Y’all I’m thrilled! I have been trying to lose weight forever! I’m 24F, 5’5”. Highest weight recently was 156, currently at 140 (body fat roughly 34%), goal is 120-130.
Apologies for the long post, it’s a bit of a read, but hopefully it will help shed insight into what’s been helping me the most.
Also a mild CW for unhealthy patterns of eating/food guilt!
My weight fluctuates a fair bit, and since I don’t weigh myself regularly I usually don’t notice when I’ve gained weight (my body fat composition means it’s not super noticeable to me when I gain- I’m just chubby regardless of my weight lol).
During COVID I put on about 10 pounds without noticing, and around late July/early August I decided to get my butt in gear. I also had started dating someone in mid-august and so I was feeling extra motivated because of my body insecurity (I’ve been single for a long ass time, so I haven’t had to deal with someone seeing my naked body for a while).
I experimented with alternate day fasting and realized I’ve been chronically under eating around 1000 calories for a few years (with regular over eating days of junk). So I started eating 2200 calories on my eat days and then nothing on the fast days.
Y’all it was hard. Fasting was easy, I’ve done multi-day fasts before, but trying to eat 2,200 calories of healthy food was very difficult. I struggled a lot with guilt and appetite loss. It’s hard when you cook yourself this healthy and delicious meal, you’re starving, and a few bites in your appetite is gone. I can definitely put food away in one sitting so I’m confident it was a mental block. I tried smaller and more frequent meals but I just wasn’t hungry and was forcefully eating which sucked. I was also overtraining my body with exercise and that made for a tug of war with my body and mind.
So! What’d I do? I decided to stop the fasting (I’ll go back once I get more regular with food), and instead go for a moderate and regular calorie deficit of around 1600ish calories. I try to food track but honestly it’s too labour intensive when I’m cooking for myself or eating my moms food, so I just wing it and have a rough idea of my total daily calories.
I also realized a big part of undereating was not having a regular eating window. I work random hours and can’t break to eat, so it’s difficult to meal prep and eat at regular intervals. One thing I incorporated was drinking “ensure plus calories”. I was not getting enough nutrients, and even though they’re not perfect, they helped me get my calories up while getting more nutrition. Another thing was listening to my body and the mind-body connection. I realized I was nauseous a lot because of my anxiety. So I started seeing a Counsellor as well as a naturopath to control my cortisol/stress levels (I hadn’t had a menstrual cycle in nearly three months until I started seeing both of them). I also scaled back my workouts from every day to a few times a week.
I know this may be a hella long and an atypical post but I’m happy I’ve made progress and more than the weight loss I’m so happy to be working towards a holistic health of my mind and body, and processing food guilt and body shame.
Thanks for reading!
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