TL:DR: Feb 2020, January 1 2021, Feb 2022 33 Year old Male 310+ (wasn't touching a scale then lol) to 204.4 to 205.0
March 2020 just as the Pandemic was declared, but before the lock down was ordered where I live my wife became symptomatic with Covid. I'd been ignoring very minor symptoms (headache/sore throat) because guidance at the time said they weren't.
She got better, she got worse, then she stayed worse. We were both heavy, and fairly young, she was 30, I was 33. This disease for old people put her on her back for 6 weeks with a few 'should we call an ambulance' moments. At the same time work fell apart (I work in aerospace) so I dove face first into fitness and weight loss.
We got a water rower and I would religiously do 30 minutes on it every day, sweat through my shirt. I also went on a pretty extreme diet/fasting plan. I wouldn't recommend what I did as generalizable so I'm inclined to avoid too much detail.
I dropped maybe 5-6lbs before I started dieting, the typical weight reduction you expect from exercise alone, and starting in late June I started dropping 3.8lbs a week like clockwork. By January I had lost 100lbs.
Turned my focus to maintenance for a year, slowly weight crept on due to strength training and general lack of precision in my dieting (I was monitoring, my rule was once I started being above 220 with consistency I'd do a cut down, I got there right around Christmas so I waited till after New Years for obvious reasons.
I switched to a more conventional diet model, started tracking, eating normal meal times, pulled my calories down and have slowly moved to maintenance.
Not perfect but you can see the slight regain in the right.
What I've learned:
- For someone who's always been heavy you might need vigilance always. Don't just jump back to 'normal' structure maintenance.
- Remember everyone's getting fat, so it's not like you're missing out on a mysterious ability to just 'do whatever' and not get fat. That thought used to torture me, but especially this past two years has shown that almost no one can just 'do whatever' without gaining weight.
- It helps to be working towards something fitness-wise. Not always be losing weight, but have something to orient your physical and dietary activities towards. I'm ending a weight loss cycle and will turn my focus more to strength development.
- Loose skin sucks and fucks with your head
- I didn't know what I was capable of, both in terms of rapid weight loss and maintenance but physical capacity. Go back two years and tell me I'd run 6 miles one morning just to see if I could and I'd assume you were high. I'm a big framed asthmatic, even if I lost weight that'd be awful.
- Embrace the difficult. Is it harder to make tasty meals without throwing sugar and fat in them? Yes, can it be done? also yes.
- Pain in exercise is inevitable, right now my right trap hurts, a couple weeks ago I pulled something dead lifting, and now when I rack my squats it can trigger. So I'm going to train around it, avoid heavy squats and deadlifts, perhaps do something different until I'm desensitized to the pressure. My non-exercising friends are also in pain, their backs hurt, hips, knees etc. Pain is unescapable, and the pain of fitness hurts less than the pain of ill health.
Hope someone finds this helpful.
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