Why I've been failing at weight loss and gaining weight despite trying for years

This is going to be a really loooooong post but I feel like I have to type it out, for my sake.

To be brief, I've been trying to lose weight since I was 11, when I was still of a healthy weight, albeit a bit chubby. My current weight loss journey started in 2016 / 2017 when I was 14, when my highest weight was 69.5kg (my height is 163cm / 5"4). Today, at 18, my highest weight is 77.8kg despite me being on a weight loss journey for the past 3/4 years. Throughout the whole of last year, I was around 72kg, gaining and losing. This year, because of self-isolation, I've gained about 5-6kg and I have been unable to lose the weight and keep it off.

I know that this cycle will keep repeating. I will try to lose weight, binge, gain weight, try losing weight again for a few days, lose a bit of weight, binge, then gain even more weight. And like basically everyone else, I've tried "everything", as many people would say - restrictive diets, calorie counting, not counting calories, volume eating, intuitive eating, intermittent fasting... Yeah none of it worked out.

And after every binge, I would feel extremely guilty and angry at myself for screwing things up once again. If only your fatass would just stick to the plan, you'd be skinny by now! But noooo, you just HAD to have those cakes and cookies, then proceed to consume 5000 calories more... You idiotic cow! That's what I'd think to myself every night, feeling frustrated and vowing to start afresh the next day. 4 days later, the cycle would repeat.

So having said that, I've reflected a bit on why exactly my weight loss has failed over and over and over again, leading to this cycle of gaining, losing, then gaining even more than before. And I've narrowed it down to one main reason - food is the only good thing about my miserable life.

Let me elaborate - I was one of those lucky people to be born loving food and how it tastes, especially junk food. Since young, I've always been a bit of a glutton and I'd snack a lot. I'd be surprised when I was with my friends and they'd only have one cookie or just one small pack of chips, while I'd keep eating and eating, or at least, I'd feel self-conscious at how everyone only ate a little then stopped, while I still felt hungry, so I'd eye the food longingly and sneak a few more snacks when nobody was looking.

The difference when I was young, however, was that I still had a life. I had friends, I loved playing and moving about. While watching TV, I would run around the house, practice my gymnastics (as in, I'd try to do handstands and long jumps, splits), go to the park and play at the playground with the other neighborhood children. I loved to draw comics and characters in my free-time, read, color, talk to my friends on the phone and rack up quite the phone bill... Yeah. I had a life. When I got a little older, say 11 years old, I would gain about 3-5kg each year because of my overeating and constant spending on junk food, developing my unhealthy eating habits. But I was still fairly active and food wasn't on the forefront of my mind all the time.

And as I entered into my teen years, that happy life slowly faded. I won't go into detail about my school life but it was pretty shitty lmao. When you're a teen, people don't exactly look at you the same when you're playing at the playgrounds. So I stopped going. Life turned into a constant cycle of me going to school in the morning, getting bored in classes, thinking about what I'd eat after dismissal, then going to buy a load of junk food and going home to eat and watch YouTube mindlessly on my phone for hours, do homework, go to sleep, repeat. I stopped drawing because of my family who don't respect my privacy and criticise and cause me to become embarrassed of my works, but that's a whole other issue. I became too self-conscious and scared of drawing because my family would always pry and find them, no matter how well I hid them, and I'd be scolded, insulted, humiliated, so the best way for me to maintain a sense of privacy at home would be to just look at my phone and keep all activity digital, guarded by my phone's password lock. So I'd spend all my free time on my phone instead of on other activities.

And what would I do when I used my phone? I'd eat. I'd watch YouTube and eat, watch something else, eat something else, from my waking to sleeping hours. If I had school, I'd do that from dismissal all the way to sleep time. So yeah. Not a lot going on in my life.

K so I've talked wayy too much about my life story now, so I'll start explaining my rapid weight gain today. Because of all of these little factors leading up to my life today, food has become the only joy in my miserable life. I only have a few friends and I rarely get to hang out with them because they're busy with their own lives. Using my phone is no longer an exciting treat, it's just my life every-day. And since I don't do what I used to love, which is drawing and reading, my entire life has become simply consuming content on my phone all day. The only thing that truly excites me and makes me happy now is food. It's the only thing that brings me some joy in a boring and repetitive life, where I feel like I'm not free to be myself and do what I want without being berated, judged, or bullied for it (ironically, my fatness is now what my family uses to insult me and make me feel like shit lmao).

So it doesn't matter what I do, what diet I follow, how full I feel... Because in my mind, I'm always, ALWAYS thinking about food. Even when I'm having a healthy eating day, I'm always thinking about the next meal, thinking about what snacks I should eat, planning my next meal, looking at recipes, going to the supermarket to look at food (both junk food and fresh produce to plan my eating)... Everything is about food. In order to stop myself from overeating, I go out to shopping malls. And what do I do at these malls? I look at food! My hobby when I'm out at shopping malls is to peruse the bakeries, especially, admire the delicious breads and cookies even though I know that I won't buy any, walk around the food booths and look at all the different foods available, then I'll head to the supermarkets and spend close to an hour in each supermarket to buy fresh produce for my next meal and to go walk around the ice cream section and see what new flavors Ben & Jerry's has in stock, even though I know damn well that I don't intend to buy any. Everything I do in my weight loss journey is to either stop myself from eating by going out to look at food, or to obsess over what healthy meal I'll whip up next. It's all food food food food food food food food food. Non-stop. It's all I think about and it's all that makes me happy.

