(Long time lurker but first time poster so please go easy on me!)
I am a 25M 5'9" SW:221 CW:171 GW:166 I work in non-profit and homeless advocacy.
I was overweight/borderline obese and chronically depressed, low energy, sweaty, and self conscious from ages 13 to 22 before deciding to make a change.
I want to open by saying that I am not a role model.
Ya’ll’s positive attitude and progress pics are what have kept me going. I don’t look nearly as good as a lot of the people in this sub so I can’t tell you how to get perfect abs and a huge chest because I don’t have perfect abs and a huge chest. My journey hasn’t been about looking like a fitness model. My journey has been about striving everyday to improve my emotional and mental health and using fitness and nutrition as a vehicle to get there.
I have played sports my entire life so I have always assumed that I knew what good nutrition and exercise looked like. This is why it has always been extra frustrusting looking around a locker room and not understanding why my body looked different from all the other guys doing the same workouts I was. I tried just about every diet or exercise life hack I could find and never achieved any long-term sustainable results.
3 years ago I found myself in a really dark place. I was working too many hours, at a job I hated, for a company I didn’t believe in and progressively I found myself neglecting the important relationships in my life and feeling deeply depressed more often than I didn’t.
This realization settled in all at once when I vomited after trying to attempt to jog a mile on the treadmill.
I decided in that moment dry heaving at my office gym that I wasn’t going to allow my life to continue spiraling down the path I was going. The next day, I walked into my office, put in my two weeks’ notice, went home and bought a one way ticket to Madrid with every last penny in my savings account (I live in Texas). From there, without any training or previous hiking/camping experience, I backpacked 192 miles on foot from Leon to Santiago, Spain along the Camino de Santiago trail.
When I came home, I made the promise to myself that I’d never return to being the person I was before I left.
During the period of the 2.5 weeks I spent backpacking, I hiked an average of 15 miles a day while consuming what was likely more calories and fat than I ever have in my life and still came home having lost 11 lbs. This experience entirely altered the way that I looked at food and health.
While I was in Spain, my eating habits could not have been more different from the traditional “Western Diet.” I subsisted on primarily bread, tons of red meat and animal fat, a good measure of wine, and whatever fruits or berries I could find growing along the trail. I was eating the way the locals in the small villages I passed through ate. The food I consumed was simple, fresh, and produced almost exclusively within a 50 mile radius of where I was eating it. This simplicity has been the foundation of my current nutrition regimen. The only foods I actively avoid today are those that are heavily processed or high in sugar. And I eat local and flexitarian as often as I can. Aside from that, when I do crave a cheat meal whether it’s chicken wings or chocolate cake, I indulge! The difference is that now, I earn it by always cooking and preparing it myself.
Everyone’s path is different. For me, good fitness and nutrition has been about avoiding extremes of any kind, positive or negative, in exercise and diet. What I mean by this is that I’ve tried Keto diets, cutting out carbs, intermittent fasting, etc. and, to be fair, some of them gave me incredible weight loss results. The problem was that none of them were sustainable in the long term because they forced me to constantly monitor and sometimes physically weigh everything that went into my body. This realization to strive for “sustainability” as opposed to immediate results was the key to success for me personally in maintaining my lifestyle over a period of years as opposed to weeks or months.
My success in long-term diet maintenance can be simplified down to two key principles I learned from the writing of Food Journalist Michael Polan; “eat (real) food, not too much, mostly plants” and “everything in moderation, including moderation.”
My success for long-term fitness maintenance comes down to two simple rules I made for myself; make exercise the first thing I do in the morning and work-out in whatever way will get me moving based on my motivation that day.
Know yourself. I’m lazy! I know that. So by waking up at 5:15AM and going to the gym before work, I know that when 5PM hits I get to go home and play video games :)
If I were to offer one piece of advice to anyone getting started it would be to follow the “work-out in whatever way will get you moving” principle.
I never used to feel comfortable in a proper gym because I was always so intimidated by the yogeys, crossfitters, and gym rats. Everyone is different so it’s critical to make the gym work for you, not the other way around. For me personally, running, swimming, cycling and most other forms of traditional cardio are miserable chores. So instead, I chose to play racquetball and rock climb at a bouldering gym (for those that haven’t tried it, bouldering gyms are amazing; basically jungle gyms for adults with an incredibly supportive community) 3 days a week to make sure that I’m getting my heart rate up in a way that’s constructive but more importantly, enjoyable for me.
My greatest obstacle has been in working to fundamentally change the way I look at food and exercise. I had to learn to cook healthy foods in creative ways that actually tasted good (keep your baked chicken to yourself lol) and find fitness outlets that made me excited about going to the gym.
Long term success is not about working out to compensate for bad behavior, it’s about slowly accommodating your lifestyle to incorporate activities and choices that will make you look better and (more importantly) feel better every day.
Weight loss changes your life in ways you wouldn’t imagine. In addition to losing the 50 lbs. so far, I am so much less tired throughout the day, I don’t snore anymore, my chronic sweating has subsided and my skin is so much healthier. More impactful and important than any of that though is the fact that for the first time in my life, I’m confident being the man I am. I don’t have perfect washboard abs but I know that every day I get fitter, healthier, and stronger. Nothing is more rewarding than that feeling.
Healthfulness is about emotional fortitude not crunches and cauliflower
Your goal is to live a life that you’re proud of in all regards. What that means in pounds lost or miles run is ancillary and it’s up to you.
I’m sorry that I don’t have any current pictures but here’s a comparison of me at my heaviest to me 6 months ago (219lbs on the left and 185 lbs on the right)
https://i.imgur.com/CBGEC93.jpg
Love you guys. Thanks for listening.
