My knees feel better and yours can too! AKA, you don't need to hit goal weight to start seeing benefits.

I just wanted to share a little bit about my journey so far. I've had some ups and downs with weight loss, but my first serious attempt was in 2015. I started experiencing severe pain in my right knee and thought I'd maybe torn my meniscus or something like that. I went to the doctor, and long story short, the only thing wrong with me was that I had developed arthritis in that knee. For reference, I was only 38 years old at that time, so this was pretty disheartening.

The doctor gave me a cortisone shot that helped for a while and advised me to lose weight. He told me that every pound of weight I was carrying translated into 4 pounds of force on my knees. I took that advice seriously and started losing, and pretty soon my knees felt a lot better.

I fell off the wagon and regained some (not all) of what I lost in 2016-2018, and surprise surprise, my knee started hurting badly again. I had to lean on railings to get down stairs, I started limping if I had to walk more than maybe a quarter-mile or so, and my knee was just always in some amount of pain. Frankly, it sucked. In the back of my mind, I knew this was related to weight gain, but I kept telling myself, maybe it is just the weather making it act up. Maybe I am just destined to have painful knees and this would have happened regardless of weight gain. (Yeah, right.)

So I got serious again in late 2018. Here we come to the point of this whole story. We all know that carrying excess weight around is bad for our joints, but I think a lot of us (me included, previously) have this idea that you have to get all the way down to your goal weight before things really get better.

NOPE.

My goal weight is still 45 pounds away. But I start noticing improvement in my knees when I had lost only 10 pounds. I've now lost 38, and I don't have to use the railing to go down stairs any more, I don't limp, and I'm walking 4-6 miles per day every day with no pain. The arthritis isn't gone - I can still feel it twinging me from time to time. But the daily pain and the limited range of movement has cleared up almost totally.

So don't think that if you have, say, 100 pounds to lose, you have to lose all 100 (or even most of it) to see benefits. Your body will start feeling better faster than you think.

submitted by /u/DubiousBeak
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from loseit - Lose the Fat http://bit.ly/2XnXQ33