I'm sure other people have made posts like this on this thread, but it has been nagging at me to say something on the topic of weightloss as someone who did weightloss wrong.
There is nothing wrong with losing weight, losing weight can be very healthy - if you are overweight, and you lose the weight slowly and sustainably. Losing weight should always be done primarily for its health benefits, not purely for aesthetic purposes - there is nothing wrong with wanting to look better, to have more confidence in your appearance, but to approach weightloss with your only goal being to become more attractive is a dangerous mentality, and one I myself have fallen victim to.
For context, in the space of about 6 months I lost 35 pounds; not the most impressive weight loss, given some of the stories I've seen on here, but that is because when I started losing weight I had a healthy BMI. I was slightly on the upper end of healthy, albeit, but I was not overweight by any means. I had decided to lose weight purely to look better. I am 5'8" tall, 19 years old, and female, and my starting weight was about 145 lbs. I dropped to 110 lbs. I lost my period, I lost any muscular strength I had previously enjoyed, and I lost the ability to care about much beyond food, and what I felt I was "allowed" to eat.
And its very, very easy to say "Oh, but I won't get an eating disorder, because I'm being healthy and doing this the right way!" and guess what - that is exactly what I said to myself. I didn't overly restrict in the beginning, I ate a balanced diet, I did moderate exercise. I started in the same way that anyone attempting helthy weightloss would start, but as I got deeper into so-called "diet culture" and learnt more about calories, about how many calories indivdual forms of exercise realistically burn, about the fact that the lower your weight, the fewer calories you have to consume to maintain it, I began to grow afraid of calories. I cut carbs and fats out of my diet to the greatest extent I could, having learnt that of all foods they were the most calorically dense, I limited even starchy vegetables to this end. I would eat a small portion of protein and a whole heap of undressed, bland, boring salad at meals I couldn't avoid. I had sworn myself off of ever enjoying chocolate, pizza, pasta etc ever again. And for the sake of looking better, well, I resigned myself to it.
Naturally, this is no life at all, especially for someone who had just started university, and would deliberately avoid spending time with the new people I met because that time spent together would frequently entail drinking - and liquid calories were naturally a no-no - and would spend far too much time exercising, to the point of neglecting work and lectures to do so. I have to stress that anorexia was not a sudden development - it crept up on me, because it is far too easy to slip into obsession after starting a serious diet.
And the unfortunate consequence of starving myself for so long was that the moment I went home for summer, and I was once more in a house where food was readily available at all times, was that I was unable to control myself. I entered a very dangerous, very upsetting binge cycle, which I would try to offset with intermittent periods of starvation. I was seriously binging - I'm talking 5000+ calories a day - and the result was that I grew very incredibly depressed, lost any desire to leave my home because of how disgusting I felt, and inevitably I gained quite a lot of weight. I only gained back 20 pounds before I managed to get a lid on the overeating, so it might be judged that my "diet" was semi-successful, right? Because I lost and kept off 15 pounds (that, bear in mind, I did not need to lose in the first place). But for the depression, and the anxiety, and the trauma it has caused me, and for how it has destroyed my relationship with food, I wish I had just learned to love myself at a slightly higher weight.
Take it from me, if you are losing weight, be so, so careful, because the obsession may well sneak up on you. For anyone who feels even a hint of an obsession with calorie counting, or even the slightest compulsion to exercise perhaps more frequently than you should, please stop, and get help. Do not harm yourselves in the way that I have harmed myself.
The fallout from excessive weightloss is not worth whatever aesthetic gains you judged yourself to have made. You can lose your period, possibly render yourself permanently infertile, lose brain mass, and if carried on too long, an eating disorder can and will kill you. You will lose friends, you will lose your personality, and none of it will be worth it.
To end on a slightly lighter note, I am now on my way to recovery, and managing so far to maintain a healthy BMI. My period has come back, and I'm stable enough so far that I haven't had to drop out of university. I'm slowly learning to care about myself again, but these things take time, and building upwards from rock bottom is not easy. Do not do to yourselves what I did to myself.
Tl;dr: Weightloss is great if you need to lose weight, but be incredibly weary of becoming obsessive about it. Take care of yourselves, people!
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