A phrase that gets thrown around on here a lot is the idea of a "lifestyle" change.
It's the idea that if your new habits are not permanent, any results aren't going to last for very long.
I think a lot of people are under the impression that you can just work out really hard for a month or two, lose the weight, and then "return to normal".
But it just doesn't work like that. "Normal" will just put you back where you started.
I just recently hit my goal weight, and I wanted to right up a post or two here to encourage all the lurkers to keep going. I know I really enjoyed reading other peoples stories.
STATS: 29M 6'1
HW: 262 CW: 198
My weight loss journey was not linear at all, and it had a few different stages and phases over several years with this latest round of CICO/exercise finally clicking and coasting right into my goal weight from 242 -> 200 in ~ 240 days.
So lifestyle... When I was a kid, I was very active. Biking, skateboarding, football, swimming, trampolines. This was the stuff I lived for. Sure I played video games, and I always loved pizza, but as a kid the super active lifestyle was enough for me to stay in a generally healthy range.
This remained true until in middle school, I had some social issues. My school changed, I basically lost my core group of friends, the kids around me started doing activities that I was uncomfortable with, and I retreated more and more into my home, playing world of warcraft. Slowly I began to gain weight.
After a few years of this I was able to make new friends, and adjust more socially. I ended up being very active in high school, not so much with sports but just always on the go. I had places to go and people to see, so to speak.
I like this example because its very illustrative. My old gf worked at a Baskin Robins about 1.5 miles from the house. We would walk to school, walk to a friends house, and then walk home. If she had to work, I would walk her to work. I would then walk home. Maybe I would walk to visit another friend or something, and when her shift was over I would walk there and walk her home.
So while i paid almost no attention to my diet, my life consisted of a base-line activity level of walking 5+ miles on most days. Combined with the fact I had no money, this lifestyle kept me pretty healthy too.
After this, I ended up working in a warehouse loading trucks. This work was incredibly demanding physically, and it was the same story, my weight was fine, I didn't worry about it.
Repeat with a construction job.
Then comes the phase when I was laid off. I weighed my options, and decided to go back to school. Couple this with a bad breakup, and moving back in with my parents, I went thru a phase where I spent a lot of time at home. I bought a playstation and played a bunch of video games, ate my mothers cooking, and slowly the weight creeped up. I still didn't give it much thought.
I began to be frustrated with my physical appearance as my weight kept increasing, and so I took a weight lifting class at the junior college I attended. This was a God-send, and I developed some strength and stamina and began to lose weight. It was at this point I became mildly aware about calories, and I attempted on and off to make healthier food choices.
I dropped weight, and felt good and strong. But then I graduated from that community college, and fell away from my beloved little gym where I had free access and felt so at home.
I took an internship in a fancy office park downtown by the university. For the first time in my life I was making a bit more money, and I was sitting ALL DAY. I would commute 1 hour each way, and then sit on a computer for 8 hours a day.
The money and the downtown location opened up a world of social eating / drinking which I had never known before. My co-workers would go out for lunch almost daily. After work happy hours with much drinking where a regular occurrence.
My new lifestyle was no exercise, lots of rich food and drink. The weight piled on, worse than it ever had before.
I was still cognizant that exercise was important, so for instance I would take the stairs the 6 floors from my carpark to my office each day. But a 5 minute stair walk 2x a day was just not enough to combat the influx of calories from my new lifestyle.
In retrospect I can see it so clearly. My weight / condition was always tied to directly to my lifestyle. But I never thought of my lifestyle as something I could control. I was just a passenger, letting the waves of the ocean dictate my levels of food intake and exercise .
This all came to a head when I was walking my chunky butt down the stairs to my office and I turned too quickly at the bottom of a landing of stairs and tweaked my knee. I remember thinking "what the hell, I just hurt myself from walking". I used to run, and jump, and fall off of skateboard ramps and never think twice about it... what happened? I thought to myself, If I fell down onto the ground right now, i'm pretty sure I would injure myself. It never used to be like this...
