TL;DR: 195ish to 164ish in 1 year, 37M 5’11
Pics: https://imgur.com/Lqn9pZM
Happy Scale Weight Graph for the Year: https://imgur.com/Kwmfmqg
One year ago, I decided to “go on a diet” for the first time in my life. I had just returned from a couple of days at the beach. I had felt pretty uncomfortable in my own skin and that put a damper on what would have been an otherwise pleasant vacation. I was feeling that discomfort with my appearance more and more. It bummed me out. A lot.
Earlier in the year, after nearly 3 years of Crossfit, I injured my wrist and had to stop working out for a while. I didn’t change my eating habits during that time, so I saw the muscle I had gained during Crossfit disappearing and getting replaced with fat. Because of my eating habits, I was always a bit chubby throughout Crossfit (195-205lbs). The workouts tended to counterbalance my bad habits rather than lead me to getting really fit. Without that counterbalance, I saw where my habits were ultimately leading me, and I didn’t like it. I happened to come across a /loseit post in early September and decided to make a change.
I have neglected my relationship with food my entire life, so learning about CICO, TDEE, and what drives me to eat has been a very elucidating experience. Before, I was approaching every meal as an eating contest and consuming way past feeling satiated. I would sit down and finish a big bag of chips on a whim. When I started trying to lose, I started asking questions like ‘why am I eating this when I am not hungry anymore?’ And those questions lead to deeper questions and realizations about unhappiness, depression, etc. I was over eating for a lot of reasons, none of which had much to do with hunger.
So this weight loss journey has been a bit more than just seeing the number on the scale go down. It’s been about becoming more conscientious concerning my health (both physical and mental).
That being said, I am happier with what I see in the mirror nowadays. I was taken aback when I saw my old pics next to current ones. I was expecting a subtle difference, but was surprised to see I had made more progress than I thought. I am feeling more motivated than ever to take this as far as I can.
Regarding methodology, I was able to lose without tracking in MFP. I was willing to track if I had no other choice, but I wanted to try to do it by feel first and found that I could. I jumped around a bunch of different strategies…I tried various types of intermittent fasting and eating on different schedules. Weighing myself every day helped me a lot. I was able to spot trends and cut my self off from bad habits before doing too much damage. I used the weekly Weigh In Wednesday thread as a journaling device to keep track of what I was trying, how it made me feel, and what effect it had on the scale.
Looking at the Happy Scale weight trend, I went from losing pretty quickly at first to a much slower pace in early 2019. That is because I eventually landed on an eating schedule and strategy that worked for me and didn’t interfere with my productivity. I had reached the point where I didn’t really want to eat any less, so instead I wanted to try working out harder (since my wrist had healed). I couldn’t afford to go back to Crossfit, but I ran into a buddy from my old box that was in the same situation, so we started doing Crossfit-style workouts at our gym. That has kept going and gotten progressively more intense as the year has gone on. Those hard work outs have kept me losing while also causing some positive changes in my body composition.
I finally made it back to the beach at the end of July, and I’ve tried to return once per week since that visit. It felt really good to enjoy myself without a specter of self consciousness.
Thank you to everybody on this subreddit for sharing your experiences and knowledge. I tend to lurk more than participate, but I came across many insightful posts that helped me over the past year.
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from loseit - Lose the Fat https://ift.tt/2HI0qHQ
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