Just making this post for myself.
So I finally stepped on the scale yesterday for the first time in about 2-3 years and was shocked to find I had gained 50lbs--went from about 125 to 175. As a woman just over 160cm, this puts me right at the start of obesity. Wow!
For the last 3 years I was studying abroad in a city that didn't agree with me. I moved every year (as is normal there) so I never had a sense of stability, definitely didn't own a scale to lug around. I wasn't really happy with my studies. I was always cold and always tired. My diet was 90% soylent for the past two years, but I ate a lot because I thought that was the way to sharpen my cognitive capacity and stay warm. I thought eating 2000kcal was the baseline for a woman of my size because it's what my GP offhandedly told me and it's what it said on the bottle. I didn't exercise because it barely even crossed my mind with everything that was going on. I considered it for mood benefits but I was constantly overwhelmed. I was saving every penny I could and tried to pour all the time I could into studying, so no gym or anything. For my 2nd year of university I didn't have central heating at all (which was later found to be illegal and only fixed in the summer) so I spent a lot of time waking up in the middle of the night with cold-induced headaches and generally just mewling and not getting out of bed because it was actually painful to. (Ask me about my landlord!) I didn't do well in my studies and I wasn't happy.
When March of this year hit, I took quarantine extremely seriously. I was living in a shared house (hellish arrangement) and before we knew how COVID spread, after I would wash my hands, I would grab nylon gloves from my pocket to use them to close the tap and the door. I did not leave the house at all for about 2 months, not even for brief walks. The extent of my movement was from my bed to my computer to the bathroom and back. This must be what really did it, and I didn't even realize it at the time. I was still trying to study (but ended up deferring for a year because I was so fucked up and unhappy and alone) so I was still trying to eat the same amount of calories (again, literally did not know this wasn't a good idea.) Once I finally felt comfortable leaving the house (and did quite a lot! had to do tourism before I went back home) I noticed a lot of my clothes that I hadn't touched since before lockdown weren't fitting. I figured I had shrunk them in the wash.
I just came back to my home country about a month ago and the first thing my parents did was remark on how much weight I'd gained. The last time my mom had seen me was when she visited me a year prior and she said nothing of the sort so I think shit has really hit the fan in the past year.
I've never been this big before. I remember vague but not overly serious worries about, as a very young kid, being too skinny. My metabolism has always been good and I've always had a fairly low appetite, I can go long periods without eating. I've always been unselfconscious and self-indulgent. I'm glad I had a childhood full of chocolatey snacks. But I'm a grown woman now (22) and it's time to start shaping a life free of heart disease and all the other problems that will plague me. The thing is, although I have had a healthy weight, I've never exercised or been fit. I was an antisocial terminally online kid who never left the house. I'm a single child and my parents were always working abroad as truck drivers so I was sort of left to my own devices from early on. I've slept like shit since I was about 12 and didn't set any healthy patterns or anything diet-wise or exercise-wise. I've always, *always* been the slow kid who found gym class unbearable and who could sprint the shortest distance. So I don't have a go-to sport or anything. I've been speedwalking through the park before winter comes, but after the frost I'm not sure what to do besides fast.
I wrote all of this just to track what got me here in my own mind. It all makes sense. It's obviously an unpleasant surprise but I guess I'm feeling lucky I'm so young and have been made to think about these things this early. I feel grateful I became a vegetarian two years back, because otherwise, going plant-based after my ethnic diet that's so heavy in meat and fats would have looked much harder. I feel like losing it will be challenging, and I'm panicked because now I know the weight isn't just cosmetic, it's a legitimate health concern, and that makes me want to hit the brakes really hard. But I'm worried about going too hard and burning out and falling into a yo-yo situation. I hope that obesity doesn't start to become a really serious health problem until it accumulates for a while and with age. I'm happy to go at a slower pace. I just don't know how to balance it. I don't know whether to buy gadgets or a treadmill or whether my lizard brain will process spending money as weight loss progress and it'll gather dust and set me back. I'm lucky that, while I'd say my relationship with my family is somewhat rocky, they've been creating a supportive environment in this regard. (And seriously, not being around them when there's a fight is a great motivator to go and exercise.) And I'm upset that I'm actually now at about the weight of the average USAian (more than female, less than male I think) and what an unhealthy society we all live in. But, it is what it is.
It's easy to feel serene and rosy when I haven't really done anything but I sort of do feel I'm in a good position to start living in a more healthy way. I just don't want to hit a bump in the road and be discouraged and done (since my main goal in life was getting to my uni program & working to pay for it, and then the program turned out to suck, I haven't really had a goal in any part of my life and the feeling of "determination" is foreign at this point.) Getting down to an actually healthy and not overweight BMI looks like a really long-term and difficult goal and I do intend to move out again within the year (hopefully sooner) and that may mean new jobs or whatever new stressors. So I would like to set my goal to, say, 145lbs, but that seems too ambitious given I can't expect long-term consistency in my life. I guess we'll see.
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