Like many of you, I've been a heavy guy my whole life. I consistently gained weight from childhood until I was around 21 years old. Before then, I told myself countless times "today is the day I begin my weight loss journey", followed by maybe a day or two of good eating, and then falling back into bad habits. The heaviest I ever weighed myself at was 282, but I'm pretty sure my heaviest was probably closer to 300, but at that time I wouldn't even weight myself because I had a crippling fear of seeing a number that started with "3" on the scale
I managed to get myself down to around 250lbs from the age of 21-24 through sporadic diets, some calorie counting, and exercise. Finally, in August 2017, I managed to get focused, started weighing myself almost daily, and managed to get to around 200lbs by April 2018. Life happens, and I slowly lost the drive I had for those successful months of weight loss. I have been bouncing around the 200-215 mark, until these past couple months, where I've managed to get back some of the motivation I had in that first big burst of weight loss. I'm posting this to provide some insight to people that may be in a similar situation to me when I started, and also to kind of kick myself in the ass to finish what I've started.
My number one tip to anybody that wants to lose weight is to build an environment around you that is conducive to overall health, and the weight loss will follow. For me this mostly meant removing unhealthy, high calorie food from home. I have always been both a stress and binge eater, and its natural to go towards the lowest effort, most comforting food possible. In the past, this would be things like sugar cereal with milk, baked goods, pasta, bread, etc... (Im a big carb binger). So what I did is stop buying these things, and instead having things like fruit, oatmeal, peanutbutter, deli meat. I always thought my cravings were for delicious food, turns out all my binging brain wants is to shove food in my mouth. By having these as my only option, I was immediately cutting huge amounts of calories without even trying.
I originally started counting calories, weighing my portions, the whole deal, and this was absolutely essential for me in gaining an understanding of portion sizes, calorie density of different foods, etc. However, for me this was unsustainable. I only managed to keep this up for a month or two, but eventually found my groove, and managed to lose most of the weight, and have maintained my weight, without this.
Another big change I made was moving in with a health conscious room mate, that had a ton of good habits that I could replicate. I truly believe you are a product of your environment, and by spending time with people with good habits, it helped reinforce the changes I was working on. Obviously this isn't an option for everyone, but I guess I would recommend trying to spend time with people you hope to be like(this works for muchmuch more than weight loss!!). I think its important to realize the massive effect the people you associate with have on your life.
There are a million other little changes I've made that have helped, and its the combination of all these changes that have led to success. I'd be willing to answer any questions and go into more details if people want to hear more. One thing I will say is it gets easier as you go. Start cutting out some unhealthy food, take the stairs, if you can find the time do some exercise, and get the number on the scale dropping. Once you see the number going down, it will start a feedback loop that will help drive and reinforce the good habits you are building. Don't expect to make all the changes at once either, take one little step at a time. At least in my experience, there wasnt the one day where I suddenly decided to change and then changed, it was more about having an understanding and acceptance of my weight problem, and using this to help drive decisions in my life.
Good luck to all of you on your journey
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