So in essense, the reason why my weight loss has failed over and over again is because I can never stop thinking about food. To a normal person, in their life, they don't think about food as much as I do. They think about friends, hobbies, work, love... I've met people who don't think about food to the extent of forgetting to eat for the whole day (not healthy but you get the point). I would never ever forget to eat because it's all think about. After breakfast, I'm thinking about lunch. And while thinking about lunch, I eat some snacks, and more snacks, and more snacks, until I'm full from snacks. Then I either binge because dang, I've ruined it again! Or I don't eat for the rest of the day and become super hungry at night, then the next day, I'm really hungry despite eating the same breakfast from before, then binge... Yeah you get the point lmao.

I've realised that it doesn't matter what I eat, what approach I follow, where I go, how much I work out. Because if I don't change this food obsession of mine, I will never lose weight. I will forever eat in a surplus of calories. Thinking about food makes me "hungry" even when my stomach is full. And entertaining myself by looking at food only makes me crave high calorie foods. Even though I now know how to prepare low calorie meals that I absolutely love (French toast, peanut butter and jelly sandwich, guacamole chicken salad, oatmeal and homemade pizza have become my go-to healthy meals), I STILL can't stick to eating them because I start craving dessert after meals even if I'm full. And this obsession with food will not stop until I develop hobbies that are NOT food related.

In order to do that, I need to do a few things, which I shall list here:

1. Find new hobbies that do NOT involve food or using my phone. Something that I can't snack and do at the same time. I play the piano and though I'd love to improve, I spend all my free time on my phone instead of practicing. So I'm going to commit myself to playing the piano every-day. Can't snack when both my hands are busy. I also want to properly learn to play the guitar, though I keep putting it off because of judgement from my family (I was screamed at once for buying a new guitar because my old one is a little wonky lol). Screw that, I'm going to start anyway. Also, I want to start drawing again. I've been wanting to for so long but I keep putting it off. I used to be the talented artsy nerd kid in school who would read and draw for fun and now I'm just a phone drone. So I'm gonna start doing that again. I also used to keep a diary that I'd spend HOURS on, aka no thinking about food, but my family kept intruding on these private little thoughts, so I stopped, but I'm going to try to start again. I've never really been an active sporty person so finding a sports hobby is kinda hard, though I recently bought a pair of inline skates and I've only used them a few times due to fear of being judged and looked at by the public (yeah I have pretty bad social anxiety). But I want to get good at them and not just use them as exercise to lose weight, but as an actual hobby.

2. Stop walking around malls just to look at the food. Basically, stop admiring food that I know I don't actually intend to buy. i always do this to mentally satisfy my cravings, I guess? Which only leads to me craving food even more lmao. I go to malls in order to stop myself from staying at home and over-eating with the food I have at home but this practice is only fueling my food obsession. This is going to be a hard one to stop because if I don't go out of the house, I'll just stay home and likely eat more. But hopefully having new at-home hobbies will stop this.

3. only go to the supermarket when I absolutely NEED to get groceries. Same reason as number 2, it fuels my food obsession. Since I'm cooking for myself now, I've been going to the supermarket a lot more, but in doing so, I'm just increasing my reliance on food even more. So I don't want to think about what I'm going to eat next that much, regardless of whether it's healthy or unhealthy meals.

Yeah. I think that's about it. I need to get over my food obsession before I can ever lose weight. Because it won't matter how full I feel even if I'm eating in a deficit if I continue to think about food anyway. High volume eating can only do so much if my brain won't stop going back to food. I need to change my lifestyle entirely, which won't be easy at all given how I'm so used to my mundane routine. I'm going to try my best and hopefully, I'll be able to lead a healthier lifestyle and finally lose the weight.

So yeah. Thanks for reading this far, if anyone actually reads this. I've done way too many "I binged again and I fucked up everything, I'm so guilty, I'm gonna start anew tmr and lose weight!" posts and it's about time that I realized the root cause of my weight gain was due to my miserable, mundane, food obsessed lifestyle, not just because of hunger or restrictive eating. Like, I've always known that I have an unhealthy obsession with food, but recently, I've really started to understand exactly how this obsession came to be and how I keep fueling it. Changing my lifestyle doesn't mean just changing how I eat, but also changing what I do everyday. Yeah this is going to be really freaking difficult. But if I don't change now, I'm going to be even more miserable in life than I already am.

This post isn't meant to come off as me complaining about my life, I don't know if that's how it looks, more of me reflecting on everything that has happened and that has led up to my lifestyle today.

Okay I think I'm done rambling. See why I used to spend hours on my diary? I have way too many thoughts and I digress too much lmao. That's it. My willpower is pretty shit but I'm gonna try to be determined to make a complete change. Maybe nobody will read this but that's fine, I'll keep this up as a reminder to myself.

TLDR: I keep failing at weight loss because I'm obsessed with food, something that was caused by my boring and uneventful lifestyle of using my phone and eating because I barely have friends or fun activities in my life. And I can only successfully lose weight once I stop constantly thinking about food and what I'm gonna eat next, instead focusing on living life.

TLDR of my TLDR: I need to get a life.

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