I have been re-reading a lot of my old blog entries and I realized it
has been a long time since I really wrote about my story. In fact I don’t think I have really written
specifically about my weight loss story since I first started this blog and
that was a long time ago. I have talked
about things I have learned along the way, things I have accomplished but not a
lot about the journey as a bigger picture.
This seems to be coming up a lot lately and I have also been thinking a
lot about it probably because I have been sharing it so much. Every time I share even part of my story it
has such a positive effect on me. It
reminds me of where I am, where I came from and where I’m going. It seems like a pretty important thing to
write about so here it is.
I have been heavy all my life. I
don’t remember anything different and throughout the years I have gone through
periods of wanting to lose weight, periods of not caring and even some where I
was actually able to lose weight. The
current arc that I am on of this journey to lose weight actually started
forever ago in March 2009. It’s hard to
believe it was that long ago but I still remember the day when I rejoined
Weight Watchers like it was yesterday.
It was a hard day for me because when I got on the scale I was at the
highest weight I had ever been. I had
gained all the weight I had previously lost a few years before and then
some. I was embarrassed and
ashamed. I was mad at myself and devastated
that I had undone all that I had done previously. It was not my best day.
After that weigh-in I made two vows to myself. The first was that I would never be that
heavy again. I was wrong on this one. I was not able to keep this vow but I’ll
write more on that in a few. The second
vow is the more important because I have kept true to it since. I vowed that no matter what, I would not quit
or stop going to Weight Watchers and six years later I still have broken this
vow. That is why I consider my journey,
this version of it, truly starting in 2009.
It is true when I made that vow that I had planned to reach my goal
weight much quicker but I don’t consider the time wasted by any means. A lot of people have questioned my stubbornness
with staying at Weight Watchers when it wasn’t working but what I tell people
is that I know it works and I know it will work, I Just need time to make it
work for me. In the end I actually hope
that all I have learned in the last six years will help other people move
through their own journeys much faster.
I do know that trying to change your whole life, your beliefs, habits
and knowledge takes time.
Anyway from 2009 through to 2011 I was making very slow progress. I lost just over 30 pounds and made huge
changes in my lifestyle especially around my habits. In this time period I learned that for me
this was going to be a slow process. I
don’t make changes quickly but when I do make them I make them permanent. I did my research and slowly started to work
through the process of changing my life.
Change is not the easiest thing for me to accept and I knew that the
only way I could make things really work for me was to take the smallest of
baby steps. I knew that if I just kept
moving in the right direction that the weight would come off.
In this time I mostly focused on my food. I worked to change the things I was
eating. I started to try and cook more
and eat out less. I started to read
everything I could on food and quickly learned everyone has an opinion and
often the opinions are opposite. This is
when I decided that whatever I was going to do for weight loss that it was
going to have to make common sense. I
have never been one to jump on any fad diets but I knew that just because I wanted
to lose weight didn’t mean that I should start now. The choices I began to make had to make sense
to me. I still apply this logic (faulty
as it may be) to my journey even now.
This is also why it takes me a while to work through things and make
changes.
I was on the right path but then the unthinkable happened. In August 2011 my world was shaken to the
very core when I lost my best friend to a heart attack. I had lost people in my life before
(grandparents, uncles and a cousin) but this was the first time I lost someone
that I was extremely close too. Will was
25 years older than me so logic said that at some point I would lose him but
there is no preparing for the shock.
Will’s death set me on a destructive path that I didn’t even fully see
until after. For the next year I did
everything I could to avoid dealing with my emotions. Thankfully I am not typically an emotional
eater otherwise things could have been much worse; instead I started to keep
myself very busy. I took very little
time for anything that was for me. I
stopped caring about a lot of things for that year. At the time though I convinced myself I was
fine and dealing with it.
The clue that I wasn’t dealing well with everything should have been
the scale. Each week I went and weighed
in and my weight would go up one week and down the next and was bouncing all
over the place. The problem was that it
was trending very slowly up. I managed
to gain the 30 pounds I had originally lost and then another 20. The other problem with such a slow climb is
that it is easy to overlook or excuse. I
am great at ignoring things sometimes and it was easier to ignore the fact my
weight was coming back and that I was missing my best friend than it was to
deal with it.
In May 2012 I drove down for a memorial to Will in Des Moines. This was the start of me coming out of the
funk I had been in. It was also the
start of me realizing that I was in a funk. I had a lot of time to think on
that trip (5000km in a little car by yourself will do that) and I knew I had to
change things. When I got back from the
trip I made the decision to once again start working towards losing weight and
becoming healthier. I still had a lot
more to deal with though and for the next year I struggled with my weight
bouncing up and down. My weight change
in the next year was minor, only maybe the final 5 pounds I gained by the time
I hit my highest weight in September 2013.
By the time I hit my highest weight I was starting to experience
something I had never really had to deal with.
I was starting to find that my weight was getting in the way of things. I found that I was getting tired super
easy. I had no energy to do
anything. I even had to skip test
driving a brand of car I had thought about because it was not built for
me. Although I had always been heavy I
can honestly say that I had never felt like it was getting in the way until
that year. It was frustrating and I knew
that I had to make a change. I knew that
to keep going this way was not a way of life.
It was certainly not the life anyone (my family, Will, other friends)
had pictured for me and certainly not the life that I wanted for myself either. I knew it was time to kick my weight loss
into high gear.
I knew that the key to that was going to be moving since I was already
doing well with my food. So I went out
and bought my Fitbit. If I wanted to
move more I had to have a way to be able to track that I was doing it. I started walking, first just on commercial
breaks but soon that expanded to getting up and moving more at work. I even started walking on some of my lunch
breaks. With the help of another friend I
started to see the potential for me to do more.
I started to think about trying to run.
The last year has been me working towards that goal. Since then I have done two official race 5Ks
and a whole bunch more Sunday morning runs.
I have been learning strength training.
I have also met a whole new world of people who are willing to cheer me
on and support me. I can honestly say
that I am the most active I have ever been.
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