Hi people! This is my first-ever post on Reddit, so please be nice if I make a Reddit faux pas. I've been lurking on this sub (and a few others) for a while now, but today I finally got around to actually making an account, because I wanted to post here. I'm sorry if this ends up being a little long - I feel like I need to get my whole "backstory" out there, because personal validation or something like that, so here goes.
First of all, you've all inspired me. I don't like to use that word, because I don't feel "inspired" in the "traditional" sense of "really excited and fired up about doing a thing". It's more like, I suddenly feel, in a quiet, calm, almost detached way, like I can do this. Reading posts here was sort of a quiet, low-key wake-up call of "So this looks like it works for people. And it's really simple. No weird diet to follow, no exercise requirement, no restricted foods. It's just numbers. Know what you're expending, know what you're eating, and eat less than you expend. That's it. It's really simple. So yeah, you can do this. If they all can do it, you can too." So I'm glad this sub exists.
(If anyone's wondering how I got here, as a lurker who didn't even have a Reddit account before today, I'm pretty sure it was because of r/antiMLM. I enjoy some of the more ridiculous stories on that sub, and if I remember right, someone had posted something there about "Ugh, I want to lose weight and I'm looking for advice, but every time I say something about it on Facebook, all I get is a bunch of MLM people trying to sell me overpriced nutrtion shakes and crap, and I'm not interested, where can I go for good weight loss advice/community?" And someone else was like, "Go check out r/loseit, they're really helpful and stuff." So I got curious, and came over here to check it out, and am now starting my own weight loss quest. Yay!)
So anyway. My story: I've always been kinda heavy for my age/height. This got bad in middle school and really bad in high school. I basically ate whatever the F I wanted, whenever the F I wanted to. My mom is a bit overweight as well, and my dad is straight-up obese. He's also diabetic (type 2), and his issues have a lot of relevance to why I want to lose weight, so bear with me while I talk about him for a second. He's in his early 80s now (20 years older than my mom, if anyone's wondering). When my little sister and I were younger, he actually made some semblance of an effort to eat decently, and so we would always make a joke out of it if he ordered dessert when we were out to eat ("Oh no, Dad's misbehaving, hahaha!" kind of thing). But when I was in high school, he started "misbehaving" more frequently, and his diabetes got worse. He started needing to actually do insulin injections before meals and whatnot, and his blood sugar started getting less and less under control. Eventually, one evening (I think I was in 10th grade), he ate an entire pound of gummy spearmint leaves in one sitting, and proceeded to have a low-blood-sugar blackout episode, which made my mom call 911 and scared the crap out of all of us. From that point onward, he just got worse. More hypoglycemic blackouts, more binging on candy and stuff, less mobility, all sorts of deteriorating health. Mom ended up having to put Dad in a nursing home my freshman year of college, because she's still working and whatnot, and has neither the time nor the skill (nor the patience, TBH) necessary to be Dad's primary caregiver. Even in the nursing home, Dad's been known to wander (via wheelchair) down to the dining room area, where there are vending machines, and help himself to candy bars that he knows he shouldn't be eating. It kind of feels like he has an addiction to sugar/carbs, and that it ruined him. At least, when I hear people talking about parents ruining themselves due to drug/alcohol addictions, it feels a little too relatable when I look at my dad's behavior with sugar.
So that all sucks a bit, and basically, I don't want to end up like him.
I think I weighed about 170 when I started college, and I lost about 30 lbs my freshman year. Yes, you read that right: I lost weight my freshman year of college. It was a combination of eating right (I ate a lot of salads and went pretty low-carb all that year), having a dorm that was on top of a large hill (while all the classrooms and dining hall and everything were at the bottom of the hill), and having a hiking-and-canoeing class in the spring semester (I majored in Outdoor Recreation Management, so that class was actually one if my required ones!). I didn't lose as much weight my sophomore year, due to a variety of factors, but I still finished that year somewhere in the 135-138 range. I worked at a summer camp that summer, and didn't eat quite as well as I could have, but I was also pretty active that summer, so I think it all evened out okay.
So yeah, the summer of 2013 was my peak in terms of healthy weight and athleticism. That's kind of the point I'd like to get back to (or at least, as close as possible). I looked GOOD in those pictures from that summer.
