🎉🎉I frickin' did it!! 5 months ago I stepped on a scale for the first time and realized I was medically obese. Two days ago, I stepped on a scale and saw the number: 142.2. 34.4lbs off. I'd been regularly checking the NHS BMI calculator and it finally put me on the green part of the spectrum. My boyfriend also measured my waist and it looks like I'm some centimetres under the risk number, where I started at "extremely high risk." I am a healthy girl!!🎉🎉
What to say? I feel incredibly fortunate because I was able to do this without a lot of distractions and with a lot of support. I know this is rare, but I actually felt weight loss to be both easy and joyful. During quarantine I accidentally ballooned even though I was only on a soylent/meal replacement shakes diet for all of college. I've spent the last few months learning what real food is. I started from scratch and totally redid my diet, spent a lot of time reading nutritional/health information. Everyone has always bullied the fuck out of me for eating a weird robotic soylent diet, but I think without it I might have slipped too much into viewing food as comfort or reward, instead of what I had to think of it as in weight loss (and in daily life after I finish, tbh): food is fuel. There is a whole cornucopia of whole foods, vegetables, fruits, seeds, legumes, that I had never tried, that are so good for you. I can't see how someone who actually gives veggies a chance won't find a set of foods that both brings them joy and sustains their health.
When I was a teenager and before I went full-soylent, I basically only ate junk food, and the idea of food I'd learned from my culture was that it's indulgent and greasy and either very filling or not satisfying until you have huge amounts. I don't want to get too much into it, because I started out so ignorant and still am and there's so much to learn, but I just learned so much--again, nutrition stuff and what to eat, but also about food systems and our obesogenic culture, how incredible and sci-fi the human body is, agriculture, even whole new ethnographic things (and anthropology was my major, lol!) I've changed a lot, and for the better. I mentioned in my last post I hadn't felt determined in ages because my experience at college was so shit, but in these past few pandemic months in a kind of volatile home situation (my last post said "I don't get along too well with my parents," pretty quickly after I posted that my father turned out to still be full-on abusive lol), I didn't feel I could control a lot but I could control this, and this is the first thing I've actually accomplished in ages. It's a real thing with a real benchmark, no one can dispute that I went from x weight to y weight. And that feels good. When I started, I had the BMI of the average person from Tonga. Now it's the average person from Lesotho, and I'm well below average for my country.
I'm still gonna keep at it until I lose about 25ish pounds more and hit the 115-120lbs area--20/21ish BMI, dead centre, is good for me. Then I'll pump up my calories from 1200/day to 1500-2000 or whatever I need according to my activity level (I think by the time I'm done I'll be vaccinated and so will a lot of my area, so I hope I'll be able to really scale up the activity to a healthy degree). Another wonderful thing is that I've influenced my loved ones. My mother and my boyfriend both watched me do this and changed their diets to various extents to become healthier after being inspired by me, and I think their choices will go to inspire others, as well. Nobody loses weight just by themselves! We are all network nodes!
I don't really want to write this post with advice because I don't feel qualified to give any, both because my situation was so peculiar (for a while, I basically couldn't leave my or my mom's tiny rooms except to cook because of my home situation, so no exercise--but on the other hand, I also wasn't working or really studying and could almost just fixate on my health full-time, which I imagine almost nobody has the privilege of doing) and because who the hell am I to tell people what to do? But there are some weight loss-related things I did do, if anyone is curious, although I wouldn't claim any of them are secrets to success. I went full cold turkey on sweets and full-on junk food--again, food is fuel, don't lose the plot. I used to eat several bars of milk chocolate per day, then I started having only some dark chocolate squares. With the pandemic, I was staying at home all day so there was no constant bombardment with temptation and ample time to cook. Since I was thinking conscientiously about food, I finally went from vegetarian to vegan--mainly not for the health benefits, but as I got into that world I saw how many there were, and how many temptations it just kills right away because soooo much shit I'd want to eat otherwise is non-vegan. The weirdest thing is maybe that I just eat the same thing every day, Derek Parfit-style. This has gotten me cyberbullied as well. I find it to be fantastic. Once I figured out a balanced set of meals with all the necessary vitamins and minerals through cronometer, with constant adjustment and occasional substitutions, why would I have wanted to subject myself to thinking about what to stuff my noggin with every day when I have a perfectly good system already? It's definitely less than the healthiest thing possible for the gut microbiome (I think you're meant to get 30 different plant foods a week for it), but it works terrifically for me since I can focus on what I care about instead and I do know that what I am getting is very good for me. Maybe I'll level up and include more diversity as I get better at this. The only money I spent was on a food scale and a new personal scale because the old one was broken. No meal plans, no apps, no personal trainers. I'm extremely confident I've saved a lot of money--not just from my old diet (which was pretty expensive) but even compared to the average diet of most people in my country. Legumes are the key to life, the universe, and everything.
I didn't bullet point those for easy reading because it's seriously not to be construed as advice, just a weird set of stories. But I wanted to post to brag. Because it's an accomplishment, and I used this sub a lot and found it very helpful, and I'm very happy! Have a wonderful day!
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