TLDR at the bottom.
Stats before story: 38 year old male. 6’1”. Start weight on 8/1/2020 was 315lbs. Current weight is 205lbs. 110lbs lost. Goal weight of 190lbs.
Two days ago, I was in the hospital with an appendix 3 times the size it should be. I had to have surgery. I was to be put on a weight restriction of 20lbs. No more gym. No hard exercise for weeks. My progress would all go down the toilet. I’d just lay around, eating, destroying the work I’ve put in over the past year and a half. These were my initial thoughts. I was bummed. But I decided to take a moment to reflect on this, and share the process and story in hopes that maybe someone would get a smidgen of inspiration from it. Also, just to celebrate what I’ve done and how I’ve changed.
Let me explain my intention with this post before I get to the details of my weight loss. I’ve been a subscriber of this subreddit for many years. Several years before I even tried losing weight, in fact. I knew I wanted to lose weight, but I didn’t have the discipline or mental capacity for it. I perused this subreddit on occasion hoping I’d read someone’s story to get a nugget of motivation or insight to one day make the post that I’m making today. And this subreddit has been there for me as a pure lurker. I watched everyone’s success and trials and failures and complaints. You’re all inspiring. Even YOU, the guy or gal sitting there reading this with no intention of ever posting anything. This is for you. The lurkers. I know you want to change, because I’ve been there. I am you. You can do this. You are my intention.
In August of 2020, the pandemic had been around for the whole summer. I had a moment where the writing was on the wall for me that this was going to go on for many months. And it was that moment that I decided, when this pandemic was all over, after all the shit we’ve all gone through, the isolation, the worrying… if I came out the other end of this the same guy, I just couldn’t live with that. That’s not to say I was thinking of harming myself. I just had a moment where I thought “I can’t live that life”. So, a switch was flipped.
That’s how I looked at this whole process. It was a long, endless line of switches. The first one is the highest, and the hardest to flip. But that’s the one that starts the machine. It started with me thinking “I’ll take it easy. Just cut down my portions. Don’t drink calories. Move around more.”. And this worked! It worked well enough that after two or so weeks of just being mindful of what was going into my body and how I was expending energy, I lost a couple pounds! Great!
But man, it was hard! I was hungry. I thought about food all the time. I didn’t want this to drag on forever. This is when I reached up to the next switch. I thought “If I’m miserable with this, I might as well make myself extra miserable, but for a shorter amount of time”. I researched calories in/calories out, and set myself at a 1000kcal deficit. This also started my other mantra of building up what I call a “misery resume”. More on that later.
So with this aggressive deficit, it was hard. Very hard. But the lbs were actually flying off. For 6 months straight I lost 10-15lbs a month. I was seeing the progress. The first 70lbs or so was all done through diet. I didn’t go for walks. I didn’t weight train. Nothing. Some of you can probably guess where this is headed… to my first plateau.
I knew I had to start moving. I’d been operating on the thought that the more miserable I was, the more progress I’d see. And what’s the most miserable thing a fat guy like me can do? Run outside. Well, more like walking with very brief moments of awkward shuffling lurches. But this was another switch that I needed to flip. I needed to learn to do this. And this is the point where my misery resume really started getting big.
The idea of this is that you push yourself to do the things you don’t want to when it sucks the most. That first day, just getting out and attempting to run sucked. So, the next day you think “well, that first day was horrible. I felt embarrassed. My knees hurt. I was sweaty. But I did it. And if I did it then, I can do it today”. But I built on this. Fasted for the past 16 hours and just got home from work? Suck it up, go run. 36 degrees out? Suck it up, go run. Oh, it’s raining and you’re just getting over a sinus infection? Suck it up, go run.
The idea is that when a good day comes… when it’s 68 degrees out, sunny, birds chirping, earbuds fully charged, just ate a good meal, you have no excuse to not go out and run. You went out and ran the day after you got your COVID vaccine and your body felt like you fell down a flight of stairs! So, you go out and do it today because it CAN’T be as bad as that! Build the resume up so you have no excuses. You get what you need to get done under the worst circumstances.
It took me from March 2021 until September 2021, running 3-4 times a week to where I ran my first 5k in under 30 minutes. And as great as that may feel, accomplishing that… I still put it on my misery resume. It wasn’t pleasant. I hurt. It was a mental battle to keep pace the whole time. But I did that, so I think I can go out and jog around for 20 minutes on a nice day, lazy bum.
Running this way also made me aware of how calories fuel me. It’s silly, but it took me running on an aggressive deficit for my brain to be like “hey, if you want to get better at this, maybe feed the body a little more”.
And that brings me to today… I can’t run. I just have to sit and rest and recover after surgery. I’m reaching up to another switch. It’s the maintenance switch. I haven’t flipped that one quite yet, and I'm flipping it earlier than I anticipated out of necessity. With flipping this switch, it also means allowing myself to put the misery resume on hiatus while I heal. And that “First Run After Appendectomy” achievement will be waiting to be scribed onto my misery resume.
TLDR: The physical discomfort when it comes to weight loss is a grain of sand compared to the mental gymnastics you have to go through to get to your goal. Figure out the thing that will give you DISCIPLINE. We all know our motivations. Motivation is easy. Explore what you have to do to make you accountable and driven. It doesn’t have to be misery. It can be whatever makes you realize your own potential. You got this.
Aside: I’ve also done some pretty extensive (albeit beginner) resistance training, which I can explain if anyone is interested. Let me know. Feel free to DM me if you have any questions, too.
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