My junior year of college, I was living off-campus, so not on top of the hill any more. I was also doing a lot of my own cooking (and eating less salads, because I HATE making salads for some reason), and generally was eating less healthy. I tried to kid myself that I was eating just fine, thank you, but I know I wasn't. I was also dealing with some probably-diagnosable (but undiagnosed) mood disorder - I'm guessing depression, because I felt miserable and unmotivated a lot. So that probably made me do some emotion-eating. And my boyfriend (who I had just met at camp the previous summer) was finishing his senior year at a college in another state, about a 12-hr drive away from me, so we were long-distance, and that was stressful, which I think caused some stress-eating. Anyway, I gained back about 30 lbs that year. And my senior year wasn't much better - I gained about 15-20 lbs that year. Summers after junior and senior year were killer - I was working at the same camp, but there was a new director, who was very strict and demanding (like, ex-Army strict and demanding), and I KNOW I did a lot of stress-eating those two summers. My senior year, my two best friends and I were trying to work out regularly, and we put in a decent amount of time at the college's fitness center, and had a lot of fun besides, but we were also all still eating badly (so much ramen and donuts!), so it did a limited amount of good for any of us.
After I graduated, I was still working at that camp for a while (they do a lot of off-season retreats, so I was mainly helping out with those), and then I was back at my mom's house over the holidays, trying to figure out WTF to do with my life (working at the camp year-round was okay, but I had student loan payments coming up, and the camp did not pay enough to cover those and still have money). I got a job at our local grocery store for a couple of months, and then finally got a job as a State Park Ranger at a park near Philadelphia. So I moved there in May of 2016 (and am still there). I think I weighed about 165-170 when I started that job. I weigh over 190 now.
I could come out with all kinds of explanations about why I gained 20+ more pounds in the past two years, but the bottom line is that I just stopped trying. I just stopped actually caring what I put into my body. I still do a lot of my own cooking, and am perfectly capable of making healthy meals, but I also eat a lot of snacks and overly sugary stuff. Rent in my area is also really expensive, so even though the state park pays me decently, I currently have a second job at a nearby Barnes & Noble. This leads to two problems: I've gotten a lot of drinks in the Starbucks-serving cafe over the past two years (and they are SO calorie-filled, it's ridiculous), and I have less free time to cook, so I've been eating more fast food. I've tried to kid myself that the fast food was "healthier" - most of it has come from Wawa, which is a local convenience store/gas station chain that does made-to-order deli-style food, rather than from McDonald's and the like - but looking at the actual calorie counts on their food, that crap isn't anywhere near healthy. (My guess is there's a lot of hidden added sugar to blame.)
I've been wanting to lose weight for a WHILE now, but I haven't actually done anything about it. It's been hard, for one thing, to find any motivation. (I think I'm still dealing with undiagnosed depression, honestly, and that that's part of WHY motivation has been so nonexistent. I haven't found a therapist yet, but I want to.) But like I said earlier, reading posts here has given me the inspiration (I guess) that I needed to actually start. Well, that along with the fact that my state park uniform, which fit me decently when I started, has recently gotten so tight it's painful. Actually, a lot of my clothing doesn't fit me right any more, which makes me really sad. I'm a bit of a clothing collector, I guess. I like to comb thrift stores for interesting and unique items (even though I damn well don't need them - I have enough clothing for three of me, probably). I'm also part of a LARPing group, so I have a whole sub-wardrobe of costume pieces for that. And a lot of my coolest and most interesting outfits, as well as a lot of my LARP character's clothing, either don't fit me right or don't fit me at all. I've been sad and frustrated about that for ages, but when my park uniform started actually being painful to wear, I realized I can't keep living like this, and that I need to actually make some changes. That was right around the same time I started lurking here, so I guess that was some really fortunate timing! It took me a couple weeks to actually make the commitment to get started, though, for some reason (I'm perfectly content to blame that on my undiagnosed most-likely-depression, actually). But I'm here now.
Like my title says, it's Day 4 of my weight loss quest, and I'm feeling cautiously hopeful that it'll actually work (read: that I'll actually stick with it). Being a LARPer, as well as a casual player of MTG, D&D, and Skyrim, and a fantasy lover in general, I'm framing my weight loss process as a "quest" rather than a "journey", because it sounds cooler to me that way. And it kind of gives me a more fun set of terminology to work with. I bought myself a nice leatherbound journal, which I've dubbed my "Quest Log", and I'm trying to get in the habit of "updating the Quest Log" (AKA filling a page of the journal) every evening (with my calorie goals, my actual consumption, my weight that morning, and then anything else I feel like writing about at that moment). I'm also framing the problems I encounter along the way as if they are things in a fantasy RPG world. For example, there was free cake available in the breakroom at Barnes & Noble two days ago, and I framed that in my quest log as "It's only Day 2 of my quest, and a rogue cake already attempted to waylay me today". Or when I get my period, it's "Ugh, I have a temporary -3 Resistance to Chocolate." Stuff like that. IDK, it makes the whole process feel a tiny bit more like fun.
So yeah, I realize that became a bit of a novel, and I apologize for that. But I felt like it all needed to be said. If you read all of it... thank you, I guess. I'm here now, I'm working on dropping my unnecessary weight, and I think it's going decently so far, even though it's only Day 4. I'm keeping my fingers crossed for myself, anyway.
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