Hey guys, new here but I've been lurking for several months now.
Like most people here, I'm on a bit of a journey to lose weight. For a while now my mother has been nagging me about my "belly getting too big" and "you shouldn't have a pot belly at your age" and so on. Now, I'm not one to care too much about opinions like her's (especially considering she herself is clearly obese...), so for quite a while I didn't take it too seriously despite realizing and acknowledging I was overweight. However, it wasn't til I bought a scale from Amazon and measured my weight that I realized how bad it had gotten. 249.6 pounds!!! I was 250 pounds; I was "obese." Absurd, I thought. But I knew I had to do something about it and so that I did.
On October 4, 2018 I decided I would embark on this journey to lose weight and it's been quite the journey indeed. It's posed its ups and downs, but I'm definitely starting to feel better about myself already. I can remember a few months ago in university, doing a group video project and seeing slight man tits and my undefined chin from a side profile and feeling disgusted by what I saw. I'm not one to be obsessed with weight or anything but I definitely do not like the idea of myself being fat, especially not when it makes me look misshapen.
Anyway, fast forward to March 10, 2019 and I'm down to 218.2 pounds. That's 31.4 pounds down from my starting weight of 249.6 and I have quite some ways to go before hitting my goal weight of 175 pounds. And what did I do to lose all that weight? CICO. Nothing else. No exercise, no aerobics, no weight-lifting, nothing. Just plain old CICO. Haven't even changed my diet, which was never particularly "bad" to begin with (i.e. I rarely eat out, don't eat much junk food, etc.). Just CICO. No progress pics though as I don't feel comfortable posting pictures of myself on the internet. Sorry!
Which brings me to my general observations about my journey:
- First, I've never really "struggled" with my weight in the same way that I've noticed a lot of people here have. I don't have an eating disorder and I don't find it particularly difficult to resist the urge to eat. I've come to realize that my weight gain was largely down to me consuming far too many calories without even realizing I was doing it. Fruit juices were a huge offender.
- Portion control is definitely kind of new to me. Again, I've never "struggled" with my weight but I've noticed that it is definitely taking quite a while to adjust to the idea of controlling portions. Using 250ml of milk for cereal instead of 300ml, for example, is one thing I definitely struggle with because 250ml doesn't look like it's "enough" when compared to 300. But that's simply because I've trained my brain to think it isn't enough
- I've had a lot of miscellaneous "stomach issues" over the years that I think are heavily related to my steady weight gain over the years. I've experienced a lot of IBS-like symptoms that have drastically decreased as my weight has steadily gone down, and I suspect that my weight gain was also causing a few other misc. "health issues." Even in going to the bathroom I've noticed that I go for a #2 a lot less and experience significantly less diarrhea and other nasty stomach rubbish.
- At first I was weighing myself every single day and this seemed great at first as the weight was really just melting off of me. However, as soon as I hit the 20 pound mark in my journey my weight started fluctuating like crazy every single day to the point where looking at my daily weight journal wasn't really helping me see the big picture. After switching to weekly weigh-ins I realize that I am, in fact, steadily losing weight over time and the weight fluctuations aren't worth paying much attention to. I also changed my scale, as I suspected the previous scale I was using was going on the fritz with its fluctuations and the new scale I have seems to be far more sensible and consistent.
- I've learned to recognize that hunger and thirst are actually different things! In fact, sometimes what I mistake as "hunger" is actually just gas trapped in my stomach that promptly escapes when I belch and the "hunger" usually goes away pretty much instantly. Amazing how that works, huh? I see now that actual hunger, for me, is when I feel the actual psychological desire to eat something, rather than just subconsciouslyt thinking to myself "my stomach is growling and eating will probably stop that effect."
- Trying to force yourself to eat "healthy" with foods you don't like is not effective, at all. It makes you more likely to try to sneak off a snack some time later to make up for what you didn't eat earlier, which is not helpful. I don't "hate" vegetables or anything, but I find that a lot of the time I don't actually find vegetables pleasant to eat unless they're prepared in a specific way. And you know what? That's okay. Not eating things I don't like has helped a lot and I plan to continue doing that going forward as it seems to be working well for me.
So, there you have it. My story. I hope my observations might help some people with perspective, if nothing else. Or, at the very least, I hope this post has killed some time for you if you're bored and waiting somewhere for something to happen. Hopefully I'll be able to come back here months (years?) later and say that I've hit my goal weight. Thanks for reading.
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