This was my initial wakeup call. I knew something was wrong, and I wanted to change. But I really didn't know how. I tried doing the things I knew, I cut out soda and drank more water. I tried to order the chicken instead of the beef. I made small token efforts at living a healthy lifestyle.
This new modified sedentary lifestyle was enough to keep me at about ten pounds lower, but that was it.
Then school started again, and I was at a new university on the other side of town. I had to walk to class from my office car-park. And it was about 1.5 miles each way. At first it sucked, I was over-weight, and it gets very hot where I live.
But just adding in that walking, was enough to bring me down 10 additional pounds, in a way that was simple and easy to maintain. I didn't think to much about it, I didn't track calories, it just was my lifestyle.
Now I met some new friends at university, and I really liked them. One in particular was a marvel to me. Her lifestyle was SO different from what I had ever done.
She used a bicycle to get around. She packed fruits and nuts in small little containers for snacks. (instead of waiting until she was starving and getting a bunch of tacos and beer at the end of the night). She spent her spare time in the library studying for tests, instead of racing home to play video games.
So I copied her. Its a good thing it wasn't a test because this would have been major plagiarism. I wanted to keep up with her biking, so I busted out my old longboard. With my longboard my commute was much more manageable. And I was having FUN! I would ride up and down the bike paths. I would explore new areas. I would take long rides at night enjoying the cool air. I started going to the grocery store and buying fruits and nuts to bring to school for snacks. At some point I also started tracking calories. This brought me down to ~220lbs (40 less than my maximum). It was fun, I was happier than ever, and It was not burdensome.
It was easy, because what I had done is copied a successful and happy person, and adopted their lifestyle. I wasn't just forcing myself to quit doing what I really liked, I just re-adjusted what I liked doing.
But alas all things must come to an end. COVID struck, and everyone went home. I took my newfound passion for skateboarding with me, and I used all those covid hours for exercise. I maintained my weight and was generally pretty pleased.
However then I got married. (which was/is awesome). But I think nothing has ever been more of a shock to my lifestyle. I kept up with the exercise, but my diet went to crap. My wife is an excellent cook, and I think she shows me her love by making delicious things that I wanted. This change in lifestyle set me back 20lbs now to 240.
Again, every different weight and phase has just been a reflection of changes in my lifestyle.
It was at this point I realized that I was in control of my lifestyle. I had learned that I love skateboarding, and that is plenty of exercise for me. But now I needed to tackle the eating. But my old strategy of just eating fruits and nuts and for long days away at school wasn't working so well in my new 24/7 at home environment.
Enter CICO. I learned the truth about calories, and I was on fire. It sucked at first, and I was hungry. I had to figure out what types of foods are worth it. I had to get a food scale and find out that my honey bunches of oats were 4x more calorific than I ever would have dreamed. I had to learn that I love carrots. I would have long plateaus and think something was wrong. I quit using mayo and just started putting hot sauce on everything. I had to cut down on alcohol because it just doesn't fit very well into a good deficit.
But now it's paid off. I've crafted a new lifestyle, and I very much enjoy it. Any spare time i get I steal off to the skatepark and drench myself in sweat for a couple of hours. When I'm home I eat nice foods that my wife cooks, she just weighs the meats and gives me a count of how much of everything she used. I'm going to track it for a while still, because it's really not that hard, and I like the accountability.
So this was incredibly long, thanks for reading. I wanted to give a birds eye view of what "lifestyle" has looked like for me. And how my weight has always directly been related to it. My advice to any new-comer is this.
If you want to lose ALL the weight you have to count your calories. If you want to lose SOME weight, you need to just nudge your lifestyle a little bit. Cut out soda. Start walking to the liquor store instead of driving. Switch to sugar free energy drinks. Pick whatever is easiest and start there.
A small and genuine change to your lifestyle is worth its weight in gold.
