Fully Clothed Comparison Pics: https://imgur.com/gallery/wLMDstb
This morning I finally hit my goal of losing half of my weight. I went from 428 pounds to 214 pounds.
I began this journey back in September of 2017. I had been bigger from about 4th grade on and had really ballooned up after college going from 325 pounds to 428 pounds in about 7 years. Back in middle and high school I was always an athlete. I would wake up at 4:00am in the morning and go for a 2 mile run followed by 500 sit-ups. Then I would eat a quick breakfast of a few eggs and couple strips of bacon and go to the gym. Once at the gym I would usually go for 20 minutes of high intensity on the exercise bike, lift heavy for an hour and a half, then follow that by another intense 20 minutes on the exercise bike. I had this morning routine every M-Th during the football season, since my coaches didn't allow us in the weight room on Friday's so that we wouldn't wear ourselves out for that night's game, and M-F in the off season. Every other school day we had PE class for 1h45m and after school I either had a 3 hour practice, game, track meet, or in the off season I added a two hour agility training. I say all this to give an idea of the level I used to be at. I ate to maintain that very active life style at the time.
Once I went off to college, all of that ended. I went from athlete to sedentary gamer. World of Warcraft had just released my first semester of college and a group of us guys on my dorm floor were hooked. That is all we did when not in class and on the weekends I had days where I played 20 hours straight a day with only 4 hours of sleep. This came with a lot of ordering pizza and eating junk food. I had kept eating the same amount of food I had been when I was very active. I started piling on the weight.
After college, I got a third shift lab job, lost all contact with my friends, and just doubled down on gaming. I would order pizza at least once a week, some weeks three times, where I would have a large pizza, order of breadsticks, cookie/brownie, and 2-liter of soda. I would eat that as one meal. I would get a large order of boneless wild wings from BWW with 16oz of blue cheese dressing and an order of fries every weekend. I would also regularly buy family sized bags of chips that I would eat in a sitting. When I cooked for myself, it was a ton of unhealthy food. I regularly went out for ice cream and fast food as well. I just started gorging myself.
I was eventually laid off from that job and got a new second shift lab job in a new town. I was in that role, continuing the same lifestyle, for around 8 months before I applied to a first shift position and got it. Around this time (Summer 2017) my blood pressure was rising at an alarming rate, my blood came back that I was only a couple mg of glucose from being diabetic, along with a ton of other concerns in my blood work. My doctor wanted to put me on blood pressure meds right away. I convinced him to give me 6 months to work on it. This was the end of July 2017. Needless to say I didn't start working on it right away and continued on with my now normal lifestyle.
The straw that broke the camel's back for me was actually at the end of August 2017, a little over a month later. I was in my car driving with the seat all the way back and it had become a struggle to turn the steering wheel because my belly was so big. That was when it hit me how big I had gotten. It, for some reason, just hadn't clicked with me how big I was. I went in to my local AnyTime Fitness on September 6th and signed up. I was given a session with the head trainer for a fitness assessment, I'm assuming because I was so large, which I had on Sept 15th. After that session, the trainer was actually impressed with how well I was able to perform everything at my size and talked me into signing up for their small group training unlimited access membership. It is a bit pricey but, gives me access to all sorts of things like their InBody scanner, all classes included, unlimited small group personal training, unlimited tanning access (not really my thing but a nice perk) and a heart rate monitor that I wear across my chest and shows up on the screens around the gym with everyone else who has one too. I loved all of that, especially the monitor and InBody because I could have all of that data to track and monitor everything.
I started out focusing just on the exercise. After a month and losing my first 8 pounds, my trainer convinced me to start tracking what I was eating. So I began doing that and was surprised at how much I was actually eating. So naturally I started eating less, then eventually started eating healthier foods, and on New Years for 2018 I made my resolution to start eating more vegetables. My new girlfriend at the time, now fiancé, loved eating veggies and was the type of person who ate salads for snacks after school growing up because she loved them. Her and her mom really helped me get into eating veggies. It was a slow process of trying new things but, I eventually got to a point where I am today where I eat a lot of veggies and lean meats.
I am currently back to a more athletic lifestyle, though not as intense I used to be. I run long distance (5 to 6 miles currently) 3 days a week (T, Th, Sat), have group training preceded by around 20 minutes of cardio running on the treadmill 3 days a week (M, W, F), and have a boot camp style class two days a week (T, Th after my runs). I spend a lot more time outside and haven't played WoW or any other games really since October of 2017. I am currently working toward going form my current 22%BF down to an eventual 12%. I want to at least be below 200 by my wedding next spring, which I figure I will easily hit.
So some experience I gained throughout this journey:
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Take it slow. I made some small changes every 2-3 weeks over the course of this journey to reach where I am today and I still make small changes, that I maintain, to continue to improve my fitness and weight loss.
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You will overeat some days. It has happened to me many times and the key is to just accept it and continue the next day like it didn't happen. This comes from many things like family get togethers, holidays, friends in town visiting, etc.
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Based on #2, I learned to plan for those events. It is ok to cut back a little every day during the week and eat a bit more on the weekends. I still love frequenting the local wineries and my fiancé and I enjoy going out to eat a few times a month. I just cut back during the week to save up for it.
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Adding exercise helps a ton. I figure, by adding exercise, I have lost 75 to 80 pounds more during this time frame than I would have if I were to just eat the same without exercise. It made it fun for me and gave me other goals to strive for beyond my weight loss and I maintained more muscle. I still lost some muscle but, I lost 9-10 pounds of fat for every pound of muscle lost so I feel it wasn't too bad.
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Find an exercise you love doing and pursue that. You will never stick to it if you hate it.
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Avoid eating back more than a fraction of exercise calories. They are off on their calculations and overestimate. I figure this is because they don't subtract the amount of calories you would normally burn in that time period if you weren't exercising but, I could be wrong on that. Either way, they are always overestimated so just treat calories burned form exercise as more weight loss.
That's all I have for now, I have taken up 45 minutes writing all of this instead of working. Good luck to everyone else on their journeys. If I can start at 428 pounds and do this, so can anyone. It's simple but, challenging and yet within everyone's ability to achieve. Just find what works for you and stick with it.
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