TL;DR I stopped going out for lunch and breakfast every day to save money, and accidentally lost 20 lb-- I hope that you'll read the whole post to see if you are making the same mistakes I was.
I am a 32-year-old dude. 5'8, and was 356 lb when 2019 began. For the past 8 years, I was spending ~$10 on breakfast at the office cafeteria (Coffee, 3 Sausage Links, 3 Pieces of Bacon, and a drink to nurse for the day.) Then at lunch I would spend an average of $15-20 EVERY SINGLE DAY on anything from McDonald's to Chipotle, to expensive Japanese steakhouses. On top of that, I would often stop for a snack on the drive home since I have a long commute and spend another $10 on a candy bar, or pack of skittles and a drink and something for my kids/wife. I have no idea what my caloric intake was for these meals/snacks, but I know that I justified them by saying the people around me were doing the same thing. I figured if I was eating like a "normal-sized" person, it couldn't be but so bad.
What I wasn't taking into account is that I sit 10 hours a day for my commute/work and then go home and sit for another 7 hours while I watched TV and played video games. On the weekends I was barely any better-- maybe a couple errands, maybe take the family out to a movie/dinner, but right back to sitting down ASAP.
I have some executive function impairment that affects my ability to relate actions/consequences and makes it hard for me to see the effects of stuff like this, especially once it becomes habit over a period of years. When your brain works like mine does, anything that doesn't provide immediate feedback seems pointless-- I just can't handle the idea that I'm losing something for no reason. How it sounds in my head is basically, "Making this decision will make me feel good immediately. I'm supposed to believe the decision is bad, but when I do it, nothing bad happens immediately. If something bad happens months or years later, this decision is so small, I'll have no idea if it actually caused the bad thing. Better be safe and feel good right now, or I'll regret it."
The first week of January, a redditor called out a comment I made about my lunch/breakfast spending that resulted in me adding it all up and realizing I was spending $500.00 a month on breakfast/lunch on average. I had no frame of reference for that since I saw people all around me doing the same thing, but people on reddit made it very clear that what I was doing was extremely unusual. I felt extremely guilty about the opportunities I was costing my children, the additional financial stress I was adding for myself and my wife-- it was the tipping point for me.
So, on January 7th, 2019 I stopped spending money until I got home from work. I went to the grocery store and bought some snacks for my desk. I didn't focus on getting anything particularly healthy, but also didn't get a bunch of cookies and cakes either. I spent ~$80.00 on nutrigrain bars, and goldfish crackers, and triscuits, and packs of nabs and water/calorie-free tea and that lasted me 3 weeks. The first week or two I was eating through a lot during the day-- making special time for breakfast and lunch and then snacking in between, too. I'd go through probably 2-3 packs of nabs, and 3-4 nutrigrain bars, and some handfuls of nuts. After a while though, I stopped even thinking about breakfast and lunch as special meals and would just work until I was hungry, eat a snack and keep going until it happened again. Over time, that has become maybe 2-3 times a day that I'm eating a 100-250 calorie snack.
Like I said, I don't know what I was eating before, but would guess it was somewhere in the 2-3000 calorie range by the time I got home. Now I'm averaging ~700 calories during the day.
I weighed myself last night and I'm down to 336 lb for a total of 20 lb lost in 4 months and a week. Not to mention I've saved myself thousands of dollars at this point and I've really noticed a difference there, as well.
I told myself all sorts of things about how I had to get out of the office for a bit every day to be mentally healthy, how I deserved a break and a hot meal, how depressing it looked to me when people ate their lunch at their desk-- working the whole time.
I can tell you, though, that I was not taking into account the costs of what I was doing. Losing this weight, and saving this money, and yes-- working through my lunch at my desk, has provided me with such a huge boost in happiness that it entirely offsets all the things I thought I was doing to keep myself happy.
When I was 16, I went from 260 lb to 180 after being fat almost my entire life and I swore I'd rather be hit by a truck than go back to being fat. By the time I was 24 I was fatter than I had ever been and it just got worse.
Making this change has been the first light that I've seen in a long time. I know that eventually I will plateau and I'll have to add in exercise and start curating what I eat more carefully, but for right now just the fact that I'm moving the other direction feels like a miracle to me.
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from loseit - Lose the Fat http://bit.ly/2v6Jmok
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