SV: More than Halfway to My Goal Weight! It's a Good Thing We're in Quarantine and I Don't Need Good Fitting Clothes

Hey all, this is my first post on this subreddit after a couple months of lurking!

Enjoy some backstory:

Growing up, I had always been on the bigger side. I remember at the end of 6th grade, I was 5’6” and 170lbs. By the time I was finishing up freshman year of high school, I had reached 5’9” and 210lbs. My weight slowly went up until the end of high school at which point it shot up to 247 (mostly due to the fact that I was finally allowed to hang out with my friends at night on weekdays which meant eating a lot of food). I remember looking at that scale and being mortified at how fat I had gotten. I had a friend in high school who lost a bunch of weight and he told me that he had stepped on the scale one day and saw that he had hit 235, and told himself “this is too much.” At the time I was around 215 and I thought, “wow I’d never let myself get that fat.” And yet here I was at 247. During my first year of college, I managed to drop back down to 225-230 but that slowly crept back up and the next couple years saw my weight fluctuate between 230-245. However, starting my senior year, my weight shot up to a new high and one day I stepped on the scale and to my horror, I weighed 252 pounds. This was a breaking point for me as I was now closer to 300lbs than I was to 200lbs and I realized that I was on my way to becoming morbidly obese. A lot of my clothes didn’t fit well, my second chin was becoming permanent, and I just felt tired all the time. After talking to another friend of mine who had managed to lose 60 pounds in 6 months and keep (most of it) off, I realized that I wasn’t doomed to be obese forever. Something clicked and I realized that if I wanted to lose weight, I would have to be in it for the long haul. This wasn’t going to be easy, but the reward at the end would be worth it. I set a goal weight of 170 pounds and made a plan for myself.

I used various different websites to try to figure out my basal metabolic rate and aimed for a 1000 calorie deficit daily, which came out to around 1500 calories a day. I told myself that if I worked out, I'd just reap the extra weight loss. For the most part, it's been pretty manageable. I bought a food scale, started checking nutrition facts more on the food I eat, stopped eating out, and for the most part, I've been able to stick to 1500 a day. I've definitely had several days, and occasionally weeks, where I go over, but for the most part, I've been able to lose on average 2.1 pounds per week. For me personally, I've found that cutting out most carbs (except hash browns, tortillas, and a little bit of rice) and eating more vegetables and protein makes the 1500 more bearable. Also, being able to figure out when you can best tolerate being hungry and when you absolutely need to eat helps (I personally only eat around 400-500 calories before dinner and eat another meal after dinner.) Taking progress photos has also been a huge motivator. If I ever start to feel discouraged, I just look back at the photos I take every week and I'm reminded that the pain is worth the gain.

As of today, I’ve reached the halfway mark (actually a little beyond halfway) with a weight of 209.8 pounds! also progress photos

submitted by /u/brandon08967
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