Hello /r loseit
I hope this post is within the guidelines. It’s not really formally a day 1 post.... but I’m just.. struggling. If this gets deleted, I’ll try to find another, more appropriate venue. If a mod does take it out, I’d appreciate a DM with suggestions on where else I might take my story. It took me months to work up the nerve to make a post
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Let's start with repeating the stats in my title:
I’m 30, M, 5’5 and weigh 240.
My story is long, very personal, but I’d be sincerely grateful if you’d listen, and give this sad dude some advice. A quick content warning, I do discuss health, sickness and death in this post. Unfortunately, it's been a huge part of my struggle. Here we go:
When I was 28, I weighed in at 247 lbs at the doctor’s office. It was the heaviest I’ve ever been in my life. My blood pressure was so high they got out a second blood pressure cuff to be sure it wasn’t a fluke. I suddenly had to undergo heaps of tests to ensure my heart was in healthy condition and if I’d need to start on blood thinners. I don’t think I’ve ever been more afraid in my life for my own health... I’m still afraid, but it isn’t enough anymore.
In the end my heart was and is fine, no blood thinners were needed, my blood pressure got back into a healthy range. During and after the scare I started CICO, eating low carb and intermittent fasting (and have been doing IF ever since, though less consistently as time goes on). I lost just over 40 pounds, and kept it off for 2018, and half of 2019. For a long time, until earlier this year, I was maintaining between 210 and 215 pounds, but then covid hit. Gradually, it’s almost completely all trickled back in.
Before quarantine, I used to walk between 25 and 45 km a week just going to and from work every day, sometimes joining my best friend on our walks to the office. If I joined him it usually meant I could add an extra 5 to 10 km in one day. I also started hiking again – I was amazed at how much better I felt after just 20 pounds came off, never mind 40. Now I’m lucky if I break 10 to 15 km weekly; it’s depressing to go outside and walk myself along the same boring blocks like I’m the family pet, even if it does help.
I originally shed most of my weight thanks to Virtual Reality, playing Beatsaber, and slowly adding weights over time. Wrist weights, hand weights, and eventually playing with a weighted vest on my body. I started lightly hiking, too. It was super fun for a very, very long time. After the five-ish month mark I realized I was bored.
Once Beatsaber started to lose it’s luster I moved onto regular fitness, but the boredom was already taking root. All in all, it took me about 5 months to lose the 40 pounds, and then I plateaued. Gradually working out less, making more and more allowances in my diet because of stress. I had started working on a very difficult, time consuming contract for work, and there was a lot of stress and death in my personal life. I was also sick a lot due to desperately needing a tonsillectomy. Despite it all, I kept up the walking and the IF, so again... I reasonably maintained for a pretty long time.
I was so excited when I lost that 40, I felt like for the first time in years maybe I could get below 200 pounds, and maybe take it even further than that. I had a friend who went from my weight to 150, and she looks incredible. I want to have the resolve she does. I haven’t been close to a weight like that since I was 20, when I got down to 160. I’ve been chubby since I was 12, so having people tell me it was the first time I looked a “normal” weight was both invigorating and demoralizing.
But back to present times: Many, many occasions since Covid began, I’ve told myself “change starts today,” and I do make changes. I have a good week of good food choices, fasting on schedule, walking more. A bit of weight sheds, and then it's like I run into a wall. It's hard for me to keep up momentum when every day feels exactly the same, and where I live we often go days to weeks without seeing the sun. Seasonal depression is always threatening, even with light therapy and vitamin D supplements. As it stands, I’m already often depressed and demoralized by Covid, even though by all accounts I’ve had it pretty good. Seasonal depression is just another wrench in it all.
I know there is so much good in my life – especially considering the state of things. I kept my job, I recently got a raise, I'm able to work from home, my rent is cheap and I live with my partner of 5 years and a roommate. My family members who did end up exposed to Covid had very, very mild cases. I’m incredibly grateful – there isn’t a day going by that I don’t stop and count these blessings.
