Sorry if this isn't the right place for this kind of post but I'd thought I'd share my experience just incase anyone here has gone through something similar. I've lurked on this subreddit for a couple years now and it seems like a pretty open community.
To give a little context I'm a 21 year old male and had been overweight for most of my childhood. I wasn't a very athletic child and mostly spent my free time writing and playing music which is a fairly sedintary activity. My entire immediate family is overweight and doesn't have the healthiest lifestyles, which made it hard to make any real changes to my own diet until after I moved out to college. At my heaviest I weighed about 210 pounds, which was in my last year of highschool. My weight has always been something I think about constintley and it really impacted my mental health throughout highschool and most of my college experience. I hated being known as a "big kid" or "the fat friend" more than anything and ended up socially isolating myself for a long time. I would occasionally go on quick fad diets or prolonged fasts and quit before I made any real progress because my goals weren't realistic.
Last year when the pandemic hit I finally had some time to reflect on my life in general and did some research on how to actually make real progress in terms of weight loss. Seems pretty simple now but really getting into accurate calorie counting allowed me to get into a pretty stable routine and maintain consistent weight loss. I had initially set a goal weight of 160 pounds because it seemed like a good number for my height (6 foot 1 inches) and age. For the first few months of my weight loss journey I didn't own a scale so I was just trusting in the process, but later ordered one online so I could track my progress more accurately.
When I first weighed my self, after not stepping on a scale for a few years, I was surprised to find myself at 159 pounds. It was one of the best feelings I've ever had in my life to be completely honest, but I still felt just as overweight as before. I set a new goal of 150 and kept going.
Since then, around November 2020, I've dropped down to around 135 pounds depending on the day and I'm terrified of gaining any weight. I know for my height and age that puts me right at the top of the underweight category in BMI but I really can't stand the idea of being any heavier than I am now. My heart rate often falls below 140 bpm when I'm sleeping and rarely gets above 160. When I stand up my vision often goes completely black for up to 30 seconds.
Since my weightloss journey began I've also made a lot of other improvements in my life, built new friendships and even starting dating a really amazing girl. I'm scared that if I can't maintain this weight loss I'm going to fall back into my old habits and disappoint the people in my life who now know me as the "skinny friend".
As a guy this stuff has always been hard to talk about, and I'm starting to think I have some form of body dismorphia. I haven't taken my shirt off in public in over 7 years and even after losing over 70 pounds the idea of people seeing my body still gives me just as much anxiety as it did at 210.
I don't know if anyone can relate to my situation and I'd be happy to give more context, but I'd thought I'd reach out anyways.
submitted by
/u/memejpg
[link] [comments]
from loseit - Lose the Fat https://ift.tt/3B6sBdD
