Hey everyone I recently hit my goal of making it to the mid 120's for my weight and I figured I would share my experience with weight loss. I also want to try to give some advice that helped me out to help out others as well. That being said everyone is different so what might work for me may not work for someone else. I'm speaking purely from my experience what worked for me though.
What got me into dieting and losing weight I am a Type 1 diabetic. I'm 24 years old and I'm male. I went to see my Endocrinologist to get my A1C checked. Upon going there, I spoke with my Endocrinologist and they told me that they were concerned about my weight and that I had gained 15 pounds since my last visit to the Endocrinologist and that I was becoming overweight and I needed to lose weight. I'm around 5'5 and I was a few pounds overweight. This came as a shock to me because I had never been overweight before. Prior, I would eat some of the worst food imaginable and still stay at a decent weight. I wouldn't be extremely lean, but I was relatively in the middle between skinny and overweight so kind of dead square in the middle of those two ranges. As someone who's had family members and friends that had health problems happen because of their weight I became worried about my health and decided to start eating better so I could lose weight and become more healthy. I started at 149 pounds when I was told I was becoming overweight at the doctors.
Beginning of weight loss I then began trying to lose weight. I knew the basics that I had to eat less calories than I burned, but I knew little beyond that. I figured if I ate salad every single day and avoided fast food I would lose weight easily. Did that happen? Nope. I was dead wrong. It turned out I was actually eating below 1000 calories of food every day and that it backfired. So for about a month I ate caesar salads I bought from the grocery store every single day each of which had about 160 calories. I would eat about 4-5 of them a day which means at most I was eating 800 calories a day. This is definitely not healthy. Unfortunately, I didn't know that the time. Eventually, my refrigerator broke. So I wasn't able to eat salads for about a week or so until I was able to get another refrigerator. During that time, I went back to eating fast food. However, instead of ordering two burgers and ordering two huge burgers that had like 900 calories each I instead would order one burger that had around 500-600 calories or so and pass on getting fries or a drink. Around this whole time I did not notice much weight loss. I abandoned eating salads and mostly went back to eating fast food although eating it in more smaller quantities of less calories. Fast forward a few months. I go and visit my endocrinologist again. I'm excited to see my weight and what's happened to it. I get my weight checked and I only dropped from 149 to 146 pounds. So despite eating salads for around an entire month and less food at fast food I was losing weight at a very a slow rate. I was glad to see I lost weight, but I knew something was off i I only burned 3 pounds in 3 months since my last visit to the doctor. I knew I was capable of losing weight faster. I wondered to myself though... What went wrong?
Middle of Weight Loss Journey I guessed the solution was I wasn't exercising. I still wasn't sure, but I began exercising to see if it would help. So I began doing cardio every single day. I walked/ran in a neighborhood for about an entire month and a half straight every single day. I was happy since I saw myself make progress and get better at cardio Even if I was still incredibly out of shape and a novice runner at best I ended up much better at running. I then began starting to see real weight loss happen. My body fat was getting reduced and I visually saw myself getting skinnier However, was the weight loss from the exercise? No. It was actually because I had began using weight loss calculators and began calculating how many calories I needed to burn weight per day. To my shock I discovered I had been under eating and that I wasn't eating enough calories each day. I began counting calories every single day when I began using the calorie weight loss calculator. I would see how much calories every meal I ate was and avoided eating any foods that I couldn't find out the calories of such as random foods at smaller restaurants that had not released their nutrition info. Despite not weighing myself, I began looking at my stomach and noticing that I had less stomach fat. Eventually, before I knew it when I went running I had to buy a smaller and tighter pair of sweatpants because they kept falling when I would start jogging. This was the first point I began really seeing major weight loss happen. I got myself a scale and I had gone down from 146 pounds to 140 in only around a month and a half or so. So why did I stop cardio then?
