Hey Reddit, I’m Mark! This is my first time using this platform so I don’t quite know how it all works but I’m gonna give it shot. Basically I wanted to find a place to talk about my weight loss since I haven’t with literally anybody in my life. I’m 16 years old and over the past 202 days I’ve lost about 36 pounds, going from 245 to 209. I know I still have a lot of work to do but that number change has been the biggest thing I’ve ever done. 6 months ago I was really struggling and my weight was the main contributor. My confidence was shot, my energy and overall attitude was lacking and overall I was just not the person I knew I should be. For almost as long as I can remember I’ve been self conscious about my weight. From probably the time I was 9-10 I felt different from other people and had the constant feeling that people were looking at me because of my weight even though I wasn’t deeply overweight at the time. The struggle for me was pretty basic, eating too much and eating garbage food. I tried and tried to talk myself up and say that I needed to stop but the truth is I was never able to. I’ll fast forward to six months ago because if I go through all the years I struggled I’d bore everybody reading this. So, on February 24th 2019 I headed off to baseball practice. A few days prior while scrolling through Twitter (which I was doing way too much at the time) I stumbled across a weight loss advertisement. It caught my eye, like I said earlier I was struggling really badly and was looking for anything to help me. I quickly ran through the ad and it was a 30 day challenge to essentially give up bad food and soda. I’ll add the list of things at the end of this Incase anybody was struggling like me and want to try out what I did, spoiler alert however, it’s not easy. So after reading through the list I, instead of committing myself to it right away, decided to screenshot it. Just Incase I ever really wanted to go for it. Fast forward a few days and I’m at baseball practice like I mentioned. Baseball has always been a passion of mine but I always felt held back from my weight and self consciousness, I never ran as fast as the other kids, I didn’t have the stamina as everybody else and I was constantly trying on different clothes before hand to make sure I didn’t look “too big”. On this particular practice I was brought into pitch, something I’m not really that good at but I’ve done it before. While pitching I really struggled, I couldn’t throw strikes and I felt like I was embarrassing myself. Out of breath, not feeling athletic, feeling like everybody was looking at me. Essentially the same thing I’ve felt for years. Eventually my coach took me off the mound and let another kid pitch, a couple comments from teammates about how “I did a good job for somebody that doesn’t pitch” cut me deep, and on this rainy day in February I was feeling worse then ever. After some time practice ended, I hopped back in my car with my older brother and my mom, and I felt like garbage. My mom tried to tell me I did well as Mom’s do, but inside I was devastated. I felt like I didn’t belong, that feeling, was something I hadn’t felt before and I knew I needed to never feel it again. It was in that moment in that parking lot that I ran through my saved pictures and repeated the 30 day challenge list over and over and over in my head. On the way back home McDonald’s was offered to me and my brother from my mom, something we’d always do after practice because we’d be starving. I instantly turned it down, which surprised my mom but the person it really surprised was me. It was instinctual, I didn’t even think about it. It was really then that I had some hope that I could stick to it. After the 30 minute drive back to our house I instantly went to the kitchen, before showering, before taking off my sweaty cleats. I didn’t go to the kitchen to eat however, I looked at everything we had and mentally said “I can’t have this, I can’t have this, I can’t have this.” Over and over and over, trying to make it muscle memory that I could no longer eat the foods I ate way too much. The day that I call my first full one was February 25th, that was really difficult. Waking up to the smell of chocolate chip pancakes that I knew I couldn’t eat if I wanted to stick to the diet, having to walk past the cookies and the chocolate chip bars in the pantry. 2 weeks past, and I knew I felt good, but I couldn’t see visual improvement. At that point I decided to step on the scale, that was always scary thing for me but especially on that day. What if I made no progress? What if this was a waste? What if I gained weight? Those questions running in my head, I looked down at the number to see 235. I had lost 10 pounds in two weeks. I had to hold in a big “YES!” so I didn’t alert my family. I felt hope when I saw that number, I felt like I could do something about the thing that had held me back for years. 2 weeks later was the 30 day mark, I had to once again step on the big scary machine that reads numbers to you. The scale said “228.8”. I stepped on and off a couple times to make sure it was right, this was my lowest weight in well over a year. I hadn’t see anything under 235 in forever. I actually cried tears of joy that day, I can really count only a few times I ever did that. It felt surreal but it also felt motivating. If I can do that in 30 days, what can I do in 100?! Although 100 days felt like 100 years away, I knew it was possible. I just had to stick to what I did, say no thanks to the things I can’t eat when offered and don’t even think about them when I see them in kitchen or the grocery store. I’m going to skip ahead a while now to day 77, the first day I said “damn, I look good!” That fired me up, even though it was day 90 yet (I started weighing myself every 30 days to keep up with the initial 30 day challenge) I knew I had to step on that scale, just to see. The scale said 219.4. I knew for a fact it had about 2 years since I was that low. My weight continued to drop as the days past, with a combination of physical activity and the diet that I found on Twitter. On the big day that I had been waiting for (day 100) I got to 218.3, 27 pounds down. 102 days after that weigh in, I’m writing this message. I don’t know if anybody will read it, I hope if anybody does it’s somebody in my situation 6 months ago that feels a connection to what I wrote here. Right now I’m 208.0. 37 pounds from my start weight. At this point I’m feeling more confident then I ever had, I ended up cutting my terribly long hair which was something I kept to distract people from my weight, and even a smell of things I used to crave now make me nauseous. Burgers, chocolate, sodas, chips. I can’t even comprehend eating any of it now, I used to binge eat those. My family, although they know I’ve changed something still don’t know anything I wrote about here. On day 365 I might have them read this, right now I don’t know, what I do know is committing to that diet was the best decision I ever made. The thing that consistently held me down is now something I’m feeling more and more confident with. Clothes fit me for the first time in forever, I don’t hate going places because I know I’ll have to try on 5 different things because of my anxiety that people with think I look huge. I’m actually looking forward to getting clothes for Christmas this year, in years past I hated the feeling of getting a cool shirt just for it to be too small and for me to feel too embarrassed to say anything about it. Once again, if nobody reads this I don’t lose sleep about it. I really just wanted to talk about the main thing on my mind for the last 6 months, I’ve kept it bottled up and I needed somewhere to release it, thank you for letting me release it here. Lastly if anybody is feeling the way I did, just have confidence. Have confidence that you WILL find something that connects with you. The biggest thing I learned was nothing changes if nothing changes. Without serious change I never would have gotten anywhere in my weight loss. Thank you again if you read this, you are loved, you are appreciated, and you will find your way. The information of my diet will be at the bottom of this.
Thanks Again, Mark.
No Chocolate, No Chips, No Cake, No Fast Food, No Burgers, No Cookies or Donuts, No Candy, No White Bread, No Ice Cream and NO SODA.
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