TL;DR: Lost 100 lbs through cutting my excuses, creating a defining motivation, CICO, and taking it slow.
New poster here, although I've read r/loseit occasionally during my weight loss journey. Just coincidentally I went on the subreddit today and saw u/TundraTofu's post, and his story resonated with me so much (newborn kid, heart issues in the family, etc.) that I felt like I had to post my weight loss success story to give u/TundraTofu and others in his position an example of success. Feel free to ask me any questions and I will try to answer. I've only posted on reddit once before, so please let me know if I'm breaking any rules or need to make edits.
About me:
Male, 5'10.
When I first started my journey in October 2015: 31 years old, 253.1 lbs (Class II obese).
When I hit my goal of losing 100 lbs in August 2018: 34 years old, 153.1 lbs. Basically a loss of 0.1 lbs a day averaged out.
Today (December 2019) I am 156 lbs, so I was able to keep my new weight for a bit over a year (although there were ups and downs).
Pictures here: https://imgur.com/a/HSM8CER
My story:
I've been overweight my entire life. I was bullied as a kid, was picked last in gym class, and was known as the fat kid throughout all of my school years. I was never thin. Being overweight was just who I was, and I accepted it. In my 20s I did manage to lose around 50 pounds (but was still overweight), but the weight came back as I transitioned from a bachelor to being someone in a great, fun relationship. I never felt healthy but I never really felt unhealthy either—I was making money, I was getting married to the love of my life, I had good family and friends. Life was good. I was just too busy living life to focus on losing weight. It could wait till later.
When I was 30, my wife was pregnant and I was about to become a father. I decided to go to a doctor for a physical—I was always afraid to go because I was overweight, but decided that it was the right thing to do since I was going to be a dad. When the doctor checked my blood pressure, it was 175/125. He freaked out, thought I might be in a hypertensive crisis since I was much too young to have numbers that high. He made me immediately take an x-ray to check if I had an aortic dissection, made me check my eyes to see if my high blood pressure damaged my eye nerves, and set up an appointment for an EKG. He immediately put me on blood pressure medication. Luckily I didn't have any permanent damage from the high blood pressure, but I was put on three blood pressure medications to reduce my BP levels. The fact that my grandma had a stroke and my father also had high blood pressure even though he was thin as a stick suggested that I had a history of heart problems in my family.
After that scare, I decided... TO DO NOTHING.
The blood pressure was normalized with the drugs. I was fine. Western medicine and pills allowed me to continue with my unhealthy life. I carried on, and my first son was born.
As every parent knows, having a newborn is exhausting. One day, while I was exhausted, my wife took a picture of me while I was napping with my kid (see pictures in link above). When I saw the picture, something triggered inside me. A combination of the chin fat, the belly roll, the moobs, the exhaustion. How big I was compared to how small my son was.
I remember looking at the photo, getting depressed. I was so tired. Now that I was a father with barely any time to spare, there was no way I would be able to exercise or change my lifestyle in order to lose weight. As a new dad I now had the ultimate excuse to never lose weight, therefore I would be obese forever.
Forever wasn't going to be long, either. With my family history of heart issues and the fact that I was already on three blood pressure medications, odds were that I'd be dead sooner rather than later, and my kid would be growing up without me.
This was absolutely unacceptable. It was at this point where I decided that I had to cut out all of my excuses for not losing weight. I needed to change, for my son. I needed to live a healthy life and the first step towards that was losing weight. I needed to be around for the life events for my child (now children), I needed to ensure they had a father around. This became my defining motivation.
A defining motivation is the biggest and most important reason why you want to lose weight, described to yourself in vivid detail. Although a number of things needed to happen in order for me to lose weight, creating a defining motivation was the key turning point that enabled my success in losing weight.
To be clear, having a defining motivation doesn't mean that you need to spend every living moment of your life dedicated to it. What it does mean is that when you are given a choice between something that moves you closer to your defining motivation versus something that moves you further away, more often than not you choose the action that moves you closer.
