So here's the thing... I've been fat my whole life. The biggest I remember being is over 400 pounds, at only 22 in 2011. I'm 5'7" and I told myself I was smaller and cuter than the mirror made me look, for a long long time. I had always been heavy for my size, but working on my feet in retail for my young adult life meant that eating garbage food all of the time didn't add weight but I definitely wasn't losing anything, even at walking 10 miles a day as a Customer Service Manager at Walmart.
When I left Walmart for an office job, sitting on my butt all day as a telemarketer for some crappy company in a small town in Texas, I gained a ton of weight. I kept eating the same amount of food I was eating before when I worked on my feet, only now I sat in a chair all day getting yelled at by people. It was towards the end of my 6 months there that I reached the heaviest weight I've ever seen on the scale, 417. I couldn't believe it.
I had fooled myself, my entire life for some reason I thought the weight would just start coming off. My boyfriend at the time had also been gaining some weight (we ate the garbage food together, but he was 6'4" and a lot more active than me) so he and I decided to join a gym together.
I think I lost maybe 20 pounds, but it was hard and I wasn't changing much of my eating habits. I tried to make myself eat only chicken and white rice cause I thought that would work, but wound up breaking down constantly and buying fast food.
I stopped going to the gym as often, stopped reading r/loseit and started reading subreddits about accepting and loving yourself (which I still believe in, but I definitely was just giving up mentally.) Eventually the boyfriend and I broke up and I wound up gaining just about everything I had lost back over the next 2+ years, although at the end of 2014 I dropped about 30 pounds without trying too hard on keto with the current boyfriend.
Except in November my coworker made an offhand comment about wanting to drop weight for the holidays quickly. I had done Keto for a little while in 2014 but it hadn't stuck. She said she wanted to do it, I told her I would do it with her starting on Monday. Monday came, I ordered some unhealthy breakfast as usual and she made me throw it away to keep me to my word.
That did it. Since then I've managed to lose 55 pounds. My current weight is the smallest I've been since high school, which is insane to say about 330 pounds, but hey.
Every single day at work someone stops me to tell me they see how much weight I've lost. In fact, last week someone didn't recognize me from behind. I myself couldn't see the weight loss until I was at a bar last night with a coworker who is becoming a friend and I was trying to find old pictures of when my hair was a lot longer.
https://i.imgur.com/O6lXYy0.jpg
So what am I doing? I did low carb for the first few months, limiting myself to 30g or less of carbs a day. And that really worked, but I missed bread and figured I needed to learn how to eat it like a normal human being, so I redownloaded MFP and started logging food again, plus I walk on weekends with a friend and track my steps daily, trying to keep myself at 10k steps a day.
The whole point of this post which is now way longer than I ever thought I would write is just to say that if I can do this, you absolutely can do this. I have every excuse in the book as to why it's impossible (PCOS, desk job, too broke to afford 'healthy food') and I found out that it actually gets easier after you get over craving sugar like a fiend.
Don't feel like you have to take everybody's advice. As soon as I started showing signs of losing weight it seemed like every conversation I had with a coworker turned into them giving me tips or wanting me to try this great new product or whatever. I also can't tell you how many times people are amazed when they find out I'm losing this weight just by counting calories. They all assume I had a weight loss procedure or I'm on some sort of magic diet pill.
Anyway, I don't know how to end these things so I'll just say the following: You can do this. And if any fellow stoners can give me their tips on how they deal with the munchies, that would be fantastic.
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