Hello r/loseit! I've been lurking for quite a bit and now I think it's finally time for me to make a contribution of my own. This may be long, sorry in advance.
On December 26, 2018, my girlfriend broke up with me. I was devastated, but after a few weeks, some time in January 2019, I realized that I now had to focus on myself. It finally hit me that I wasn't going to be comfortable with my body, let alone eventually put myself out there to find a new relationship, until I lost A LOT of weight. A lot had been happening over the years before this - I was depressed and had been on antidepressants since high school, I had recently realized my father had an opiate addiction, and he had fallen quite ill and was refusing to get help. I had been waiting for so long to get into a better mental place, and I just couldn't wait any longer. It's definitely not the right course of action for everyone, but for me, I decided I needed to jump right into it.
Ever since high school, my parents had been telling me I needed to hit the gym and lose weight. I tried the gym for a bit, but I could never get myself to go consistently. I tried the WeightWatchers plan my mom loved so much because it helped her get rid of some fat after she was pregnant with me. That didn't work. None of the books on diets they had ever given me had worked. I decided to give Noom a try because nothing else had worked for me.
Noom made me weigh myself - that first day, I weighed 257.7lbs. The app gave me daily articles that helped me re-evaluate my relationship with food and understand the psychology behind some of the things I was doing while eating. It allowed me to track what I was eating daily so I could keep under my designated calorie-budget for the day, and it also got me into the habit of weighing myself on a daily basis.
Once I got the hang of that, I realized that it was actually working for me. I was losing weight! The first few pounds came off very quickly, which was a good motivation for me. I started going to an endocrinologist in February, who I have been seeing very frequently since then. Besides the main reason I went to visit her, she prescribed me some medicine - it turns out I have a slightly under-active thyroid.
If I remember correctly, it took me until early April to lose the first ~15lbs. I was going to a consultation for surgery (luckily something that was "non-urgent" and could wait a while), and they weighed me - I think I weighed 243lbs. The surgeon came in and told me that she wouldn't perform surgery on me until I had lost more weight. She asked me what my ideal weight is, and I told her I wanted to lose at least 100 pounds. She kind of said, "Well, that's a lot," in such a tone that anyone could tell she didn't think I could do it. She told me she'd perform surgery on me if I lost 40lbs, and said we'd check in with each other in September. I left that office feeling like absolute dogshit - I weighed too much AND the surgeon had doubts about me being able to lose weight. It took me at least a month to get over that, in which time I lost next to no weight because of my poor mental state.
Once I was finally out of that funk, I decided to aim for the goal she set for me by September. Also, my endocrinologist had been insisting that I should think about weight loss surgery; she said the amount of weight I wanted to lose was very hard to achieve without surgical assistance. I was tired of my doctors not believing that I could actually lose the weight. I kicked it into high-drive and got really serious about everything. I became more familiar with the nutrition labels for everything I liked to eat. I realized that I didn't have to stop eating the things I like - I just had to eat less of it.
Come September, I had lost enough weight to get the surgery, but I decided that I wasn't going to move to the next step with that surgeon. I canceled the follow-up appointment we had scheduled after the initial consult. Among many other big reasons, I didn't feel comfortable getting surgery with a doctor who didn't believe in me.
I ended up getting surgery in November. I weighed around 195 pounds. There were a lot of hurdles, which has made me realize how terrible healthcare is in the USA for someone like me - and for a ton of other people, too. But it's helped me secure in my mind how important it is to stay healthy.
Now it's January 2020, and I weighed in at 177.4lbs this morning. I still have a way to go. I'm a short guy (5'3, as it says in the title of this post). In another 8lbs, I'll finally be in the 'overweight' BMI category. I need to weigh 140lbs to be in the 'normal' range. But now my parents tell me I look good, and when I tell them I want to lose another 40lbs, they say that if I lose any more weight I'll be too skinny. Go figure. I stopped using Noom a few months ago and traded it in for MyFitnessPal, which I'm also very happy with. I got a gym membership at the beginning of December and have actually been going quite a lot. I also managed to stop the antidepressants I've been on since high school, and although there are so many factors as to why I was able to do that, I think that losing weight helped with that a bit because it's helped me learn how to take care of myself in different ways.
Sometimes I look at myself in the mirror and it's hard to keep in mind where I started from because I still have a long way to go. I don't have a lot of pictures from before I started losing weight because I never liked how I looked. Now, amazingly, I kind of actually like looking in the mirror.
This is my lifestyle now - once I hit my goal weight, I'm never going back to how I was before. It feels good to share this. I hope that my post can also help people who have been struggling, and especially people who have gone to doctors that don't seem to have confidence in them (I still have the same endocrinologist, and she told me she gets super excited every time we have an appointment because she can't wait to see the progress I've made). I didn't need weight loss surgery. I did it by myself. There were many ups and downs and periods of time with no progress, but I've done it by myself.
This year, I'm aiming to hit 140lbs. If you've actually read my whole post: thank you, I hope it's helped you in some way, and I hope you're having a wonderful morning/afternoon/evening/night. :)
