Hi. I (5’7, 17F) have had a really rough time losing weight over the years, and I need advice.
I was the chubby kid growing up, and I always hated it. As far back as the third grade (US), I absolutely hated my body. I was very active and ate relatively healthy due to a semi-health obsessed mother (stevia, whole foods, etc), but I was still large enough that my doctor would always let me know that I was on the top end of the weight percentiles for girls my height.
In the summer of 2017, when I was 13, 5’6, and 179lbs, I decided to lose weight. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing, so I got a personal trainer and clung to her every word. I would weight train with her for thirty minutes 2x a week and rarely do cardio. She had me eat intuitively and focus on healthy foods, specifically telling me to avoid calorie counting to save my mental health. Unfortunately, eating whenever I was hungry and doing minimal exercise only hindered actual progress. According to the gym’s expensive scale that I don't remember the name of, I was gaining weight due to muscle gain and barely losing fat. She eventually quit in December.
I got a new trainer in January 2018. This girl had me on a much more comprehensive schedule. I was at the gym 4-7 days a week, three spent on hour long weight training sessions with her and the rest on hiit or liss cardio on my own. She wasn’t too heavily involved in my dieting, but she did tell me to start calorie counting. This was when I joined the weight loss side of reddit. I learned quite literally everything that reddit had to offer, starting with the basics. I had a FitBit and switched to an apple watch at some point; both matched my calculated TDEE. My trainer suggested a 500-1000 deficit and my TDEE was ~2500 cals, so I ate ~1,800 a day.
Eating 1,800 calories was hard. I was always hungry and was (still am) an extremely picky eater so I struggled to find nourishing food that wouldn’t become boring within a week or make me nearly vomit. I meticulously weighed everything on an accurate food scale yet wasn’t losing weight at the pace that my deficit should have had me at (I weighed 172lbs by the end of March), and the small payoff for an annoyingly large effort frustrated me.
I began dropping my calories every week or two and looking to 1200 is plenty, searching for but not finding some sort of increase in my rate of weight loss.
At some point I found the anorexic side of tumblr. I learned of all these people who were doing okay on just a couple hundred calories a day, so I decided to drop my calories further. Increasing calories would make me gain weight, staying where I was or slightly lower wasn’t helping, so going much lower seemed to be the only option. I thought I was above yo-yoing or the debatable starvation mode and, at the time, I was.
I slowly decreased my calories until I was bordering three digits, purposely instilling harmful mindsets and convincing myself that I liked being hungry. Starving was so much easier than trying to figure out meals, making the new approach all the more enticing.
I still lost weight at a slow pace, eventually reaching 166lbs by May. In mirror pictures of just myself I looked like a normal person for the first time in my life– no bulging stomach, back rolls, etc. In pictures with other people, though, I was nearly double the width of others. I kept going.
By July 2018 I was comfortably fitting medium sized shorts. I was also a starving insomniac with body dysmorphia. I weighed somewhere between 155 and 160lbs. At this point I was becoming extremely frustrated with the slow weight loss, so I tried upping my calories with the assumption that I was falling into some form of starvation mode. The increase made me gain weight. I wasn’t sure if the weight gain would have tapered and eventually reversed as my body adjusted, but the way I was still hungry on a 1,600 calorie diet scared me, so I went back to my triple digits, some days only eating 100 calories.
In late August, my personal trainer moved gyms. I had been boxing with a different trainer and I stayed with him, but my main trainer's move cost me my only source of weight training. I continued to do it myself, but gym anxiety and my hatred for exercise dampened the frequency.
Shortly after my trainer left, I was struggling to keep my calories down. I eventually was eating only a couple hundred calories below maintenance, but it was making me gain weight at a slow pace. I thought I had totally let myself go and it upset me deeply, but some small part of my brain thought that a magical force would enter my life and cause me to just jump back into things, like my subconscious wouldn’t allow me to gain my lost weight back. That inkling did not come to fruition; I kept steadily gaining weight and barely making it to the gym beyond boxing.
I was tired of starving, I was tired of exercising, and I was tired of putting in what felt like triple the effort of others (like my siblings, who were having great results while in normal deficits and counting calories exactly the same way as me) for subpar results. I posted on this subreddit once (now deleted) under a different account to explain my situation (minus the extremity of my deficit) and asked why CICO seemed to not be working for me. People said that the only variable was improperly counting calories. I already used an accurate food scale for everything and carefully counted every calorie, so that was the final push into giving up around December.
Then COVID hit and quarantine began. Without scheduled boxing, all physical activity went out the window. My appetite only increased as I stopped starving myself, and my weight shot up. I stopped weighing myself, but my old shorts began to fit tighter than they did when I started this journey.
By August 2020, my school skirt that needed double rolling in 2018 was now too large to sit properly on my hips, and instead sat around my waist. I had new stretch marks all over– my armpits, lower stomach, in-between my thighs, the backs of my knees, etc. It was embarrassing.
My school returned to online by December, and I only continued gaining weight. I completely stopped trying to restrict myself, too involved in school, extracurriculars, and mental illness consequences to have the energy or time to care about my own health. I very rarely outright ate ‘bad’ foods like ice cream or desserts, but I allowed myself to eat mediocre foods like sandwiches without removing the bread and sauces. I also ate anytime that I was hungry. I never gorged; I still ate slowly, drank water, and gave myself all the time in the world to feel full, but I was eating. I feel that I should add here that food has never been an emotional response for me; I don’t eat when I’m bored or stressed or sad or any of that, I just eat when I’m hungry.
Around February 2021, I told my mom how I gained weight even when eating below my maintenance in early 2018 and how I was currently gaining so much weight due to my appetite. She thought I might have an underlying issue, so I got blood work done. Nothing.
In March, I tracked my eating for two weeks, completely allowing myself to eat how I have been eating for the past year with no shame. I was always a couple hundred calories around 2,400 cals a day. Then I ate 1,800 calories a day for two weeks just to experiment, and the hunger pangs were unreal. I meant to experiment for longer to see if they would die down (as they should), but they only got worse to the point that I was falling behind in my school work from lack of focus and energy so I stopped.
Now I’m ~225lbs and I honestly don’t know what to do anymore. I’m incredibly insecure and I desperately want to at least return to a normal weight before I go to college (aka before August 2022), but I can’t find the drive to do so. I don’t want to starve myself, but there seems to be no other option. I am terrified of gyms now. I went a couple times and the anxiety was just too exhausting to fight right now (I have depression). I figured I could exercise from home, but I can’t logically find the discipline to exercise when I know it will be nearly futile without a functioning diet.
I know my situation seems physically impossible without some underlying health issue, and I know your initial thought is that I simply wasn’t calculating a proper TDEE, tracking my calories right, or that I had gone into whatever version of starvation mode you believe exists, but I swear to god I could not have been more precise and my weight wasn't dropping at the predicted rate even when I started out with a normal deficit. I am not uneducated and I am not stupid, but I really feel like I must be missing something obvious here to be so plainly failing. I guess I am just hoping that someone has a shred of advice that I have yet to hear.
Thanks for reading.