But it hasn’t shielded me from depression about being stuck in my house day in and day out, isolated from the rest of my friends and family. It’s resulted in lethargy and increased food cravings. My job requires a lot of overtime, and on those days I want to eat more out of stress and overtime fatigue.
I have sleep apnea as well as ADHD, so my sleep is very disordered. While my sleep routine is significantly better than it used to be, I still often don’t sleep enough, or when I do, I don’t sleep “properly” because of my sleep apnea. I’m frequently tired, no matter what I do to stay rested (luckily I do get my cpap on Friday, so that’s something!). I am absolutely counting my blessings in these scary uncertain times, but this ennui and frustration persists. I may not have it as hard as some, but I am struggling with Covid Blues to a degree all the same.
Because of quarantine, I've grown to hate my neighborhood. I’m tired of walking the same circuit I’ve been walking for nine months. I don’t have a car and I’m At Risk because of asthma and my weight so I don’t take transit. I have complete environmental fatigue and the only time I find relief from this frustration is when I’m in VR (I just started playing Beatsaber again this week, but it’s still just not as fun as it was in 2018 for me).
Often, I just want to relax when I’m done work. Working out...is just work in my mind. At one point it was fun, and easy to add to my lifestyle when I wasn't plateauing, but then my day job got intense. For emotional relief, I focused intently on other passions in my spare time instead. Working out felt like it was stealing from the time to focus on my passions: art and music, and so on. I am enormously creatively driven, and working a job that can often leave me with barely two hours to myself at the end of the day unless I stay up extremely late makes it easy to justify skipping out on my fitness, because it doesn’t reward me emotionally the way art does – at least not upfront. ADHD rears it's ugly head often in this case.
Work isn’t intense all the time, but it cycles between periods of steady, normal hours, to suddenly having to ramp up and do 50+ hours a week (in my greenhorn days, I frequently clocked 80 to 100 hours; those were dark times). Whenever I have free evenings, it’s hard to justify putting that time towards fitness because it feels rare and hard won, like I need to use it creatively while I still can. It’s a tough balance. I am extremely passionate about my dayjob as well, so a change of career is out of the question.
I know roughly how to lose weight....I want to keep with IF and CICO, but it’s so easy to talk myself out of doing it consistently now that I’ve been off my game for so long. I wish the discipline I built up in 2018 would just come screaming back to me, but it hasn’t. Depression is always a battle and it’s had many victories over me this year. To say I’ve been struggling feels like putting it mildly.
So much happened to me in 2019 that I’m still healing from, that made it easy to derail hard. I had my tonsillectomy which was good, and got back on track with things for a little while, but it didn’t help my sleep apnea like I thought it would. Instead, I continued to feel sick and tired all the time, my contract got even more demanding, and I was often going home at 10 pm, sometimes past midnight.
To make matters worse, a mother figure in my life died following a long battle with lymph cancer. My aunt, who had cancer of the brain followed not long after. I haven’t really been the same since.
Health and death are often on my mind, as it’s cast a long, long shadow in my life. My Aunt wasn't the first to die of brain cancer in my family, and four years ago, my other Aunt died horribly from diabetes related complications. My Grandmother also died of this, and my great Aunt. Usually, it starts with an infection, then the kidneys, then the death spiral begins; dialysis, surgeries, gangrene...it’s horrific.
My parents luckily never developed diabetes, but both my Grandmothers had and have it. It's still something I’m at risk for genetically, especially at my current weight. I get tested every six months – so far all clear, not even prediabetes. My last test was just over a month ago.
Again, death is often on my mind the heavier I get. Diabetic fears, my blood pressure, being heavy can be so compromising... it’s scary, but it doesn’t motivate me like it used to. I feel like nothing does, even though I’m tired of feeling shitty all the time, fearing my weight, feeling ugly, and so on. What’s hardest is even with all of these reasons.... I can’t seem to reason myself into making permanent change. Depression and ADHD make it hard. I won’t discredit myself completely – I have made long term changes for sure – I still fast at least 3 to 4 days a week(but without CICO it doesn’t balance out). I still love to walk, challenges be damned, and I don’t fatigue or tire out the way I did when I first started working out in 2018.
