"You should lose 160 pounds". Those were words I have been hearing every doctor's visit since I moved out of my mother's house 9 years ago. How hopeless that seemed, how difficult it would be, let's just not care. I mean what's the worst that could happen? I'm in my early 20s, I'm invincible, some people drink too much, some people smoke cigarettes, I eat and drink. And I don't even eat and drink that much, I just don't have the metabolism of a thin person.
Does that sound familiar to any of you? Because that was me the entirety of my adult life, up until a year ago when I started half trying, and it's only been about ten months since I started religiously logging in MFP.
Excess weight is a debt, not a monetary debt, but a calorie debt that should be paid back so that the "interest" doesn't keep accruing. The interest on this debt, is the long term detriment to our health that excess weight creates. It can be difficult to see that when you're young, but as time goes on, you want to be paying less in interest, just as you would on a car or home loan, in order to make progress on paying down the debt. The same is true with weight loss, I developed hypertension at 26, I was not pre-diabetic but my doctors were starting to get concerned that I could turn that way at some point in the near future. I developed weight related adult onset asthma, another form of interest on this debt.
But, after 20 years of gaining and maintaining a weight (once I turned 18) north of 300 for most of that time, I was able to pay back the vast majority of this debt that I once thought was hopeless, in less than a year through making small, sustained changes to my eating habits. Looking at it through this lens, it shines a new light on weight loss. Yes, it will take time to reach your goals, and 11 months is nothing to sneeze at. But when you look at it through the lens of 20 years of poor eating habits can be corrected in 11 months, less than 5% of the time it took to put on that weight and maintain, making "interest only payments", you can erase that debt, it can really show you what is possible and what you're capable of.
I give plenty of nitty gritty tips on this sub as to what's worked, feel free to check my post history, but sticking to calorie counting, getting a fitbit to measure your daily calorie expenditure, and targeting foods rich in protein and unsaturated fats really makes a huge difference. It will take time, and the first month will be very challenging, but fortune favors the bold and the consistent. If you were like me with this amount of weight to lose, after being this size for a long time, I know you may be feeling the hopelessness I once did. But you will find the motivation, and you will reach your goals. It's OK to have tried and failed before, losing weight is a skill like any other that takes time to develop. You won't be eating low calories forever, you are teaching your body to get to a weight at a calorie defecit, and then eat to maintain that healthy weight. Maintaining that healthy weight means you get to eat a bit more than the number of calories you eat when losing, but it also means you can't go back to your old habits. Good luck everyone, go out there and make that progress. I can't wait to see the look on my doctor's face when I show up at next year's appointment at goal weight, after she saw me weighing 326 in September 2019, and 248 in August 2020. "You should lose 160 lbs" - OK, I did. Now I will maintain this through what I've learned on my journey of self-discovery.
EDIT: To add, the hypertension diagnosis will be removed after my BP reads normal at my next appt, it was normal in August. Bloodwork all improved drastically, asthma is essentially gone. Weight related health issues tend to correct themselves given enough time and good lifestyle choices.
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