Starting weight: 283lbs. Current Weight: 198!! I’ve lost 86 lbs and 40 inches (10" off my stomach alone!). After 25 years of being on the weight loss roller coaster, I'm finally on the path to get off this ride and I want to share!
Photos from 2017 and today: https://imgur.com/a/1C5xY1c
Feel free to skip the ramble and just go skim the bulleted lists :)
The last time I weighed less than 200 was in 2011, and the time before that was 2004. I don’t even know what my body looked like then. I have no photos of myself that are not fully clothed and I took no pleasure in my body. In my mind I was worthless and disgusting and still had so much more to lose before I could ever deserve to be happy.
Today I find myself flexing my biceps and marveling at my midsection. I’m amazed by my calves and shoulder definition. I'’m far from perfect - I’m older, saggier and floppier than ever before, but I can appreciate my body for housing me. The biggest lesson I have finally learned is that I have value and worthwhile contributions that do not depend on my size or weight. My body is my partner, not my enemy. I am worth taking care of because I want to enjoy all life has to offer for at least another 40 years.
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The 3 types of habits that are helping me succeed:
Mental habits
- Changing my thinking patterns around binging and emotional eating.
- Building self worth/recognizing the value I bring to the world.
- Removing stress and adding setting boundaries especially at work.
These are the most important changes by far and a bullet point can't provide enough detail. I keep trying to write it out but each one is almost as long as this post. If there is any interest, I can write those posts.
The TL;DR takeaway is: Hating myself thin does not work. I have 25 years of evidence that trying to hate myself thin will neither make me thin nor happy. Taking care of myself and treating myself kindly results in being a better friend, wife, family member, employee etc.
Tracking habits
- Logging what I eat/calories (My Fitness Pal). I was really against tracking in the beginning. It seemed too hard, too time consuming etc. Over the past 3 years, this is how the process evolved:
- Writing down what I ate each day. No judging, just writing it down and noticing patterns.
- Calculating calories for some of my most frequently eaten meals & making small changes to make them lower calorie.
- Calculating my meals every day. This gets so much easier over time as I build a catalogue of frequently eaten meals and recipes. This now takes about 5 mins per day.
- Planning ahead. E.g. If I'm going to a bbq on Sunday, I'll use MFP to plan my Saturday and Sunday meals to make sure I have the calorie room for Sunday and guesstimate the foods I will eat at the bbq.
- Logging my weight (Happy Scale). I know this doesn't work for everyone, but this was super vital for understanding patterns with my body/cycle. My weight loss plateaus for 8-11 days twice a month. A typical month:
- plateau 8-11 days
- see a loss for 5 days (big whoosh, usually 4-5 lbs)
- plateau 8-11 days
- see scale decrease over 5 days (again a big whoosh)
I think it's important to highlight that according to the scale, only 33% of the month I’m actively losing weight. Without tracking to see the patterns I would have probably given up, thinking that what I was doing wasn't working. Now I know to stay the course!
Lifestyle habits
- Eating at restaurants less often. Previously, between picking up lunch on work days, going for weekend brunches and nights out etc I was eating at restaurants 8-10 times per week. Now eating at restaurants is a treat, usually only once a week. Once I am at goal and have extra calories with maintenance this may increase.
- Making good food at home. This goes hand and hand with the above item, but I think that it's really important to have food you like at home, otherwise you will keep going back to your restaurant favourites. It definitely helps that I have a husband on board with cooking. I cook lunches and weekend suppers. He cooks suppers and weekend brunches. We use an app called Platejoy for meal planning and ideas when we're getting bored. r/1200isplenty and r/1500isplenty have been great sources of meal and snack ideas. We also experiment with healthier versions of our favourites (tortilla pizzas, taco bowls, mug cakes, pasta primavera etc).
- Walking every day. This is not just about exercise, but that is a great side effect. This is to have time to process thoughts and be in nature each day. I have been getting up at 6am to go for socially distant walks and this keeps my mood and thoughts calmer and clearer all day.
- Getting enough sleep. This goes hand in hand with the above, but in order to be able to wake up early, I needed to start going to bed early. It also helps keep me from being tired and cranky and eating to soothe a bad mood. Things that help me go to sleep early and stay asleep all night:
- Enabling night mode on all my devices from 8pm onward
- A hard 'no-screen time' rule after 10pm
- Reading before bed
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None of this happened over night; this is the result of slowly layering small changes over top of small changes and tweaking over time. I still have 35 lbs to go to my final goal weight and I am confident I will get there. I am even more confident that no matter what my weight, age, size etc, I am worth taking care of and will continue to take care good care of this body!
Thank you to this sub for being a safe place to share my journey and get inspiration!
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