Hello my fellow redditors!
Today marks exactly one year after I started my journey to a long and healthy life here on r/loseit.
To celebrate the anniversary I’d like to share the most important lessons that I learned on my journey with all of you here today. Maybe they’ll shift some perspectives or help someone out who just started such a journey of their own. That being said please remember that these are based on my personal experiences.
But first I’d happily like to pay the progress picture tax. I prepared two collages for you guys. Feel free to check them out: SFW: https://i.imgur.com/2TBOrlB.jpg NSFW-Progress: https://i.imgur.com/ftMKmHw.jpg .
Now that the pictures are out of the way let’s get down to business.
My most important lessons from my weight loss journey
Be patient with yourself
When most of us start this journey we are so focused on the goal weight and can’t seem to get there fast enough. We are willing to change so many things all at once and are super disappointed if we cannot adhere to the new set of rules we’ve established for ourselves.
Please remember that you are human and it took in some cases years to reach your starting point which consisted of building bad habits. You are not going to change who you are as a person within a couple of weeks. This is going to take years and that is absolutely fine.
So please give yourself the time to grow mentally and don’t beat yourself up about not being perfect or having bad days occasionally. Be kind to yourself.
Take baby steps
This is so important. I remember when I first attempted to change my life to a way healthier lifestyle in 2017 I was so motivated that I thought that quitting smoking, drinking, going on a super restrictive diet and starting to workout like a mad man at the same time was a good idea. Spoiler alert: It wasn’t. The attempt lasted two weeks and ended with me gaining another 20 pounds.
Every new thing in your life needs to be made a habit and this takes time. This is absolutely fine. We all want a sustainably healthier life and body. Making too many changes at once will simply overwhelm you because you cannot provide every change the attention it requires to make it a habit. It’s said to take 28 days to build a habit and I’d personally even give it 6 weeks but take this timeframe to adapt and commit to one change until it’s a habit.
For me personally that meant first quitting tobacco. For a whole year I just focused on not having any nicotine and it worked. Exactly one year later I started to implement changes to my diet. At this point I wasn’t focused on losing weight, just eating healthier. Eating freshly cooked meals and more fruits, greens and vegetables improved my life quality so much by itself already. Still I gave it another 5 months until eating this way was a habit. Then I started to go to the gym. For the first month I just focused on going there regularly to make it my routine. Only after this month I started with a caloric deficit.
Overall I think the ‘baby step’-approach is one of the most important things to do while changing your life because it will help you to live better a lot more sustainably.
Make this your personal journey
How do I say this? Just because something works for me it doesn’t need to work for you necessarily.
Don't just blindly follow some fad diet. Inhale all the information and create your own story. You want to have pizza on your diet? Find a way to implement it. You want to eat vegan/vegetarian for ethical reasons but still want to have meat occasionally? Sure, that’s fine. It’s absolutely no problem to eat vegan five days a week and have meat on the other two. This way your meat consumption will reduce, and you are contributing to your ethical believes. If this is how you feel comfortable that’s cool.
To lose weight the only important thing is a caloric deficit. If you want, you can lose weight on junk food only. It’s very hard but not impossible. Figure out how to make this your own custom diet with foods that you love and that you can enjoy for a very long time.
I personally eat 80% vegetarian with fish once per month and meat maybe 5 or 6 times a year.
If you need information on fat loss nutrition/weight loss check out Renaissance Periodization or Jeff Nippard on YouTube. For the ladies I recommend checking out the TED Talk ‘A perspective on fat loss’ by James Smith on Youtube.
Consistency is key
If you do something (for example dieting or working out) on a regular absis for a longer period, you will see results. If you are not fully committed, you cannot expect to reach your goals. What counts is adhering to your plan over weeks and months.
You are in this by yourself…
… and nobody unfortunately is going to care as much as you do.
This is a sad yet very empowering revelation. We do have our supporters of course that’ll cheer us on and say nice things. But in the end, it’s just you. You need to put in the work, you need to be disciplined.
I personally talked so much about my weight loss that my friends and especially my SO are probably very sick of hearing about it.
Don’t expect anybody to notice or comment on your weight loss. They will do it if they decide that the moment is the right one. Most of the time you are in this by yourself though.
Connect with the community
Because we are in this by ourselves, we need to find people who have the same struggles, who can share the joy over the small victories we’ll have on our journey.
The r/loseit community is such a great place to find likeminded people and accountability. When I joined this subreddit, I started to attend the European Accountability threads every day and found awesome people to exchange thoughts and talk about our experiences, fears, and troubles. I appreciate this community so much and I recommend to every single on of you to actively participate in the conversations in the accountability threads (both ofc). Writing a nice comment there can really make another person’s day and help them out big time. If you do this consistently, you’ll find a circle of people that will make this weight loss journey much more enjoyable.
Celebrate your victories
There are so many small victories apart from hitting weight milestones ofc. Make sure to properly celebrate them because they mean that you are slowly regaining your quality of life which (most likely) lost before and didn’t even notice. These celebrations will fuel your motivation and carry you further than you even thought that you’d be able to go.
My favorite NSV’s were fitting into a dress shirt size L for the first time ever in my life (when I grew up I went straight from M to XXL because it was the time of baggy pants and large shirts lol) being able to run 5k, 10k, a half marathon and being able to do chin-ups and neutral grip pull ups..
Question your process once in a while
Never touch a running system is what they say right? Just because something works that doesn’t mean there is no room for improvement. Feel free to experiment a little bit on your journey to figure out what works for you and what doesn’t.
Personally I tried out IF because I was not very hungry in the mornings and evenings but I decided not to continue doing it because it put so much pressure to eat at least 2000 kcals in essentially 4 hours (overall feeding window was 8 but I was commuting 1 hour and 2 hours were spent in the gym, which also implied that I couldn’t eat an hour before the gym). The stress caused by the need to eat wasn’t good for me mentally and I could see it leading to me developing an eating disorder down the road.
Keep your expectations low
Don’t expect to look a certain way once the weight is gone. Especially if lose the weight without working out you might be disappointed at the way you look after reaching your goal weight.
Especially if you are like me and never have been lean or skinny in your life before there is no way to know how you will look with 100 lbs less. If you are in the beginning of your journey, please don’t worry about having loose skin in the future. Personally, I’d take three times the amount of my current loose skin over being obese again.
Thanks for reading this wall of text. If you want, we can have a civil discussion in the comments.
I’d like to thank this subreddit for existing.
Shoutouts go out to my European gang in the accountability threads.
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