Starting Weight/Goal Weight/Today
Hey all,
About 5 years ago I started my weight loss journey. I was 297lbs, had been obese my entire life, and completely fed up with being overweight.
Like anyone who is overweight, I knew I had to make a change but never had the strength or will to take any meaningful action. But something kind of clicked with me in September of 2015. I was suddenly overcome with an intense fear of poor health.
My brain decided to go down the rabbit hole of googling things like "diabetes symptoms" or "sleep apnea" and I quickly realized that I needed to make a change, but I still didn't know how.
I researched many diets and eventually settled on the Keto diet. I somehow had the willpower to cut carbs almost completely out of my life, going cold turkey and losing 35lbs in 2 months.
But this wasn't sustainable at all, and I'm incredibly lucky that this didn't burn me out of weight loss. So after doing Keto, I knew I needed to make a slow, gradual change in my lifestyle and habits to achieve long-term weight loss.
So I decided to cut things out one at a time, which started with the biggest offenders. First, I cut out soda completely, I was at a point in my life where I was drinking 6-7 cans a day (before keto), and I knew if I kept drinking sodas it would just be calories down the drain.
Doing that alone cut 7-800 calories, which drastically improved my caloric intake. Then, I eliminated snacking and made a conscious decision to not buy snacks, which left me only with meals.
I also started calorie counting, and it helped tremendously with being able to accurately guess how many calories are in a given dish. If you're trying to lose weight, I highly recommend calorie counting, not just so you know how many calories you're eating, but also you so you can learn about food and just be more knowledgeable and well-prepared.
Making small environmental changes like this added up, and after about 2 years, I was down to 176lbs.
It's been a few years going up in down and weight, but for the most part I've kept the weight off. I'm currently ~200lbs (6ft) and I'm happy with my weight, although I do strive to just be healthier in general. I practice intermittent fasting, eating from 2PM-10PM every day.
Tips For Weight Loss
- Change your environment, cut out the biggest offenders first (snacking, soda, etc), then move on to smaller things.
- Start calorie counting (I use MyFitnessPal, now after a few years of using it I rarely have to actually use it, I can semi-accurately estimate the calories in almost any dish)
- Consume content about weight loss, unlike other ventures in life, most paths eventually lead to the same result. If you try a diet that doesn't work for you, at least you tried it and can move on to the next one (you've still made progress).
- Don't feel like you NEED to exercise if you're trying to lose weight. I did not exercise for most of my weight loss. It's HARD to exercise when you're overweight, I always thought I was just lazy or weak, nobody tells you that it's actually just a lot easier to exercise if you have much less weight to move around.
I am by no means a highly motivated, disciplined, or willful person. That's something I'm finally starting to work on now, but I was able to achieve my weight loss goals without any of that. If you just eliminate the hard decisions altogether, then you don't have to rely on motivation or will. If I can do it, you can do it too. Remember, work smart not hard.
That's my story, I hope you guys can learn something from it and I hope to see y'all around.
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