I stopped cardio because despite enjoying seeing myself making progress at getting better at running it wasn't the end all be all of weight loss. I figured out at my pace of running/walking I was burning maybe an additional 200 calories a day. Since to lose a pound I have to lose 3,500 calories I realized cardio even if I did it nonstop everyday without a break it would take like 18 days of nonstop running to lose a pound from purely cardio. Since there's about 30-31 days a month in most months that means I wouldn't even be able to lose an additional 2 pounds a month if I did cardio every single day since each day resulted in around 200 extra calories burned from cardio. Was cardio healthy to do? Yes. Was it amazing for weight loss? Not really. Ultimately, I realized if i eat fewer calories I could lose more weight than running and eating more calories. So I began focusing solely on my diet and quit doing cardio.
Massive Weight Loss Begins When I was doing cardio I was eating around 1500 calories a day. Once I stopped doing cardio I cut down to about 1280 calories a day or so. I was somedays eating healthy foods like organic eggs and other days eating unhealthy foods like fast food burgers. Despite eating fast food though, I kept losing weight. I would get McDonald's every week and other fast foods such as Carl's Jr. The key was I would try to order items with lower calories such as the McDouble or Egg Mcmuffin which believe it or not those two foods at McDonald's are among the two healthiest burgers you can get there. They're high in sodium, but packed with protein and other vitamins despite their low calories of only having 300 for the Egg McMuffin and 390 for McDouble. What I also began doing was getting Nutri Grain bars for snacks. I would eat those at work when I got hungry and each one had about 120 calories. I ate maybe 2 or 3 or so of them a day at work so that would be a max of 360 calories even if I ate 3. That would usually hold me over until I got off work which I would then usually get fast food or cook food at home. I calculated everyday to try and eat somewhere in the range of 1260 to 1320 calories or so. I began doing this every single day and I started losing a lot of weight. I weighed myself on my scale again a few weeks later and I was now down to 135 pounds previously at 140 when I had weighed myself. I eventually realized I wanted to start going to the gym when a friend of mine who was into weight lifting introduced me to weight lifting and helped me practice doing lifts and practicing the form of them.
Thinking about going to the gym eventually made me even more motivated to lose weight. I mainly wanted to lose weight before going to the gym since I knew if I went to the gym to gain muscle from weight lifting I'd need to eat at a calorie surplus while lifting and following a program and that muscle would also add weight. I therefore wanted to lose as much weight as possible so I would be more lean before going to the gym so I wouldn't have to worry too much about gaining weight from gaining muscle and wouldn't have to worry about cutting and losing weight for as long as possible. Since i'd rather do weight loss before instead of while going to the gym. I kept eating consistently around 1,300 calories a day and soon my work khaki pants that I wore no longer began to fit me. They began falling down unless I had a belt on and even with a belt my work pants would drop occasionally. I ended up going down from a size 32 to a size 30 pants so I went down two entire pants sized and I was able to fit in them despite wearing a belt. People noticed and began seeing I had lost a lot of weight and most people had congratulated me when i told them I was losing weight and said I was doing a good job. I had stopped weighing myself on the scale though because the scale began fluctuating. One day it would tell me I lost like a pound other days it'd tell me I gained like 2 pounds in a day. This began making me question myself if I was losing weight and so I became nervous about it and just quit looking at the scale on a frequently basis. I remained eating around the same amount of calories(1300) everyday though and after several weeks of not weighing myself I stepped on the scale yesterday on June 28th and found out I was at 126 pounds. I was so glad to make it to the mid 120's since that was my ultimate goal. I had finally made it around to the mid 120's. Do I plan to stop losing weight here though? No. I plan to get down to around to 115-120 pounds or so. So what was the most difficult challenge for me of weight loss?