Because my defining motivation was more important to me than a lot of short term pleasures that exist in this world, I was able to make the right decision most of the time when given a choice between moving away or towards my goals, eventually achieving them.
How did I lose the weight?
Technically, simple CICO. I didn't even track my calories. I didn't change my diet (although I'm sure I ate healthier compared to before). I ate smaller portions and I didn't even exercise at all until about 85 pounds of weight loss. I weighed myself daily to hold myself accountable and tracked my moving average weight to not get depressed at the inevitable plateaus and water weight spikes.
I went SLOW. 0.1 lbs a day. 350 calories less than my burn rate—it was slow enough that it didn't inspire my body to fight back too much. I was occassionally hungry, but not ever so hungry that I wanted to give up.
All of the above however was less important than the mental aspect of the weight. We all know how to lose weight technically. I'll elaborate on some of the mental aspects below.
Some mental aspects of losing weight:
- The biggest game changer was the creation of that defining motivation for myself. I found it interesting that even the risk of my death wasn't sufficient for me to want to lose weight. It was the fact that my death would create a fatherless life for my kid. How does one create this for themselves? It's intensely personal I think, and often an external event occurs to inspire this thought. I'd love for there to be a discussion about this.
- I had to cut out all of my excuses. We all have so many. I don't have time to exercise is a great one. Well guess what—you don't need to exercise to lose weight. I don't want to change my diet—well, you can start by just eating less of what you're already eating. I came up with all of the excuses I had and really simplified my weight loss plan such that I really didn't have an excuse to not do it. I no longer had external excuses to blame, or even physical excuses... my diet of "just eat less" did not add any additional work to my life, in fact it subtracted from what I needed to do (I had more leftovers). I did have to increase my mental fortitude and hold off on eating as much as I did before but it wasn't that much that I needed to hold off on because I went slow, and my defining motivation supported that mental fortitude.
- I shifted my perspectives. I love free food man. When there's leftovers from someone else's work meeting, I always went to the lunch room to grab something. Snacks were awesome. Once I decided to really lose weight though, I changed my mindset. Free food wasn't free (and I wasn't poor), in fact it was an active thing that held me back from my goals. I saw it as poison more than free food. I used a good mental trick: I knew I had to have a 350 calorie deficit in my day. I looked at a snack and converted the calories of that snack into the number of hours/days it would take me away from my goal. For example, a can of soda was 180 calories, that's half of my day basically wasted. A 700 calorie dessert meant today AND tomorrow was a waste. I flipped the perspective even further—skipping that dessert meant that I was two days closer to achieving my goals, and that felt empowering. Sometimes I caved because I felt it was worth it. Most of the time I didn't. There were numerous perspective other shifts that allowed me to lose weight, I could write a book about it.
What can you do to mirror my success?
Well, big picture, I think finding that defining motivation is important. I think it's worth a conversation or self-reflection to get this for yourself if you don't have it yet. But it needs to be personal to you.
I think it's worth doing the difficult exercise of writing down all of the excuses you have on why you aren't succeeding or starting yet, then reflecting to find a way to cut that excuse out of your life. There is a paradox here. Blaming oneself sucks, it makes you feel bad. But if you blame an external factor, it may be impossible to change that external factor. Paradoxically if it's your fault, that means you have a lot more control in changing it. If you can blame yourself, then forgive yourself, you can then take personal responsibility for (and control!) your future.
Finally I think it's important to take it slow to start, and ramp it up as you feel more confident. It took me 30 years to get to the unhealthy weight I was—3 years for me to lose all that weight isn't actually that long when you think about it from that perspective. But you gotta move the needle in the right direction. Enjoying the long journey is also important. I was able to do this because I saw every 0.1 lb loss as a mini victory and a step towards the future fit self that I knew I had the potential to be.
u/TundraTofu - you and your young family will have amazing memories, because you want this more than anything you've ever wanted in your life. I believe in you and I'm looking forward to seeing your success!