I know ...mostly.... what I need to do, at least the theory of it. But I’ve been struggling for so long that my motivation has really dulled it’s edge. The work vs rewards scale feels tipped away from my favour. I know it feels that way for everyone struggling to lose weight, because real, effective permanent weight loss doesn’t happen that quickly. But regaining this weight has been so disheartening. I stress eat – work stress is real, and currently my days being are being taken up by work again. Finding time to balance passions and fitness feels impossible. Finding a way to cope without stress eating feels impossible, especially when ADHD messes with my impulse control.
I do know that I can lose weight...and do it better and more effectively than I did in 2018...but I feel so lost. I lost steam every time I’ve tried this year, and I’ve had multiple false starts. Part of the reason this has been such a TMI infodump is because I just want to create a complete picture of what’s happening, why I've had so many false starts, backslid, and so on. I don’t know where else to go right now. I’m currently on a wait list to see a weight loss specialist, but it could be months from now before that happens.
So I don’t know. I guess to circle back to my title, I frequently just want to give up. I’m sad a lot, but I know I’m not near actually giving up. I don’t really believe in giving up; I feel like statistically if I keep trying eventually I’ll have another, better breakthrough. But I get so depressed I fantasize about throwing in the towel. Then I eat more than I should, or eat an average amount without working out, which results in me gaining weight because that’s just the kind of metabolism I’m cursed with.
Despite it all, I do feel like I have a very good, nice life. I have a lot of friends and immediate support, but a lot of stressful, sad things have happened. I’m still healing, and I love my job but sometimes passion and stress go hand in hand. Even though it’s “normal” for my job and my lifestyle, it’s hard to adjust for that. Having to make a B plan for the days of overtime feels like an impossible task, and then there’s the lethargic days I don’t want to do anything because I’m so desperate to rest and reset after doing overtime, which already didn’t leave much room for fitness. I often put all my mental resources into just doing my job exceptionally well. Balancing everything else out is extremely difficult with my ADHD being unmedicated (getting medicated properly is a work in progress).
When it comes to my weight, opening up about the full breadth of it to my friends and family is just too hard. I know they’d accept it and talk to me, but my partner has never been overweight like me, and really...few of my friends have. The ones that are...I don’t know. They’re struggling just as much, and it’s a sensitive subject, to discuss weight loss without creating an invisible expectation that they should want it like I do. If it’s this painful for me, I don’t want to bog them down with it, not with the struggles I know they’re facing because of Covid.
Writing this out has helped me feel less hopeless...like I'm definitely capable to make another, better start. I want to find more people to engage with about weight hardships, especially in the face of life's non-weight related hardships complicating the lbs. I feel like many weight loss groups understandably avoid getting into the harder, painful stressors that exacerbate progress
...But for me, tragedy and intense external stressors played such an enormous role in disrupting the progress I made, and ultimately reversing much of it. I do want to hold myself accountable as well.... but I beat myself up for allowing myself to regain weight all the time already. At this point, I just want a hand, and some support from people who have Been There, and people who are Getting Out of There.
So thanks, r/loseit for giving me somewhere to put these thoughts and feelings. Advice on how to start moving forward after an extremely rocky two years would be greatly appreciated. I am refreshing myself with the Quick Start Guides and the FAQ, which is giving me something to hold onto in the meantime.
I will gladly accept DM’s about my post as well if that’s easier than sharing in the comments.
I hope you’re all staying strong, and I hope these uncertain times level out for all of us soon. Sorry my post was too TMI for some people... thanks again for reading if you stuck it out ‘till the end. I know I can do it one day, but I’m really lost right now.