Most difficult challenge of weight loss The most difficult aspect believe it or not was not the actual having to restrain myself from eating food. It was the lack of support I got from some people specifically some of my family members. Some of my family members were supportive of my weight loss, but others not so much. My family ended up coming to visit me since they lived out of state and my mother was not supportive of my weight loss. She saw me around the time I had gone down two pants sizes and told me that apparently I looked anorexic and that I needed to stop losing weight. I explained to her that according to the BMI which doctors use to medically determine if someone was at a healthy weight I was actually in the middle of the healthy weight range and that I was not overweight or underweight, but she said I didn't know what I was talking about. My family would ask me to go eat out which I was fine with doing every once in a blue moon. I explained to them though I was taking my diet and weight loss very seriously and it was very important to me. I asked that if possible I would like to eat out at a restaurant where I could see how many calories I was eating so I could count the calories and make sure I was eating less then I was burning in order to lose weight. My family would complain that it was annoying and a huge inconvenience to them. Even though I only asked to go to a restaurant like that every once in a while and was fine going to a restaurant they wanted to eat out at even if I didn't know the calorie and nutrition info. Regardless, my mom was not supportive of it and would complain nearly every time I mentioned having to be careful about eating calories. She complained at me told me I didn't need to worry and that I was paranoid about it. This caused friction between me and her since she would try to turn it into a argument every time we spoke about this. It was shocking to me to see how unsupportive she was of it. I'd like to think she was ignorant in terms of weight loss and that she wasn't actually this way because most of my family unfortunately is overweight and has never really dieted nor cared about what they ate. I thought that restricting what I eat and my calories would be by far the hardest part, but no shockingly it's actually certain people in my own family that was my biggest obstacle. My friends, coworkers and some of my family were supportive, but some other members of my family not so much.
Most important factor of weight loss The most important factor of weight loss for me was simply counting calories and figuring out from a weight loss calorie calculator how much I needed to eat per day to lose weight. Then it's a matter of consistency and eating the right amount every day. I think the biggest mistake people make is not counting calories or eating foods that they don't know the calories of which can lead to underestimating calories eaten in a day and leading to eating too many calories and ending up gaining weight. Even if the food you eat isn't the healthiest such as fast food if you can tell how many calories you're eating from the food and calculate it throughout the day you're in a infinitely better position then if you eat some food like salad that you don't know the calories of and it turns out the salad has like 1000 calories. It doesn't matter for weight loss the amount of sodium or fat a food has. It's purely 100% about calories. Does this mean you should eat foods that have high sodium, high fat or high amounts of sugar? No. Try to eat as healthy as possible, but if it's between a salad of unknown calories or a fast food burger of an amount of calories you can calculate then go with the fast food burger. In every scenario always go with the food you know the calories of every time. Eating foods of unknown amounts of calories is the #1 way to sabotage a diet. Since once you can't accurately count calories anymore it can make things very tricky. It can end up being very easy on a day when you eat a food with unknown amount of calories too end up eating too many. Believe it or not some restaurants have salads with more than 1000 calories. Once you begin looking at the calories of the foods you eat it can be a eye opening experience and even foods you thought were more healthy can sometimes turn out to be very unhealthy. The #1 thing is you must eat at a calorie deficit. As I said before that is the way you will lose weight. You must eat less calories than you burn in a day. There's no quick solution, there's no magic bullet, there's no other surefire way to lose weight than to reduce the calories you're eating everyday and consistently eat less calories than you burn in a day. Patience is a key with weight loss. Weight loss is not a race to the finish. It's a long process that takes determination and dedication.
Eggs are a awesome weight loss food Believe it or not, Eggs are actually a great weight loss food. In several studies it's been shown that people who eat Eggs in the morning for breakfast tended to lose more weight than people who chose to eat bagels instead in the morning. One of the reasons Eggs are so good is that they're filled with lots of protein. In particular, one great things eggs have is something called choline. Which has been shown to help burn fat. Beyond that though, I can speak from experience that what the studies say about eggs making you full are true. A few mornings I eat a breakfast meal of 3 eggs and I was completely full from like 8 in the morning all the way until 3PM in the afternoon. I didn't even feel hungry at all. I felt completely full and didn't end up eating any snacks at work because of this. If you get eggs though make sure to buy organic or pastured eggs they tend to have more protein and less calories than the standard store eggs.
Pictures of Weight Loss Results Here are some pictures of my weight loss. Both are after I stepped on the scale. First picture is 140 pounds and the second picture is when I recently made it to 126 pounds.
https://i.imgur.com/6Mhvlm2.jpg 140 pounds on scale after weighing myself https://i.imgur.com/UJZPmQJ.jpg 126 pounds on scale after weighing myself
[link] [comments]
from loseit - Lose the Fat https://ift.tt/2z2p3gu
No comments:
Post a Comment