Hey r/loseit!
I made a post about a month and a half ago, when I decided to jump right in, and start contributing to a community that I found very helpful. I talked about what was hard for me: mostly, adjusting to life in a different country, and how feeling so out of place here finally pushed me into starting to tackle my weight. 99 days in, I want to share what I've learned so far. It's a long post, but I hope sharing my story helps someone out there, who may be lurking this sub, insecure and unsure if they can do it.
This isn't going to be an amazing transformation post; I'm nowhere near my goal weight. But, those amazing transformation posts (while being seriously amazing and inspiring), are just one snapshot of the whole process (or two, in the case of progress pics ;). There are a lot of days in between a "before" and an "after" photo. Maybe 99 days for those of you who have less to lose, maybe more for those of you who have more lose. I'm definitely in the second category, and I wanted to write down my thoughts and experiences of living 'all of the days in between' the before and after photo, as they're currently happening.
My stats: 33 F. 167cm (5'6"). SW: 127kg (279.4lbs), CW: 114.6kg (252.1lbs), GW: 80kg (176lb), Ultimate Goal Weight: Healthy BMI
My plan: CICO, using My Fitness Pal (MFP), weight tracking with Happy Scale, and using a physical food scale for everything.
My start:
I moved from the United States to the Netherlands in May of this year. I have always been overweight. I had resigned myself to always being overweight. My birthday is in June, and for my birthday I asked for my favorite winter coat a size larger than the one I already had. I wasn't a believer in "goal clothes," and lived as a practical fat person. If my coat didn't fit, then I needed to get a new coat. I wasn't going to play any games with resolutions like "I'll lose the weight and fit into it again!!" For me, that was just asking to be cold all winter/stuffed like a sad sausage into a coat that was too small. So, I got my coat for my birthday. Hooray!
My birthday came about a month after living here, and even though I was still in my old, defeatist ways, there was an inkling that something needed to change. Living in the Netherlands put my weight in my face in a way living in America never did. It was a combination of, for the first time in my life, taking public transport everywhere (and the associated squishing into the seats), walking along city sidewalks, and navigating stores that were just flat-out smaller than in America. Two people with fully loaded grocery carts can pass each other with room to spare in American grocery stores; here, not so much. I was starting to feel claustrophobic. Not many people looked like me. Dutch fashion appears to be comprised entirely of skinny jeans. I had a hard time with the language barrier. I started to feel anxious going out in public: afraid I didn't fit anywhere. Holding my breath while trying to navigate the 4 available centimeters in between chairs on the terraces. Feeling gloomy that my old job didn't exist here. I was all around feeling crappy.
I wanted to change, but my weight seemed immutable. After all, I had been fat for so long I had actually morphed into a "practical" fat person. An inter-continental move disabused me of any delusions about hoarding "goal clothes" (I had two suitcases, a 23kg weight limit, and the foresight to realize that only the most functional and efficient items in my possession deserved the coveted space therein). I had bought a new winter coat in JUNE because I knew my old one was too tight. I was a fat person who saw life as it was. Or, at least, that's what I thought.
I started lurking this subreddit sometime in June, during that first frenetic month of alternating between thinking why am I the only fat person in Europe?!?! and You're fat, you've always been fat, be reasonable here.
I actually downloaded MFP on June 27th, after my birthday had come and gone, and I had my new coat. I remember the afternoon I downloaded it. I was hungry, and there were some sweet asian rice crackers I had bought a few days prior in the cupboard. I looked for nutritional information and was met with a bunch of Chinese characters. Great. I already don't know Dutch. Let me decipher this Chinese to figure out how many calories are in the 3 crackers I just ate. No, that's stupid. It's three freakin' crackers. Why am I even fat? Are three crackers even that many? This MFP thing is stupid. Delete.
So, that's my fearless beginning friends. I downloaded MFP, ate a few crackers, and then decided the whole thing was stupid. I quit approximately 45 seconds after I signed up for an MFP account. If that isn't a world record, I don't know what is.
My Actual Start:
But, I kept reading r/loseit, because the feelings of just being too big weren't going away. The Netherlands wasn't changing into the United States anytime soon. Nothing else around me was changing; I was changing. I started becoming really anxious, even just to go outside. I didn't just feel too big for my surroundings, I was starting to actively stress out about not being able to understand the hubbub of every-day noise happening around me. Every day was a constant interior monologue of Are those Dutch teenagers laughing because I just walked by, or because one of them just told a joke? Were they laughing at me? What did the conductor just announce is going to happen to this train? Why is the cashier looking at me like that? It sucked. Fortunately, my amazing spouse was there to help a sistah out. She scrimped and saved, and signed me up for an intensive Dutch class in July.
And then, it happened. I was on my way to class, and there was an announcement on the train. I just sat there, as I always did. The announcement ended. I thought to myself hm, lots of people getting out at this stop today; wonder if there's a festival?
