our keywords precisely. But they were right for the role. I almost never found them.

I tell this story because I want you to understand something. The system is not designed to find the best person. It is designed to reduce the workload of finding a good enough person quickly. Those are very different goals.

Your job is not to be the best. Your job is to not get filtered out before a human sees you.

Format your resume so the machine can read it. Match your title to the exact words in the posting. Put your real skills in a clean list. Use tools like CVnomist or Hyperwrite if you are applying at volume and burning out on the tailoring. I would have used them if I were on your side of the table.

Get past the filter. Then be yourself.

I left that job eight months ago. I am job hunting now.

I know how it works from the inside and I am still finding it hard. The market is genuinely difficult. Companies are cautious. They want exact matches. They are not taking chances on potential the way they used to.

But I also know that the filter is beatable. I have seen it beaten. I have watched people with imperfect backgrounds get through because their resume was clear, their keywords matched, and they made the interviewer feel something in the room.

You are not up against a perfect system. You are up against an overwhelmed human using an imperfect tool.

Help them find you. That is the whole game.

So i've been lurking here for ages and i figured i'd finally post something since this sub honestly helped me a lot when i was starting out so maybe this helps someone else idk

quick disclaimer before anything - i'm just a random person on the internet, what worked for me might not work for you, i'm not a nutritionist or a doctor or anything like that. if you have any health stuff going on please go see an actual doctor before starting anything. ok cool.

so a bit of background. i've tried losing weight probably 6 or 7 times over like 8 years. every single time i'd lose a bit then just... stop. gain it back. feel terrible about myself. repeat. the usual story a lot of people here probably know too well.

the thing that was different this time (i've lost about 30kg over roughly 14 months) wasn't some magic trick or a special diet. it was honestly just finally figuring out why i kept failing before and fixing that instead of just trying harder at the same stuff that wasn't working

so here's what actually changed for me

i stopped treating it like a sprint

every other time i tried i'd go full send immediately. like day 1 i'd cut out all junk, start exercising every day, drink 3 litres of water, go to sleep early. and obviously that lasts about 2 weeks before real life happens and the whole thing collapses. this time i changed literally one thing first and only added the next thing once the first felt normal. took longer to get going but i didn't crash and burn at week 3 for the first time ever

calories actually matter and i was kidding myself before

i used to say i "ate pretty healthy" and couldn't understand why i wasn't losing weight. then i actually started logging everything in myfitnesspal (and i mean everything, the handful of nuts, the splash of milk in 4 coffees a day, all of it) and oh my god. i was eating way more than i thought. not because i was eating badly necessarily just because portions and liquid calories and snacking adds up really fast. the logging thing felt annoying at first but honestly after a couple weeks it becomes pretty quick and automatic

also worked out my TDEE properly (tdeecalculator.net is the one i used) and was realistic about my activity level. i put sedentary even though i go to the gym because i sit at a desk all day and i think that was actually important. a lot of the calculators let you pick "moderately active" and i think most people (including past me) pick that when they probably shouldn't

i stopped doing exercise i hated

for years i thought losing weight meant running. i hate running. like deeply hate it. i'd force myself to go, feel miserable, eventually stop going, then feel guilty about stopping. this time i just didn't run at all. i started lifting instead because i actually didn't mind it and some days even kind of liked it. the best exercise is the one you'll actually keep doing, that's genuinely it

the scale thing nearly broke me every other time

i used to weigh myself every day and let whatever number came up decide how i felt for that entire day. your weight can swing like 2kg in a single day just from water and food still being in your system and all that. it's not real. now i weigh once a week at the same time (morning, after bathroom, before eating) and even then i look at the trend over a few weeks not any single number. also started taking measurements with a tape measure because there were weeks the scale barely moved but i'd lost a cm off my waist which is obviously what actually matters

the times i nearly quit and didn't

there were a few weeks where i lost basically nothing. like 200g in 3 weeks at one point. past me would've given up there and said it wasn't working. this time i just kept going and the weight started moving again. plateaus are genuinely just part of the process and they do end (usually) as long as you're actually sticking to things

also had a couple of weeks where i just ate badly and didn't track. didn't treat it as a failure and "restart monday" situation, just picked back up the next day. i think that was actually a big one honestly. one bad week isn't the problem, quitting because of one bad week is

stuff that didn't matter as much as i thought

• what time of day i ate (i eat pretty late most nights, still lost weight fine)
• whether my meals were "clean" or whatever (i still eat stuff i enjoy just less of it)
• supplements (complete waste of money for the most part, maybe protein powder to hit protein goals that's it)
• doing a specific diet type, keto or whatever. just being in a deficit is the thing

anyway that's basically it. nothing revolutionary i know but genuinely the difference this time was just understanding the basics properly and actually being consistent instead of intense if that makes sense. happy to answer stuff if anyone has questions, i'm not an expert but i can say what worked for me at least.