43 Male 5'11" Starting Weight 315lb Current Weight 245 lbs Goal Weight 180lbs
Hello all, I've been dropping by here every now and then over the last year and decided to finally post so other people can maybe take from what I'm doing to aid them on their weight loss journey and also take suggestions from others about what I may be doing wrong or right. I'm a regular over at r/deadbedrooms and my issues in my family life are one of my motivations for weight loss.
Some short background on me. I'm half Italian and half lord know what else in northern Europe. My mom, the Italian, raised me on Italian cooking, which is lots of pastas, rich sauces, and large portions. When I was very young, I was very underweight. My parents couldn't keep weight on me and the doctors were always on them about my weight, even though I was otherwise healthy, save for allergies. A decision was made to put me on Periactin (Cyproheptadine), which is a medication that has two primary uses: Appetite stimulation and as an antihistamine. It solved two problem as it made me constantly, ravenously hungry and it kept me from constantly having sinus problems. By the time I Was 10 years old, I was considered morbidly obese. My parents didn't know that the Periactin was stimulating my appetite, they were only told about the antihistamine effects of the medication. The doctor that had originally prescribed it back when I was younger had retired and passed away by that point. I had developed a very poor relationship with food that still continues to haunt me to this day.
I have tried many things to lose weight over the years, from gym memberships, to fad diets, to diet pills (which gave me kidney stones), but one thing remained, I loved food. I was eating out of a programmed psychological response to the intense hunger that I had had in my youth. I feared it, so I would constantly seek out food to have available and would eat, not when I was hungry, but when I no longer felt satiated. In the end, it doesn't matter how hard you work out. If you're constantly taking in more calories than you burn, the weight isn't going to come off. You might build a lot of stamina and muscle under it, but it isn't going anywhere. I had to change my relationship with food.
Upon nearing 40, my health started to fray along the edges. My knees, ankles and lower back started to hurt. My sleeping problems began to bother my family. I snored so loud, no one could sleep in the same room with me, and my wife was telling me that I would stop breathing in my sleep often. I went in for a sleep study and was diagnosed with severe sleep apnea. I'm now using a CPAP every night.
That one thing was a game changer. Before I got it, I wasn't effectively not sleeping. I was passing out and kind of staying in a state of twilight, never going beyond the first level of sleep, because, every time I did, I'd stop breathing and my body would wake me back up. I was constantly having to get up and use the bathroom. I was miserable. Once I got it, two things immediately changed. The first was that I had energy again. I was always tired and worn out before. The second was that I found that I could be positive about life again. While I Was always tired and worn out, I was also secretly battling depression. I wouldn't share with anyone how sad and horrible I felt inside. I hated me. I assumed that everyone else hated me. It was a very self defeating way of thinking, and I couldn't see my way out of it. Finally getting decent sleep allowed me to think clearly again. IT was like I was stepping out of a fog. What it also did was allow me to look in the mirror and take an honest assessment of myself.
I was fat. I weighed 315 lbs. I wasn't suffering from a lot of the secondary problems yet, but, I was past 40, and any self improvement would rapidly become much harder as I got older. I needed to do something.
I took to the internet and started reading. I knew from past experience that I did poorly in self motivation with respect to going to the gym and with limiting myself to reasonable portions. I needed to come up with a plan that would work for me. I chose a two pronged approach.
The first was that I needed to get more activity. My primary job has me essentially welded to a desk most days. There's not a lot of room around my desk to do much in the way of exercise during the day, so, incorporating anything more than a couple of short walks each day wasn't going to cut it. Instead, I had to do something in the evenings that I didn't have any choice about.
I took a second job as a night janitor.
Its not glamorous. It doesn't have a bunch of hot people around in spandex making me think horribly of myself. There are no snack bars to tempt me with sweet treats. It's just me, a building that needs cleaning, and the tools of the trade, which are my workout partners. A vacuum that I walk several miles behind each night. A commercial grade mop that I push, pull and lift over thousands of square feet each night. Toilets, sinks, and counters that need me to bend, stoop, reach and flex around to clean properly. Several flights of stairs that I need to climb to clean. It's all the cardio I could ever get in a gym, but, instead of it being a CHOICE to go there, it's a REQUIREMENT, and it helps that I'm getting paid to do it as well. As I've lost weight and grown more fit and capable, I've expanded my duties to another building. It's essentially over two hours of cardio each night, five nights a week.
This is the best I've felt in decades.
The second thing I did was work on what I'm eating. I started by not changing a thing, but, instead, I kept a food diary for two months. I broke it out into a spreadsheet and found the foods that I was consuming that gave me the most calories for the least amount of nutrition and targeted them for elimination or substitution. My first target was soda. I was drinking over 40 oz of cola a day on average. I immediately made the change to diet cola. I know that a lot of you are down on diet soda for the artificial ingredients, the fake sugars, how it perpetuates a sweet tooth. I get it. I made the concious decision that, over the long run, I was going to die of obesity before the secondary effects of the diet soda got me. Lesser of two evils and it needed to be done. IT had a secondary effect. I was a sugar addict. I craved sugar constantly. By making myself switch to diet sodas (specifically, Diet Pepper and Coke Zero, as they were the two that I could tolerate the most) I was able to begin to break my cravings for sugar. I can't really drink regular soda now, its WAY WAY too sweet. This eliminated 500+ calories per day from my diet.