Narrator: there was no festival
A train conductor approached me, as I was obliviously tapping away on my phone. He said something in Dutch. I looked up. He realized my Dutch was no good. He informed me in English that the announcement had been made that EVERYONE had to get off the train. I looked around. I was the literal only person sitting on the train. I got off the train, utterly humiliated and defeated.
Afew weeks went by. I was going to my Dutch classes. I found myself once again riding the train. Another announcement was made. And then I heard, as if a choir of heavenly angels were singing directly to me, the train announcement magically transform into coherency: the doors will open on the left. I was shocked. I had thought that everyone was just kind of guessing where the doors opened. It seemed random to me. They actually announced it? I was learning? I understood it!? Could it be that maybe I was going to be OK after all!? What was next? Dutch television suddenly making sense??? Mastering Dutch dialects?!?
Kidding aside, I hope some of you recognize yourselves in my struggle to learn Dutch, even if its not "learning Dutch" that's the exact confounding factor for you. I know that I really had to work on my mental game before I was ready to make any other change. It was absolutely imperative for me to start feeling more comfortable here, by starting with the basics: communication. Maybe for you it's something else. For me, I needed to be able to see my progress in dealing with the trains to feel confident to try something else. And what I saw here, over and over, was people encouraging each other to just try. To just keep doing it. Just keep going to your Dutch class. Just keep logging your calories. Just try. And keep trying.
And I thought about that. I had never been able to lose weight (or speak Dutch!) in my whole life. But I kept reading here, and seeing a lot of people succeed. Some posted every day, in various sticky threads/accountability threads. Some posted after huge milestones and victories. I thought about what it would take to just try again. And then, I realized that it would take exactly the same thing it was going to take to learn Dutch: commitment.
But, was I capable of actually committing to this? I mean, I've been fat forever. Surely I would know by now if I could actually commit to doing this, right?
I started thinking about what I had been able to commit to in my life. Earning a degree or two from institutes of higher education. Marriage. Paying bills on time. Yeah, but that's different. I dismissed it. But then, after thinking and thinking, I realized that every single day in 2018 (starting from January 1st), for no other reason than I wanted to do it, I have filmed one second of video, in order to make all of the clips into a big movie at the end of the year. And a tiny, but very important thought came: if I can do that one thing every single day, maybe I can do ONE MORE thing every day.
And that one thought, about how I could already do something every day, was what made me decide that I could probably try this weight loss thing again. My first few months of filming are pretty abysmal. It took me nearly until April to realize that it was really important to film (from my phone) in "landscape" mode. But, what was important was that I had done it every day, even when it was boring: when there was nothing to film but my cat or the clouds. But, I still did it every day. I reasoned that if I could commit to doing that, then I could commit to tracking my calories every day. My feelings of "too-bigness" weren't changing, and I needed to do something about it. My general stress at being functionally illiterate in Dutch had been improved by just taking one class. Maybe I could work on my weight.
There were no bright flashing lights, no tearful rock bottoms. No concerned doctors giving me serious test results. There was just me, sitting on my bed, telling my spouse that I was just feeling really, really bad and like I didn't fit in, and you know, I've been making these one second clips every day, and I think I can use this calorie tracker app I heard about on Reddit...
Now, I know I'm lucky in this part of the story. I have an amazing spouse whose lived with me on two separate continents (and whose Dutch is absolutely flawless by the way ;), and who knew I was really having a hard time. She said, "OK, let's do this." She downloaded MFP the day after I did, and we both downloaded Happy Scale. She used a gift card she'd been saving to the Dutch version of Amazon and ordered us a digital bathroom scale and a digital food scale. And we started.
The beginning days:
We started counting calories on July 31 and Aug 1 respectively. I was ready to go, and to go hard. I mean, I had progressed from sitting cluelessly on the train all the way to hearing which side the doors were going to open on within a month! I was armed with r/loseit's hive mind, and daily Q&A threads! I was ready to set that daily calorie allotment to the bare minimum, and get shredded!
Lucky for me, my spouse has always been the more reasonable between us. She gently convinced me to start with a 0.5kg (~1.1lbs)/week calorie deficit. I agreed to her terms, but we both did try to stay below the ~1800 calories MFP gave us. Most of the days I stayed below, but some days I ate all 1800. Some days I even ate a little more. That turned out to be OK. I learned a lot that first month.
In the process of logging my calories for the entire month of August (at a relatively gentle deficit), I realized that my lifelong reaction to being fat (but I don't eat THAT much!?) was actually, well, not really a lie. I never really did eat "that much," in the dramatic sense of finding myself routinely covered in Big Mac wrappers and empty Chinese food boxes. But, what I did do, was have that third beer when I should have stopped at two. Or, had a big lunch AND a big dinner. What I found out for myself was that I routinely ate 200 or so calories above what my body needed to maintain its weight. I had gained weight slowly and steadily to 127kg/279.4 pounds over a lifetime of extra beers and appetizers. I wasn't some genetic freak of nature that just looked at food, and immediately gained weight. I didn't have a metabolism that was functioning at 50% of normal. I just ate too much. Some days I ate the right amount, some days I ate a little too much, and some days I ate way too much.
