a little back story:
i want to preface this by saying that i spent ten years subscribing to fat acceptance logic, ultimately believing calorie-counting etc. was incongruous with my feminist politics. i still believe fatphobia is a thing; i grew up in a family that was pretty fatphobic, and my parents were consistently derogatory about my aunt's weight. she was morbidly obese and died of bowel cancer in her early 60s. her death was clearly related to her weight but at the time i was just sad that my dad couldn't even have a funeral for her without commenting on her size in pictures. so i know the reasons why fat acceptance logic gets lodged in your brain - it's angering that fat folks are dehumanised to the extent they are, and yes 100% i think that it's wrapped up in misogyny.
anyway, i was a tall and slender child but also gender-nonconforming from a young age. idk if i would consider myself trans now but i was always non-binary as hell as a kid. puberty and adolescence was extremely traumatic as a queer in a rural village with a lot of homophobia and transphobia at school. so i was body conscious as fuck and desperate to fit in, but always remember riding the wave of my slimness and tallness to insulate me from the additional shame of having excess fat. then i discovered alcohol in my early teens and drank consistently to deal with my sadness, for a very long time. at university this habit really took flight, and wasn't helped by the fact that from my late teens throughout my 20s, i was a touring musician. i was in bars and venues almost every weekend, and often for stretches of a few weeks at a time. my eating and drinking habits went out the window, particularly because payments for gigs for many years incorporated drinks riders and buy-outs. i got used to the idea that i was just going to be 'hench' or a 'big, strong person', which also fitted with my identity as a relatively masculine-of-centre woman who is also a guitarist.
i discovered exercise properly at about 27, when i decided to try and learn how to jog for my mental health. i loved it but felt like i could never advance properly because i was always recovering from drinking or eating too much. i was vegetarian from age 20 to 29 so was also riding the wave of not eating meat, in terms of my weight remaining relatively stable, despite being above healthy BMI. then i met my partner, a food-loving canadian who is just over 4 years younger than me. she introduced me to the world of north american meat: chicken wings, ribs... we enjoyed ourselves so much as we were getting to know each other but good god: because i hadn't eaten meat really as an adult, i was on meat holiday in a big way. i really went to town, and the whole time i was reading more and more fat acceptance stuff, learning from fat activists in my music scene and community, and touring more than i ever had in my life. i could sense myself expanding but was becoming gradually more alienated from my own body. at the same time, i was deepening my relationship to running, and even did a half marathon. so i was like: yeah, big people can be athletic! and eat whatever they want! woo!
NOT woo. so from 28 to 31, i was doing a phd. the last year, in particular, involved pretty much sitting all day long. my eating habits and alcohol consumption were also beginning to make exercise less appealing and less possible; i would go for runs and have to break every 10 minutes. alcohol was having a cumulative effect on my mental health: i would have terrible insomnia, i couldn't regulate my temperature, i was consumed with negative thoughts about myself, i had eroding trust in other people and was convinced this was just what life became when you lived in a capitalist hellscape. obviously i figured the best way to deal with these emotions and mental illness was just to....keep drinking whisky and eating M&Ms. and this is the kind of shit i was consuming on instagram too: that i should just listen to my intuition and eat whatever i want because that is self-care.
so anyway, the pandemic comes along and me and my partner - who had become my wife by this point - go HAM with the ham, effectively. we literally spent two months playing breath of the wild, getting shitfaced and ordering mcdonalds. it was, tbh, really fun. but my head and my body were suffering. and i was starting to seriously dislike the way that i looked. thing is, this wasn't a new thing: from childhood i had felt disparaging about my body for obvious reasons, and didn't look in the mirror, for example, for years. when i did look in the mirror it was just for confirmation that i still sucked. but photos of me at gigs from before covid were unavoidable and i was progressively shocked at how overweight i looked. still, these thoughts and feelings came attached to inside voices shaming and policing me for critiquing my own body, as if i was being a terrible feminist and terrible ally to my fat friends. so i just buried it and continued on my merry, buttery way.
in september i got my first full-time academic job and something in me just totally flipped. i realised i literally couldn't continue drinking in the way that i had been if i wanted to do well as a lecturer. my wife and i were going through an eviction by an evil homophobic landlord that lived in the house above us and the stress of that was also pushing us more and more to shit food and the bottle. i realised i wanted more mental and physical resilience and to live my best life, if only to stick it to people like her. so i bought a scale for the first time in my life. i had not had a scale for my entire 20s, believing them to be oppressive to women and part of the auditing, measuring culture that contributes to stress and feelings of inadequacy.
