My weight loss journey.
Hi Steemit,
Since I was a young teenager I have been overweight. Generally not a little overweight, quite overweight. I remember sitting in most of my classes in primary school on the first day of the year, looking around and thinking; "yep, I am the fattest person in the class."
Over the years as I grew in age, my waist grew in size. I am not one of those people that try and make excuses like a medical issue or something like that. Poor life choices led me to be where I am. Now I know I am not the biggest person around and that things could be much worse, however, it was time for a change.
My partner had always been good at dieting and creating meal plans, so we talked about what we wanted and set goals for ourselves. We made meal plans, food budgets and discussed cutting down or cutting our certain things in our lives. You may have read my post about quitting smoking, this was one of the changes we made. We knew it was going to be tough trying to lose weight and quit smoking at the same time would be difficult but we wanted to give this our best shot. We downloaded the My Fitness Pal app to keep track of our calories and off we went. There have been ups and downs but we are making good progress, progress that I wanted to share with the Steemit community.
The first thing that I needed to cut out was my daily energy drink and nearly daily breakfast. Every morning before work I would grab myself a Mother (energy drink) and sometimes a bacon and egg roll from the cafe downstairs from work. I loved these mornings, I would sit down there with my friends and talk about absolute nonsense. What made the instant transition from having these delicacies to not having them was the fact that my friends wanted to start being healthier as well. So, instead of sitting downstairs, eating, drinking and smoking we would just sit out the front and talk which was still nice.
For the first week or two of my diet I was constantly hungry. I was having around 600 to 800 calories per day, I was constantly told by everyone around me that this was far too low. Everyone was offering their advice, no root vegetables, starvation mode, drink water, go on this diet and go on that diet. Despite all of this, my mind was and is set on calories in calories out. I feel like the art of losing weight is made complicated by companies on purpose. Why? Well if diets are complicated and they don't work, someone moves on to another diet or buys part 2 of a diet. I could be wrong but that is my thought process.
My partner and I decided that we didn't want to have this diet consume our whole lives. By this I mean if we went to a family function or out for dinner we weren't going to be stressing about what we could eat and what we couldn't eat. We would attempt to make better choices than we had before and still make sure we enjoyed ourselves food wise. We also decided to pause our diet over the Christmas and New Years period because we knew that there would be way too many events and way too much temptation. We knew that if we didn't pause the diet and caved, we would beat ourselves up and go back to not caring.
Well Christmas and New Years is well and truly over and that means it is time to back jump on the horse and continue with my journey.
So far, I have lost 8KG, over the Christmas and New Years break I gained 2KG back. I feel that this is still a great achievement. I feel better, my clothes fit better and people say they notice a slight change. I know that this will take time, a bit like Steemit will. However, also like Steemit I am in this for the long haul.
Feel free to stick around and continue this journey with me. I will be posting updates to my weight loss journey weekly. I will be sharing how much weight I have lost and what sorts of foods I have eaten. I can even share some recipes if that is something that people would like to see.
Well done man, those are impressive improvements already, keep it up. It's all about taking things slow and steady, then they are actually sustainable lifestyle changes.
That’s the plan. Don’t want to go too hard at it and make mistakes and end up failing.
You are doing well @necromortis. As a friend keeping up with your journey, you making better choices and swapping out the bad for something better this in turn makes us (your friends) make these decisions as well.
You have our support.
Keep up the great work, you can do it!
Thanks buddy, I appreciate the support!
Keep it up mate, great progress!
You're absolutely right, though - think about who you see promoting diets. It's always someone with a book or TV show, or YouTube channel, or Instagram. Always someone with financial interests.
Dieting is as simple as you state: calories in, calories out. Cut too much, and your body doesn't get what it needs. Cut the fun stuff too hard, and you end up craving and gorge too hard when you get the opportunity.
A bit of chocolate or beer doesn't hurt you, so don't forget to have your indulgences where you can. Life's too short to ingest salad and sunshine for life.
Good job so far! I think it is a really important choice you have made about not worrying when you go to family dinner and stuff, because you are allowed to just enjoy it sometimes, and if you always worry about that sort of stuff, you do decrease your life enjoyment, and what's the point of that? ;-) But good job on your weight loss so far and having a healthier lifestyle (this is the most important point in my opinion) - keep it up!
Thanks a bunch!
Nice one man, 8kgs lost more than me! keep it up & I envy your ability to be about to post about it.