I was really relieved at this discovery. I wasn't secretly eating buckets of fried chicken behind my own back. I wasn't this broken or bad person. My purpose on this earth wasn't just to serve as a human warning to thin people about an inexorable dystopian future of gluttony and worthlessness. I was just someone who ate mozzarella sticks AND pizza when I went out on Friday nights. This was mind-blowing to me.
After the first month:
Towards the end of August/first half of September, my rate of loss slowed down a little. Nothing really dramatic had happened by that point. Clothes still fit (albeit way more comfortably). No one noticed or said anything about my weight loss (so much for "Dutch directness!" ;). I had still eaten pizza in August. My life was actually still pretty normal. So, Spouse and I decided together that we were ready to lower our daily calorie limits to a more aggressive 0.8kg(/~1.7lb) rate/week (~1500 calories).
That was tough. The first few weeks of that, I was hungry. I felt persecuted by my own diet. I was having a harder time finding creative ways to eat pizza with a 1500 calorie daily budget. I just kept sticking to it anyway. Sometimes, I went over, all the way up to the luxurious 1800 calories I was eating before. Sometimes, I ate to maintenance. I just tried to go back to 1500 calories the next day. Over the course of a few weeks, that got a lot easier for me. I hit a 10kg (22lb) loss. Wait, this was actually working!? What!
I started viewing my daily calorie budget as exactly that, a budget. I conceptualized it as an actual (financial) budget. I reasoned that if I were trying to help someone get control over their finances, I would give them a hard limit, and make them write everything down too. And, I wouldn't let them stop the second they paid off a credit card. I wouldn't think it was weird that they needed to keep a spreadsheet, or put more effort into planning their daily expenses than the average bear; I would just see it for what it was: a tool to help them manage their budget effectively.
And that's what my MFP calorie allowance is. It's a tool to help me manage my pizza and my beer budget effectively (or, whatever else I feel like eating). As I discovered earlier, I'm not some evolutionary reject who only ever wants pizza -- I have always liked "healthier" options. The more attention I spend in finessing my budget, the better I become at maximizing it.
I found out that I just used wayyyy too much oil in cooking literally everything. That was screwing the budget, for sure. I rarely-to-never stopped to measure an actual tablespoon (or 5ml) when cooking, and as a result, found out I have quite the heavy hand. Early on (as I learned here), I started measuring everything with my food scale, including my oil. I also realized pretty quickly that 99% of foods really don't need that much to taste great. Because I am a little hungrier when I eat (and, no longer drowning everything in lakes of oil), I find I really enjoy the flavors of what I'm cooking. I've become more adventurous in what I try to cook. I'm OK with my 1500-calorie budget. I trust that if I made less-than-ideal choices today, I get "paid" again tomorrow, and 1500 brand-new calories to spend.
All the days in between:
I still have quite a way to go to my goal weight. There will be a lot more "days in between." I've dealt with my first lengthy plateau. I've adjusted my calories. I know that from here, and until I reach my goal weight, I've just got to keep going. Keep trying.
But the habits and routines of logging and weighing all of my food have gotten easier. I'm OK with estimating/calorie budgeting to the best of my ability when I go out for dinner, or have a family event. I'm even OK with seeing all the little appetizers and tiny cheeses get passed around, and just holding off, and waiting for the main dish I've "saved up" for.
In fact, in building this habits, and working on this, I've freed my mind up to do other stuff. I'm in another Dutch class. I realize that goal-weight me and today-weight me have similar interests and goals. We both want to be fluent in Dutch. We both want a kickass new career. We both love our rock of a spouse (who, by the way, has lost 12.5kgs herself!). We both love good friends, good food, and good conversation. Today-weight-me has to keep sticking to her calorie budget, and so will goal-weight me. What's amazing to realize, in typing that out, is that "all of the days in between," my before (and theoretical after) photo, at this point, are actually just like all of the days that will come AFTER the day I reach my goal weight: continuously trying, and staying within my calorie budget (however that may change), and doing whatever else I want to do on top of it. And you know what? That's really not so bad.
Maybe by then I will add in more fitness goals. Maybe my Dutch will finally be good, and I can free up some mental energy to tackle something else. No matter what changes in the future, what I have learned so far is that all of the days in between your before/after photos matter. They are the foundation for all of the days that come after. The only day that's different, is the day (or, in my case month!) it takes to finally start, because on that day, you're scared and skeptical, and can't imagine how the rest of days yet to come will be.
If it's not already, let that 'different day' be today for you. We can all do this!
TL;DR: I moved to a new country and bought a winter coat in June because I was a "practical" fat person, who was just being realistic about her ability to lose weight. And then I came here to r/loseit. I lurked and I lurked, and by gosh it's starting to have worked!
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