Hi everyone from the land of the rising sun. I’m male, 34, 5’8, and currently 150 pounds. I wrote this post to share with others how I gained 45 pounds over the past few years, and how I lost it while working a very busy and stressful job over the past 10 months. I hope it helps others who are on a similar journey.
I’m a teacher at an international school, currently working in Japan. Like many of you - this past year has been super tough for me. I have been feeling especially isolated living abroad, away from family and friends, and working 60+ hours a week has put even more stress on my mind and body.
I had already started to gain weight soon after I got to Japan. The work culture here is cold, intense, rigid, and hierarchal. We work long, long days, and the stress from students, parents, and administration is unlike anything I had ever experienced before (especially since I teach upper secondary).
I barely had time to do laundry, let alone cook, so I resorted to eating convenience store and delivery-food most nights, and slowly but surely, I began gaining weight.
At first, I was in denial because I had always been in good shape. I was a high school athlete and I’ve wrestled, done BJJ, and Muay Thai kickboxing for over a decade at this point. But your body doesn’t care about what you did 5 years ago, just that I was stuffing myself full of microwavable konbini food 3 meals a day while never exercising.
I first began to have to accept that I was gaining weight when I noticed that my dress pants weren’t fitting that well. Then they weren’t fitting at all. I had two pairs of “good pants” that of course had the elastic expander waist built in that I would wear each day. I’d have to wear these pants because the other ones wouldn’t even button at that point.
Then COVID-19 hit, and I started eating even more. My mental health started to deteriorate because I was trapped in Japan, and couldn’t leave to see my friends or family.
To make a long story short - I gained about 45 pounds by the time that lockdown happened in May. I was at my heaviest at 195 lbs. at 5’8. I kept making excuses for myself and saying over and over that “I didn’t have time” because of my job to make healthy choices like meal prepping and working out.
The lockdown gave me more time, so I figured I would take some baby steps and see what would happen.
I started walking an hour a day for the first week and it felt good. The next week I did two hours a day. I didn’t weigh myself at all this time, I just wanted to get moving.
Week three, I started to tighten up my diet. I switched from a very microwave-friendly diet to a whole food one. I tried to each as many vegetables as I could per day. I also cut out all alcohol and sugar during this time. I’m not a huge fan of counting calories so I just tried to go by “feel.”
About a month in I weighed myself and I was down 10 lbs.! This gave me a lot of motivation and I decided to stop making excuses and start “making time” for my health.
I started a couch to 5k plan that day. This was unfortunately during the rainy season in Japan and it rained every single morning and night but I tried to look at that as a test to see how bad I wanted to change.
I tightened up my diet even more and began weighing and measuring my food. Luckily for me, my weight loss was very consistent in that I would routinely lose 1 to 1.5 lbs. a week, every single week. I think this is because for the past ten months I would weigh/measure every single thing I ate. Meal prepping helped here.
This morning I hit my goal weight of 150 lbs., 45 lbs. down from my height of 195 from 10 months ago. While work still sucks, and I’m counting down the days until I leave here, I’m proud of my progress!
A few tips that helped me, and that may help you are:
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Make time and put your own mental and physical wellbeing first.
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Start with baby steps. James Clear the author of Atomic Habits has a good quote on this, “Consistency beats intensity.”
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Make it easy. I would meal prep and get my running clothes ready the night before so it was easier for me to do the workout than to not do it.
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Don’t get too hung up on different methods, techniques, diets, etc., and feel free to experiment. I got sucked into the keto, intermittent fasting, low carb, paleo, vegetarian, and vegan literature when I first started back into this journey. Each of those things can work. Dylan Wiliam is an educational researcher who has a great quote that is relevant here, “Everything works somewhere. Nothing works everywhere.”
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Hold yourself accountable. For me, that meant I would weigh and measure everything I ate, and keep track of my weight at the same time each week. But that is just one way to do it. If that sounds terrible to you, do your own thing!
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This one might just apply to me, but I needed to address the issues that led me to eat more in the first place. They were being isolated and working in a place that wasn’t a good fit for me. I reached out to some teletherapists and started seeing them regularly, which did help a lot too.
I know this is a long write-up. Hope this helps someone else. Let me know if you have any questions and have a great life everyone.
