One year in, I am morbidly obese!

And loving it!

Salutations from Sunny Greece! Today marks one year since I started "doing something" about my weight. The whole thing started for me on a whim, after putting an end to 25 years of chain smoking and seeing my weight ballooning to my highest ever. You can read about it if you want here, it makes for a somewhat awkward story.

Here is a spreadsheet with some specifics about the last year too.

https://i.imgur.com/CBiJ29F.png

And a nutrition daily average over the same period.

https://i.imgur.com/ztBsrla.png

Now, I wanted to make a thread one year in to share some of the things I found out along the way. Some might be helpful to other people trying to lose a lot of weight, but I understand that each person is different and there is no universal recipe for something like this. Your mileage may vary. So...here are some observations about myself:

1. Motivation is not as important as I thought. Habit forming is, though. It really doesn't matter how much you want something, what the reasons are for wanting it and even if you enjoy the process or not. What gives results is re-training your brain and attitude towards solving the problem in the easiest way possible. And then simply putting your plan into action daily. You have to view this as a long term problem requiring a nuanced, permanent and enduring solution.
2. Because this is a marathon, not a sprint. There is no such thing as a "weight loss journey", if you think about this rationally. If you want to live, you are going to eat until the day you die. Day in, day out, until you stop breathing. Fact. Thus, you will have to manage and regulate your food consumption (among a lot of other stuff of course) forever. When starting out, I was impatient to see results and "feel the difference". I thought of this as a - work in progress -, an experiment with an expiration date where my true life would start at its end. Sorry, it does not work this way. I mean, it might in my daydreams..but the fact of the matter is that I was thinking I would become a different person via shedding weight. It's still me, just lighter.
3. And that is fine, vanity is a lousy motivator. For me, that is. You see, at the end of the day it doesn't really matter how others perceive you. The only thing that matters is how your perceive yourself and therefore, the world itself. I admit I'm still really struggling to put this concept into practice. I find myself feeling nice when getting a compliment and feeling bad when someone messes with me. This is the norm for human social interaction after all, we live in a society and it is natural. What I found out though along the way is that actually learning to love myself for who I am and trying to create a better version of myself each and every day that passes makes all social pressure, misgivings, complexes and frustrations seem trite, trivial and incredibly childish.
4. Because the only one that has a saying in this is yourself. Not your relatives, friends, co-workers, your loved ones, children or pets. As I shed weight I find myself growing a thicker skin at the same time, something that didn't happen in the past (I was/am a yo-yo dieter). This is hard though, and this is taking a long time. You have to re-train yourself to become an objective observer of yourself and others. That is more difficult than following a diet, or having to exercise, or saying no to cake if it doesn't fit your appetite/schedule. It's like getting a life coach...who lives in your head only and shows all the different ways you and others fuck up daily without judging you or making you feel bad about it. That's hard, but doable. Hell, everything I say here is very hard for me to do, this is no picnic.
5. Because there are no magic solutions in weight loss. No super diets, no nutrient excluding secrets, no get-rich-fast schemes. It all boils down to this for me. 1. Eat less. 2. Move more. 3. If you cannot move more then eat less. 4. Find the easiest, kindest personal way to do it. That's it. That is all there is to it. The most difficult part is to find the solution to the equation that is the easiest for you to follow long term. To find the one that makes you the happiest or the least irritated when following it. The one that fits YOU. Because at the end of the day, this is about you. there are no rules, no specifications, no norms and customs to observe. You have to find what works for you, and stick to it.
6. Until you need to change it again. Oh yes, you are not done with this that easily. You have to constantly re-evaluate the solution you are following, tweaking and enhancing it along the way. You have to science the shit out of this. Not in watching calories, nutrients, calculating loss rates or counting steps and repetitions. No. The sciencing part is to correctly recognize how your mind and body responds to the stimuli you are putting it though, and re-adjust said stimuli to get a better response. This feedback loop takes time, a lot of thought, an open mind and constant vigilance. But, you can do it! Everyone can. That fat has no chance I tell you, none!

Ok...I'm rambling. Sorry for the long post, hope this may be interesting to some. In any case, I have a long way ahead of me still. The rest of my life. Let's do this!!

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