Tuesday, February 25, 2020

Fasting made a toll on my mental health

Just to be clear, I'm not telling anyone that they can't fast to lose weight, but it's preferably not for me. I started losing weight in June 2019, with a starting weight of 195lbs. It's Feburary 2020 and I've now reached 150lbs with 10-20 left to go. At the start of my weight loss, I was absolutely miserable (although being 5'5 made it so I didn't look "too" fat, I was still pretty hefty). But I remember googling fast ways to lose weight and I stumbled upon intermittent fasting. I took the sandbox approach, and started fasting every other day. One day I would only eat dinner, and the next I would only eat lunch and dinner. I didn't know what a calorie was, or how it worked but all I knew is that I was losing weight fast. When school came around in September, I had already lost around 25-30lbs, and everyone was starting to notice the change. This somewhat motivated me to count calories, and I was surprised with how much was actually in my food and in a serving size of such food. During the holidays, we had two weeks off of school, so I couldn't use the weight room to work out. And I fell off track, constantly binging/restricting, and I even started to purge out of guilt (with the excuse that I felt sick). One morning I just woke up at a friend's house and thought "I need to make a set point, I can't keep doing this". And that morning, my every day set point was 1200 calories. The way that my diet was working, it was almost useless to go to the gym anymore, because I was making no progress with my muscle gain. And I would look at the freshmen in the gym making all these newbie gains, and I'd be stuck there with the 15lb dumbbells wondering "why don't I look like the other guys? Why am I not getting any stronger?". Then I found out about macros. After I started increasing my protein, it helped a little bit but it made me feel sick, most likely because it was too much. So I keep my protein around 100-111g. My boyfriend eventually caught wind of what was going on, and had the talk with me about it. All I remember is him even MENTIONING the idea of raising my caloric intake and I broke down sobbing in front of him, I was terrified of gaining fat back. But I promised him that I would get better, so I raised my calories up to 1500. I didn't get rid of my disordered eating though, and I still obsess over my body fat %, and my calories. But, I am losing weight a lot slower (1lb per week usually). And I'm gaining more muscle, and I have more confidence and motivation. Moral of the story is, do not hyper focus on macros or calories when trying to lose weight or gain muscle, you'll get there in time, even with the baby steps.

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