Hear me out... And sorry in advance for the rant!
I've spent a LOT of time reading through posts here, and of course my own experiments with weight loss to try and achieve some magical number. I've had depression & anxiety my whole life, which has fed (lol puns) a lifetime of being overweight.
For whatever reason, I'm heavier than I've ever been. But I'm also at my healthiest.
Mentally I'm doing great, the depression is at bay. Anxiety is another matter, but that's always a hard one to pinpoint. My relationship with food is better, as is exercise.
My whole life, my goal has been to get down to around 80kg. I'd never made any real progress on this, except for that one time I got to 97kg.
Spoiler alert: It was possible because of an unhealthy relationship with food.
I stopped weighing myself a while ago because I knew the numbers were just that. I could eat a lot and not weigh more, or eat little and somehow the numbers neither dropped or stayed stable.
I'm sure I'm not the only one here...
So I weighed in tonight. Around 114kg. Normally I'd get annoyed, then probably depressed, and treat myself to some sugary delights because I'm already fat so having more junk won't hurt.
But not this time.
I do still eat junk food. I don't count calories. Ever.
The key to all of this has been to have a REAL breakfast. No cereal or oats. No fruit. I wake up every morning, and fry up 2 eggs, 1 tomato, a small tin of baked beans, 1 rasher of bacon and a handful of sliced mushrooms. Then I get on my bike and cycle roughly 12km to work.
Since I've done this, I'm not craving sugar anymore. I still have my old habits of coming home, sitting in front of the TV and eating junk. But I'm not going through the day wondering where I can find some sugar or propping myself up with caffeine.
The best way I can explain it is that my breakfast gets all of my levels (whatever that means) to the right place. And my food during the day helps to maintain it to those levels. Rinse and repeat. Whereas before I was eating sugary cereals which would soon turn into a sugar crash. I'd need anything I could to get me back to normal just so I could survive the day, and then binge again in front of the TV. Rinse and repeat.
So I look at this number on the scales. 114kg. It's just a number. Yep, it's going up from when I last weighed in. But given that I'm eating correctly (for me), exercising daily, and my mood is stabilized... so what? Obviously I'm turning fat into muscle.
I'm still wearing the same sized clothes (give or take) because while the fat/muscle is being distributed differently on my body, no amount of weight loss will shrink my broad shoulders or barrel chest. While I'm cycling, I'm always going to have 'thunder thighs'.
I wished I'd learned this years ago, it could've saved me a lot of anguish over my body.
So back the topic... is anyone else NOT trying to lose WEIGHT?
I think it should actually be fat loss, not weight loss. Weight is just a symptom of your body & gravity, nothing more.
I'm sure we all agree that we're all trying to lose weight. But as someone who has been hung up on the numbers for a VERY long time, it's so damn liberating to understand that the numbers mean almost nothing!
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from loseit - Lose the Fat https://ift.tt/2CrHqf4