Hello! So I've been lurking on r/loseit for probably upwards of five years now. It has really been a great source of inspiration and support for me, and continues to be so. Although I am not yet at the finish line (I'm not even sure what that is?), I felt like it was time for me to give back to the community and share my story and progress.
Background:
I've been overweight most of my life. We never had scales in my house growing up, but I was always conscious that I was a little heavier than many of my peers but nothing too crazy. At various points in my teens and early twenties I would embark on attempts to lose weight, but frankly, I liked my food and so these attempts rarely lasted more than a few days. My before pictures below were actually taken in around 2013, a full three years before I actually started to lost weight. But that was just another point at which I thought 'this is it - I'm really going to do it' and then just didn't.
Roll on to January 2016 and I went to the doctors and they gave me a general check-up. My blood pressure was a little high, but still just about in the normal threshold, but the real kicker was that stepping on the scales, the doctor informed me that at over 200lbs I wasn't just overweight, I was obese. There is something about that word, I knew I was big but I walked a lot, I carried it well, I was carrying a lot of muscle, I'm big boned, all the excuses fat people use ad infinitum. Obese is not a word that invokes the big but healthy image I thought I was carrying off.
So that was it, right? That was the day I started my journey, right? Wrong. It was still a full 6 months, a full summer of not wanting to wear a swimming costume or summery dresses for fear of what people would think of me before I really decided to get to work. I complained to my lovely boyfriend over and over, and he bought me an online subscription to Slimming World and that was where it began for me. It gave me accountability in the weekly weigh-ins, and educated me about CICO and also allowed me to continue having the occasional treat. The pounds literally fell off me, 6lbs in the first week, 4 in the second and so on. At the end of the 6 week subscription I felt like I could go it alone so I did. After a year I'd gone from around 203lbs down to about 160lbs but come October 2017 I'd hit the dreaded plateau and the weight just didn't budge for weeks on end.
It was at this point I decided to do the thing I'd dreaded most and take up exercise so I downloaded a C25K app and dusted off the trainers I'd bought for myself years before during another failed attempt at weight loss and I started running. At first it was hell, I only just managed the first minute run and every time it asked me to run for longer I thought "there is no way I can do this", but I could! And by the end of the program I could run 5k in 28 minutes, something which I would never, ever have considered possible at the beginning of this. Actually, I enjoyed it so much that I'm now working on a 5 to 10k program.
So how do I feel now? Well, this is an interesting question. My initial target was 11 stone, 154lbs, and I thought I would feel great at that weight but I just didn't so I kept going. I thought that at 10 stone, 140lbs which is where I am now I thought, surely, I would finally feel like I have a good body, but I don't. I've actually come to realise lately that liking how you look really doesn't have much to do with your size. Okay, so I'm not obese anymore, I'm technically a healthy weight for my height but I still see my thighs as being massive, I still see fat on my belly, I see loose skin on my arms, my waist is less hourglass and more trunk. Actually learning to love your body might be more difficult than just losing weight, and it's a work in progress for me.
Anyway, I feel like I've written a lot and yet said very little. I'll post my progress pics in a link below, but if you have any questions please feel free to ask and I'll answer as best as I can.
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from loseit - Lose the Fat https://ift.tt/2B0AyGm
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