I am in my early thirties and have been lurking on r/loseit for a while, quietly counting calories and convincing myself I was doing everything right. I started tracking back in 2022, tightened up my food, hit my steps, tried to be “good” during the week. On paper my numbers looked decent, but the scale barely moved. I kept telling myself I had a slow metabolism, bad genetics, all the usual excuses. The part I kept skipping over was my drinking. I would log every gram of rice and every tablespoon of peanut butter, then drink half a bottle of wine or a few hard seltzers at night and either not log them at all or just throw in a random number and pretend it evened out. A few weeks ago I finally decided to play google doctor and started reading about alcohol and weight, and I found something about how alcohol and weight loss are more connected than people think and it laid everything out in black and white. Empty calories, effects on organs, appetite, all of it. seeing the numbers like that made me feel kind of sick because it forced me to admit that my “plateau” was not mysterious at all, it was sitting in my glass every night. I went down a rabbit hole after that and started scrolling through Reddit, bouncing between this sub and some sober related subs, just reading other people’s stories. In one of the comment threads people were listing different sobriety apps and I downloaded soberpath because it was the first name that popped up. Then I went straight back to reading, and the more I read, the more I saw myself in all the posts from people who thought they just “liked to unwind” but were actually drinking way more than they wanted to admit.
Since then I have been looking at my evenings very differently. I realized it was never just the calories from the alcohol. It was the late night snacking that came with it, the trash sleep, and the way I would wake up tired and crave greasy food the next day. I ended up reading about evening habits that quietly wreck weight loss progress and it talked about drinking at night, poor sleep and mindless eating working together to slow everything down. that felt uncomfortably accurate. I started going back through my logs and doing the math honestly, and it hit me that on some of my so called “good” days I was adding 500 to 800 untracked calories from alcohol alone. That realization hit me harder than I expected. I have cut back a lot in the last month and for the first time in a long time the scale has started to move again, slowly but actually moving. At the same time, I feel a bit lost because drinking has been my default coping mechanism for stress, boredom and even celebration for years. So I guess my question for r/loseit is this. Has anyone else had that moment where you realized alcohol was the hidden reason your deficit was not really a deficit. How did you handle cutting it back or cutting it out without feeling like you were giving up your social life or your only way to relax. I am not looking for perfection, I just do not want to keep lying to myself with pretty food logs while ignoring the thing that is clearly holding me back.
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