Thursday, December 31, 2020

Lost it. Here's what I did.

I lost 95lb this year- went from an obese BMI to the lower end of healthy (dropped 9 bmi points). I lost the weight in the first 7 months and then kept it off, despite slacking off my diet significantly for the last 5.

I found the drive to do it when I realised a few key things: 1. I wanted to look good and be fit more than anything else in the world and there was nothing real stopping me from having it. 2. That you don't have to wait until the end to start feeling better. That starts at bed time on day 1. 3. Time feels shorter looking backwards (bear with me on this) - I spent so many Christmases annoyed at how I still hadn't fixed myself - I realised that looking back on them that years go past really fast and instead of thinking I had an impossibly long journey ahead of me I could instead just do my stuff and right enough it now feels like the whole thing went by really fast and I have no idea why I didn't start earlier. 4. It's only ever about not failing today. Tomorrow can be dealt with later. It doesn't need to be in your head beyond the extent to which it populates your shopping list.

In terms of more practical things: 1. I measured everything I put in my mouth until I knew how to judge the calories in something to an acceptable degree of error (basically the first 8 months of the year). If I couldn't get accurate calories for it I didn't put it in there. 2. I always knew exactly where my next meal was coming from. My biggest enemy was letting hunger surprise me - then I reach for convenient rubbish. 3. I exercised almost every day. Sometimes only a short walk, often a long one. The whole week was built around the immovable objects that were 3x weight sessions and 3x big cardio sessions (those started off as 6 mile+ walks and ended up as a half marathon almost every Sunday). Every morning the plan for the day involved making sure the exercise happened and then building everything else around that. 4. Diet is king in weight loss but the exercise helps a lot and makes all aspects of life easier. I worked harder on building a deficit through diet on the weekdays and was kinder to myself at the weekend (I love booze and food - the year didn't need to be entirely awful) which I compensated for with bigger workout sessions. I have more time on the weekend anyway. I would just be a bit thin and quite weak if I hadn't exercised, and while I'd have taken that it wasn't what I wanted. 5. I got rid of clothes that were too big right away. There's no point planning to fail and if you keep clothes that don't fit that's what you're doing. Get rid of them. 6. I weighed myself every single day (apart from a couple of times when I was on holiday). Some people don't like doing that and that's OK but from my perspective it taught me that weight fluctuates daily and showed me the downward trend - that's the important bit and means I no longer freak out if I'm up for a day or two. I know what's going on and that I'm doing the right stuff. I, personally, couldn't deal with the lack of information that comes from occasional weighing. Doing it daily taught me a hell of a lot about my body.

I deliberately exercised on 360 of the last 366 days I burned off an estimated 306,000kcal via exercise I walked and ran a total of 2005.2 miles (I cycled about 500 more) I had 150 resistance training sessions of an average of just over an hour each. I went from being able to sweat through a jacket on a 3 mile walk on a cold day to running 9 half marathons and a 25k.

As many people say, if I can do this you can too. Everyone who has said it is right.

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from loseit - Lose the Fat https://ift.tt/3o3witX

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