30+ pounds down since last year!

I have been lurking on the sub for a long time and this is my first time creating a post like this here. This is really long but bear with me!

In my teens, I was pretty active. I played a sport competively throughout high school and never had trouble with being overweight. I'm 5'5 and in high school I was somewhere in the high 130s to low 140s weight range. My parents used to cook most of my food and while I used to have fast food and other "unhealthy" snacks occasionally, most of my diet consisted of rice, vegetables, and lean meat. After I finished high school, I played the sport for one more year but since I was in college, I ended up buying a lot of fast food (at least 3/5 days a week and a lot of it was McDonald's).

For me, my weight gain was slow. After the first year of college, I became less active, and started eating out a lot more. It didn't help that I did not enjoy/was not very good at cooking so I opted to buy instead. Also, because this was undergrad, I was also consuming alcohol regularly. These bad habits continued to grad school, and then to after grad school when I started working. Before I knew it, 8 years had passed and I was overweight at 170 pounds (the heaviest I've ever been in my life).

I knew for a while that I had to lose this weight. I tried, unsucessfully, to start going to the gym (pre covid), diets, drinking less etc but I never was able to get disciplined and commit to anything. Then early 2020, the pandemic happened and my friend/neighbor who left to go back to her home country left me with her scale. Having a scale was very useful because now I knew what I was starting with and I would be able to actually track my progress.

Initially, I tried to cook more. I was primarily making green smoothies and chicken and veggies along with other meals with rice. I didn't have a very good understanding of calories so I was still making things like fried chicken and banana bread (a lot of banana bread was made in the early days of the pandemic lol). Eventually, subreddits like this along with other sites on google taught me about the concept of CICO and for the first time I was able to understand that it wasn't by pure magic that I gained all of this weight and sure wasn't going to be by magic that I would lose it.

I decided to make a lifestyle change. Like I said, I hate cooking. So I ended up switching to purely vegetarian meals at home. They were a lot easier to make and cheaper than the meat options (particularly in my country). I started doing insanity max 30 and I'm currently on my third round of it. By also understanding this concept of CICO, I am much more aware of my food choices. I don't calorie track in the sense that I don't write down the amount of calories I consume each day but I do occasionally check online to see how many calories a food item may have so that I am mindful of what I'm consuming. With this newfound understanding and awareness, I have lost over 30 pounds since last year April.

With that being said, the following are a few things that I learned in this journey of mine:

1. Weight loss is not linear. I weigh myself everyday (mostly because I like seeing it plotted on a graph) and my weight can fluctuate depending on what I ate or didn't eat or any other bodily reason. I try not to stress too much about weight jumps (especially when I know I recently had a cheat day) and try to focus more on where the graph is trending rather than the little spikes that may happen in between.
2. With that being said, patience is important. I didn't lose weight at the same rate every week or every month. I also had to come to grips with the fact that it took me 8 years to gain this weight and I should be a bit more patient with my body in trying to lose it.
3. Diet is an extremely important part of weight loss. I absolutely could not have lost all of this weight if I didn't start being more mindful of what I was eating. I only work out for 30 minutes a day five times a week, so I know that would not have been enough to offset calories if I was eating in excess. Eating vegetarian (Only at home though. I still eat meat if I'm buying out) has helped with that for me personally because vegetables generally don't have a lot calories (as I've come to realize). It also makes it easy to get my daily servings in!
4. Most importantly, I learned the importance of discipline. I don't always want to work out. I don't always want to eat my vegetables. But this is not much different from other things that I know I have responsibilities to do. I don't always want to go to work but I know I need to. So why should that be any different for something that affects my health and my life? Don't get me wrong, I'm not on a very restrictive diet and I don't deprive myself of things I like/want to eat. But I know I can't do that all the time and I understand how important it is to stay active.

Keeping these things in mind has kept me focused and has prevented me from spiraling even during the weeks that are less than perfect. I no longer give up completly when I had a few bad days and the scale says I'm a few pounds heavier than I was the week before. I have the tools (both physical and mental) I need now to get back on track, and I think I'll be better off in the long term for it. I'm much happier with my body than I was a year ago on this exact date and I'm going to keep doing what I need to do to keep it that way.

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