This is an update to my previous post: https://www.reddit.com/r/loseit/comments/hx2ipv/i_reached_my_goal_weight_exactly_one_month_ago_i/
Also, before I begin, I want to let everyone know that my dog had her last chemo and beat cancer!!! I call her my little champion dog :).
Disclaimer:
Weight loss is a personal journey, what has worked for me may not, and probably will not work for you. I'm sharing this just to get it out there, but please continue to do what works for YOU.
Now:
Hey everyone, about a month ago I posted that I could not stop binging ever since I hit my goal weight the month before that post. While the comments were very encouraging, I noticed that they tended to fall into a few categories:
- Stuff myself with low-calorie, high-volume foods
- Intermittently fast so that I could go all out for my one or two meals
- Eat in a constant deficit so that when I went off the rails it all balanced out
As these comments kept appearing, I realized that every single one of these would make me a slave to food and weight loss, constantly thinking about calories and stressing about my weight. I realized that I needed a break to think about what to do. I had posted about my workouts, how I worked out five days a week doing intense calisthenics and conditioning, and I decided that for my weight loss break I was simply not going to work out for an entire week.
That week changed everything.
Without thinking about the day's workout or what workout would follow, it completely opened my mind and emotions up to so many things I had been neglecting as I dedicated all of myself to my weight loss journey this year. When I spoke to people that week, it wasn't about how many reps of this I could do or how much of this I could lift, but it was about my stuff: my dog, music, school, anime, all the things I completely forgot I loved during my weight loss journey. The mental break also allowed me to begin feeling and processing all of the overwhelming emotions that had sat on my chest during this whole year. I laughed a lot, I cried a lot. I felt good again. Like a real person.
The second thing that happened that week is that my hunger reduced dramatically as a result of not pushing my body to the limit every day. Without feeling so ravenous, I also stopped thinking about food constantly as the week went on. This was the most freeing thing of all. I felt a huge weight off of my mind and realized for the first time this entire year I was actually focusing on myself. Yes, the weight loss journey was for me, but it was stressful and burned me out. At the end of the week my new clothes fit so much better and I looked so much better. I realized that without all the extra exercise and food I needed because of that exercise, my water retention went down, but more importantly, I looked rested. I felt great.
That's when I realized that I needed to put my weight loss journey behind me for good. For eight months I became a shell of my former self. For eight months, all I could talk about was calories, exercise, food, diets, reps, blah blah blah. I became...boring. I wanted my life back. I wanted to focus on the things that actually mattered. I needed to let go of my "dream body" goal and understand that if I feel great in the body I have and it's healthy, then my happiness is far more attractive when I look at myself in the mirror than a perfectly chiseled frame. So I cut my workouts back. Way back. I workout twice a week now. The workouts are still intense, but they're fun and somehow relaxing now that my sole focus is just on enjoying them. After I workout, I simply do not think about fitness or exercise until the next workout. I just go on and live my life. From doing this, food no longer controls my life. I don't feel an urge to binge -- partly because I'm not exercising for 10 hours every week, and partly because I'm in a good place mentally. But that doesn't mean that things have been easy.
The past month that I've been doing this life has been utterly kicking my ass, from losing funding for my master's degree to losing family members to COVID. But because fitness is no longer my entire life, all of the stress hasn't derailed my health, because the system I have is designed so that my life comes first.
Lastly, I'm not going to post any progress pictures or anything like that. Why? Because comparison is the thief of joy. When I had this mental shift a month ago, one of the first things I did was delete the Instagram app off of my phone, to stop browsing r/progresspics, and to realize that I'm happy with where I am, there's no need for me to compare myself to others. For those of you who are wondering, I have no idea what my weight is. I simply don't think about it anymore. And I don't have to, that part of my life is behind me. What I do know is that every day when I get up my clothes fit me exactly how I like them and I like what I see when I look in the mirror. This weight loss journey has given me my life back, but I only truly got my life back when I realized that the journey was over and it was time to let it go.
Thanks for reading.
[link] [comments]
from loseit - Lose the Fat https://ift.tt/3i0hj0H
No comments:
Post a Comment