5'10" M, 27yo. I haven't been at a healthy weight at a single point in my life. In 2016 I topped out at 245lbs and wanted to make a change. I went through a very intense supervised weight loss program and I bottomed out at 190, which was significant but still overweight for my height. I gained it all back within a year. I felt so ashamed. I tried a few times to try to eat better, start losing again, etc. but it did not work. I kept those attempts to myself, thinking that if I failed, I'd only be disappointing myself. After that (obviously) didn't work out, I more or less made peace with being obese forever. I've been stable at around 230 ever since.
A few months ago I had a major shift in thinking. I realized that my obesity was not something that I could just live with for the rest of my life. I'm not sure what triggered my shift, but I could probably narrow it down to some combination of:
- Realizing that eventually I was going to have children and they were going to learn my eating and activity habits
- Being at a bar one night with my wife and a few friends and seeing more than one of my friends get hit on by strangers
- Hearing my wife be annoyed that I'd asked her to do laundry even though there were still clean clothes in the closet, and then having to tell her that I didn't fit into anything left
My wife deserves to be married to a hot guy! And she tells me she doesn't care about my weight, and I believe her - but she deserves a man who puts effort into how he looks. More importantly though, I want to be hot! I want to put effort into how I look! I want to be hit on at a bar and have to turn them down! (Sorry if that sounds super egotistical, or something that I'd only want because I'm a man - both of those things are true, but they don't stop me from wanting them.)
My plan is simple: Eat 1800 calories a day of whatever I want, track my calories, and weigh myself every day. When the weather's nice, I'm going for brisk walks to keep active while under quarantine. I've found some very tolerable meal replacement shakes that I have for breakfast and the occasional lunch. I'm not perfect about my tracking or calorie intake, though the predictable calorie intake of the shakes is super helpful in that regard. Once I hit my GW, then I'll start hitting the gym to tone up and start tracking my macros. I know I could start both of those things now, but the most important thing to me is making sure I'm making changes that I can keep doing for the rest of my life. I don't want to add too much all at once.
Most importantly, I'm allowing myself the freedom to have a bad day every now and then. My weight goes up some days, and that's okay, and telling myself that it's okay is incredibly freeing and I think the biggest reason why I think this time it will actually work. As long as the trend line is down, that's all that matters.
At the time I gained all my weight back I thought it was because I had lost the discipline to continue doing what I had been doing - hitting the gym multiple times a week, following a strict meal plan, and tracking all of my calories, plus meeting a trainer and a dietitian. Now I realize that all that that program did was make weight loss a big, scary concept for me that I'd never be able to achieve on my own. Turns out that was wrong, and I wish I had known that before I spent all that time (and money) on the program. With the progress I've made I'm excited every day to see the number on the scale, and that excitement is motivating me to keep doing what I'm doing.
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from loseit - Lose the Fat https://www.reddit.com/r/loseit/comments/gai930/my_goodness_this_is_addictive/
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