anyway, i got this scale and i stood on it and sure as day, i was 234 lbs. in my wildest imaginings of where my weight had gotten to, this was a distant number. i immediately took to the NHS BMI calculator and there it was: BMI of 32.7 (i'm a tall human), you're obese baby. for the first couple of days i was in denial - i googled things like 'i don't look obese but BMI says i'm obese'. in my head, obese people looked like my aunt or lizzo. at the same time, i was also still struggling against the fat acceptance narratives in my head: i'm obese, isn't this something i should celebrate or something? literally it makes no sense to me now but that is something i genuinely thought. i'm not exaggerating. so after a couple of days of denial, peppered with anger and dispair, i was just like: yeah i'm gonna have to fix this. i figured out that i needed to lose 56 pounds to get to a 'healthy' BMI. when i told my wife this was the amount of weight i had to lose she was like shiiiiiiit. but she never doubted me. so here is how i did it:
how i lost 56 lbs in 5 months:
Step One:
i quit alcohol. forever. i stopped drinking on september 13, and my wife did too. i don't say this like it's easy for people, but it's hands-down the most important and best thing i've ever done for myself. i'm not gonna go on about the joys of being tee-total in this post (it belongs to another post probably) but there is not a shadow of doubt in my mind that cutting out alcohol was one of the key reasons i was able to lose the weight i did. i also feel literally incomparably happier than i ever have in my adult life. i still smoke weed - couple of tokes a night - so i don't consider myself sober, but alcohol poisoned my belief in myself and my body and i knew if i wanted to take my health seriously it needed to go.
Step Two:
i quit animal products, as did my wife. a week after i quit drinking, i decided to go vegan. at first i was still eating honey but that's gone now too. again, hate to be evangelical about this, but it made my body feel healthier than it ever has in my adult life. coupled with zero-alcohol, i started having the energy of like, my 9-year-old self. my skin youthened by about 5 years. seriously, my wife and i were like WE HAVE BENJAMIN BUTTONED OURSELVES WHAT IS HAPPENING. In the first two months of no booze and being vegan, weight melted off me. From 5 October to 29 November, I lost 19 pounds. i was exercising too, but not like crazy. nothing more intense than what i had been doing before, which was running about 3 times a week.
Step Three:
i started actually drinking water. didn't do that before, quite literally couldn't understand the point (so alienated from my body and its needs). anyway, i started drinking at least two litres a day and it seemed to help everything on its way. also, my pee smelled better. win!
Step Four:
i unplugged from the internet. i deleted facebook and eventually instagram. this was an important part of my weight loss journey because i hadn't realised how susceptible i was to group think, and how disciplining social media was about what constitutes a morally good life or decision. unplugging from social media feeds allowed me to start thinking for myself, and spending more time in nature. that said, i compensated for my lack of feeds by getting heavily into youtube. obese to beast (john glaude) *really* helped me. i got super into his videos and started to understand that, actually, as an anti-capitalist, i was doing worse for the world by supporting the overproduction of food - and the nutritional crisis of obesity that unfolds from it - than by self-flagellating for wanting a smaller body.
Step Five:
after the initial weight came off, i had to develop a more serious strategy. first thing i did was actually log my calories. i used my fitness pal for this and it worked well, although i never weighed my food. so a lot of it was eyeballing/guess-work. i got round this by slightly overestimating amounts so that i could insulate myself from disappointment! anyway, without my fitness pal i would never have worked out that actually olive oil isn't inherently good for you. prior to this i would happily use a cup of oil in a salad dressing. so i started switching things out and becoming a bit more inventive: i would use vinegar bases for dressings, and use tahini to thicken it up instead.
Step Six:
i started doing body-weight training instead of running. this was partly because i ran too much one week and gave myself a hip flexor injury. so instead, i started doing HIITs and lots of planks, bridges and the like in the park in the morning. this made my body feel strong and i think sped up my metabolism. eventually, i mixed bodyweight training and running during the week.
Step Seven:
i committed to a daily morning practice of food, movement and meditation. without alcohol I was able to go to sleep more easily and wake up more easily. as a result, I was able to gradually get to morning wake-ups at 6am (i had NEVER been a morning person because of alcohol and anxiety but had always dreamt of being one). i have eaten the same breakfast every morning for five months: oatmeal with agave and either half an apple or blueberries. in some ways i credit oatmeal for being my gateway drug to a healthy life. oatmeal powers me up and 45 minutes after eating it, i started going out and exercising, followed by a few minutes of meditation. this routine allowed me to start my day intentionally and with kind words to myself.