My second victim was my breakfast foods. I was a big cereal and oatmeal eater. That was my breakfast most mornings, unless I got a biscuit breakfast sandwich from a fast food joint if I was running late. Loads of sugar, carbs, for not a lot of protein and not a lot of other nutrients that I wasn't going to get from a multi-vitamin. I ditched it all. Not craving the sugar, the cereals weren't that appealing, and I was getting tired of oatmeal. I switched to Premier Protein meal replacement shakes. Every morning, I drink one, take a multi-vitamin, and a Vitaming D supplement as I rarely see the sun during the day. That eliminated another several hundred calories per day.
My third victim was bread. I avoid it at every possible point. I allow myself once serving of bread per week. Fourth was pasta. Same deal. One serving per week. Fifth was rice. No more sushi rolls for me. That was a big loss as I love them. Sixth was switching to all sugar free yogurt and reducing fruit to one serving a day.
For 6 months, I eliminated the worst foods I ate, one per month. This allowed me to focus on just that elimination. I wasn't weighing myself. I wasn't trying for specific fitness goals. I Was focusing down on the one thing that needed to be done in order to not be distracted, in order to not get discouraged at not achieving other goals. My goal was that one, simple, controllable thing. And it worked for me.
After 6 months, I got on a scale for the first time and found that I had lost 30 pounds. But, more importantly, I felt BETTER. I could walk up stairs and not feel like I was beaten up. I could wake up in the morning and not be sore. I could tell that I was generally healthier. I had something that was workable for ME. I was loosing weight, I was feeling better, and I could see progress if I looked hard enough.
Over time, I've made other tweaks. Not craving sugar means that I don't really crave dessert, so I don't eat it unless its a special occasion. I actually drink a LOT less soda now, going days between having them, and usually a lot less than before. If I do get a craving for a sweet drink, I'll either flavor a bottle of water, or grab a Clear American flavored water from Walmart. I hardly ever grab fast food. If I do, I stick to their lowest calorie items. I'm not craving breads any more. I do miss pasta, but that's because its a psychological comfort food for me. Pizza is still a weakness. But, I've learned how to stop myself from eating more than a slice or two.
At the one year mark, I had lost 45 lbs. People were noticing that I was loosing some weight, but, only those that hadn't seen me in a while. At present, I look a lot different. I'm 70 lbs down now. Everyone that knows me sees the difference. I need to buy some smaller clothes as my pants won't stay on me, and I have my belt tightened as much as it'll go. I'm still not close to where I want to be. I still carry a lot of weight in my stomach area. Having lost 70 lbs, I'm starting to see some loose skin. My man-boobs are saggy now. I'm starting to get a flap at the bottom of my gut. The skin under my chin is loose.
Things I don't do:
I don't count calories. Intentionally. It would lead me to constantly obsess about the calories of everything that I eat or drink. Instead, I just choose low calorie foods and beverages and think in terms of servings and portions.
I don't weigh myself more than once a week. Daily fluctuations would also be damaging to my progress.
I don't berate myself when I succumb to temptation. I allow myself to make an oops every now and then and just get back on track the next day. Being as active as I am at night affords me a little leeway here and there.
My next step is to begin to do meal prep. I've been just keeping on with what I normally do, save for making my lunches more often, and using the shakes when I can't. When eat dinner, I control my portions, and we've learned to cook more healthy at home. My wife recently had bariatric surgery, so she's had to make BIG changes in her diet. This has influenced all of us to eat more healthy.
I've got to go back to my sleep specialist and get my CPAP adjusted. I don't need as much air pressure in my mask anymore and it's actually kind of annoying now. I'm trying to work down from using the mask to being able to use the nasal rams instead.
I've still got a long way to go. I need to loose another 60 lbs. My clothing goals are to get down to XL in shirts, and a 38 inch waist in pants. I've already made it down from 3XL to 2XL, and from 46 to 42 inches. Progress!
I don't have before and after pictures. I was always so ashamed of how I looked that I rarely let anyone take pictures of me. Sadly, this means that I have very few pictures of myself with my kids when they were younger. I know I'm looking better though. For the first time since I was in college, I had someone flirt with me the other day. My wife decided that she was through with me long ago when it comes to that stuff, so, it was just so affirming that it happened. That has really helped me over the last month to keep focus on my goal.
I hope that my story can help someone, anyone, to make improvements in their health and in their life. You have to want to make those changes internally. It doesn't matter how much anyone else tells you to do it, it won't happen until you decide to do it on your own. Make your goals small and attainable at first. Before targeting your weight, target your lifestyle. Permanent weight loss is a lifestyle change. I have seen several others focus on the weight and get discouraged when it doesn't change like they want it to as fast as they want. Instead, get your starting point stats, write them down, and put them in a drawer. Fix your lifestyle and learn to live with it, THEN start tracking your weight. You'll be surprised at what you see when you finally start checking it.
Good luck everyone!
