Dear loseit, for the first time since puberty, I'm at a normal weight! I'm a 36 year old woman, 5'5" (165 cm) and 145 lbs (66 kg) as of today, my highest weight was 264 lbs (120 kg) at least.
Here's a photo. How did I do it? Mostly it was a mental thing for me. I've hated my body since my childhood, and the only way I ever knew how to change it was to eat 600 cals a day while sweating one hour on the treadmill every single day and hating myself even more when I failed to keep that up.
This time was different. The goal, at first, was not weight loss, but to change the way I eat. It started with being diagnosed with gestational diabetes, and having to eliminate blood sugar raising foods from my diet. Starting with a mindset of "I'll be damned if I go hungry while pregnant because of this stupid diagnosis", I was astounded how much less I ate, and how much more satisfied I felt, after I cut those "problem carbs" completely from my diet and replaced them with veggies and protein. I never weigh myself, but I was going through new pants sizes monthly. You bet that I kept it up after pregnancy. But the whole mindset was different than my other diets. It was about feeding myself, nourishing myself, doing myself some good, not about fighting a body I hate.
Two things were key: the good food had to be always available and quickly prepared. I go through shittons of prewashed salad greens, grape tomatoes and frozen veggies every week. And I can't allow myself to go hungry, or I start making bad decisions the next time I come across food. I always have some snacks around that don't make me overeat, and if for some reason I'm hungry two hours before dinner, you won't see me without a piece of food in my hand the whole time.
Whenever the pants shrinking started to slow, I adjusted my diet incrementally. Mostly finding lower fat higher protein alternatives for things I was eating regularly. Nowadays I have some set meals that I eat almost every day, just varying the ingredients. There's no thinking involved, it's a habit, happens automatically. (If you're curious, one is some sort of veggie-egg combo for breakfast, the other a salad with a boiled egg and some protein -usually chicken breast- for lunch) My breakfast and lunch are very low calorie but just enough to keep me full and functioning until the next meal. This has been carefully experimented on and perfected over many months. That leaves me with a huge calorie budget for dinner, where I have very little control over what kind of food is on the table, and I can't escape my husband's great cooking. :) I don't completely steer clear of starchy foods nowadays, but they are always a small position to the side, not the main event. Carbs make me crave more carbs, and disturb the way hunger and satiety work for me. I'd much rather not eat that pizza at all, than spend hours second guessing whether I'm hungry-hungry or just fake-carby-hungry.
I don't want to make this too long so it might sound overly simplified. I could mention a million other things, many tiny changes over many months. Exercise played no role in my weight loss. Becoming a gym member recently was, on the contrary, a way of rewarding myself for what I've achieved with my diet. And, you read that right, I didn't use any kind of calorie tracking device or food scale the whole time, but with my history of restrictive dieting, my own brain is a scarily reliable calorie tracking device, so, your mileage might vary.
Weight loss did not solve my mental issues, not one bit. I'm just as insecure, only about other physical things now. The loose skin is there, but honestly not that bad, and it's getting better with the last lbs I'm losing. But god, I miss my breasts. My husband isn't really that into me right now, he's awesome and has supported and loved me from 180 lbs when we met to 260 lbs and back down, but he's weirded out because I look and feel like a stranger to him right now. And I look and feel like a stranger to myself, too. Losing weight is not the end all solution to all things going wrong in my life. But it was doable. A way to prove to myself that I can control things about my life. And to hell with all the people who would underestimate or ignore me because of the way I looked.
Good luck loseit, I SWEAR if I can do it, ANYONE can do it!!
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from loseit - Lose the Fat http://bit.ly/2Mjg1yZ
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