Step Eight:
i ate a cheat meal at least once a week. often this was a proper cheat meal, e.g. vegan fried chicken burger, giant cookie, fries, soda. i continue to do this every friday and the only thing that's changed is that, as my body gets healthier, i actually have much less desire to eat oily food. still, for me it's been important to have an evening of semi-indulgence.
Step Nine:
i stopped eating virtually any processed food and snacks, especially any with added sugar. i thought this would be harder than it was, but i managed it through swapping things out. i ate corn cakes and kallo spinach pesto cakes with vegan pate; i ate a lot of fruit and seeds; i would have like, only one biscuit rather than 25.
Step Ten:
i ate loads of fibre. this is easy to do when you're plant-based, but i also went for way more fibrous carbs. i starting making brown rice, sweet potato or quinoa my carb base, and eating it with loads of tempeh or tofu, tahini-based sauces and dressings, lots of green veggies like broccoli and spinach. tbh this is the food i love anyway, so i always felt satiated and satisfied. this diet hugely helped me exercise - i would never feel sleepy after meals (had just thought this was what happened to everyone after eating), and instead would feel energised. almost like... food can be fuel?
Step Eleven:
i incorporated movement into my work day. this one was hard because my job is frigging nuts right now, with teaching loads effectively doubled, if not tripled, by online delivery. i got a fitness watch which told me to stand up every hour and showed me how sedentary i was. again, hadn't realised this - really thought that running 3 times a week would somehow compensate for me sitting or lying down 90% of the time. so i started with the standing and then i did some walking at lunchtime, only a few minutes or so. i found this to be pretty boring so i got a LONGBOARD. this was a cheap board i found on ebay. i hate competitive sports and live on Plague Island so doing something solo that wasn't HIIT training or running sounded perfect. i started learning how to longboard in early February and now do that at lunchtime, when i can. i listen to miley cyrus and skate around the park feeling like the coolest 32-year-old in the world.
Step Twelve:
by the end of february i had started to plateau. initially this freaked me out but then i went back to treating myself like an interesting science experiment. so i dealt with plateaus through a combination of a) increasing my cardio - in particular, running and jumping more, hip-willing; and b) cutting back on oil. i had started to eat stuff like coconut oil, avocado oil, rapeseed oil - all of which are in vegan foods like pip & nut almond butter, vegan mayo and store-bought hummus. by cutting back - not necessarily eliminating entirely - and doing a bit more cardio, i was able to continue to lose weight. often this was no more than a pound a week but a pound's a pound bitch!
Step Thirteen:
i treated weight loss like a degree. i got curious, fascinated, data-driven; i became a scholar of my own adiposity. i made charts that eventually became a spreadsheet, tracking my loss alongside my exercise habits of the month. i mapped out my menstrual cycle and read my weight loss alongside this information (i kept retaining or putting on weight during my period which initially stumped me until i remembered that obviously bodies change then they're menstruating). i consumed HUNDREDS of youtube videos about weight loss; i also listened to podcasts from the other side of the fence, i.e. intuitive eating, health at every size, fat acceptance. i came to the conclusion that the western world - nay the world in its entirety - is in some kind of nihilistic denial that will end in an apocalyptic mukbang while pharmaceutical, food-industry, and petrochemical companies fill their pockets. i also came to the conclusion that yes, obviously the people who are pumped full of the excess sugars and fats attendant upon the over-production of food are often the poorest. i also came to the conclusion that celebrating this is FUCKED UP, and that we should all be very, very angry about it.
Step Fourteen:
i talked about weight loss with the people that i know care about me, i.e. my mum, dad, sister, wife, and 1-2 friends. i shared what i was trying to do and how i felt about it. this was totally out of character for me as i had been so against intentional weight loss for so long. i embraced the delicious slice of humble pie and 'i was wrong in the past' accountability that this offered me, while offering a new path to deepening my relationships with those close to me, through the vulnerability of being open about body struggles.
anyway i think that's everything. the main things, at least. still hoping to cut down by another 5-10 pounds so i have more wiggle room for my weekend indulgences but other than that, yeah keep going! you'll get there, bit by bit. and as miley sings:
'Ain't about how fast I get there
Ain't about what's waiting on the other side
It's the climb'
IT'S THE CLIMB EVERYBODY!
