Thankful for Change - My Weight Loss Journey

All of my life I have struggled with my weight, even as a pre-teen and teenager I can remember being on diets and trying to eat better so that I could lose weight.  I always felt that I could do better, but I just could not find a way to lose weight and stick to it.  For years, I did one diet after another trying to lose the weight, but rarely lost much of anything.  I realized that I was an emotional eater and after years of allowing my emotions to rule my weight, I had to get serious because I had hit a critical point in my life. I decided not to diet but to make some necessary changes in my life. One of the first things I did was to eliminate sodas, juices, and fruit drinks from my daily life.  I did continue drinking coffee, but I stopped using Splenda and switched to Sugar in the Raw.  I also removed milk/cream.  While those changes may seem simple, what I realized is that the sodas, juices, and drinks were adding unnecessary calories to my diet.  I also took a serious look at all that I had heard about Splenda and finally decided that it was not best for my body anymore, but I also knew that white sugar in my coffee was not good for me either because I realized long ago that white sugar gave me a jolt and then soon after I crashed and I felt like I was exhausted even after drinking a large coffee.  

The one thing I did not do was limit myself like most diets call for you to do.  I did not stop eating foods that I wanted, I simply ate less of them because I realized that one of my challenges with every diet was that I really liked food, and removing foods I liked (i.e. ice cream and chocolate) only served to be more of an issue because I would always end up overeating on cheat days or extending my cheat days to weeks which inevitably blew my diet.  So, I decided to make simple changes like having one less slice of pizza or one less scoop of ice cream.  I decided to eat more vegetables and incorporate more vegetables in my cooking.  I also decided to stop eating out as much.  I also had long since stopped using regular salt and switched to lite salt so that I would not retain water with excess sodium.  After a while, I started seeing the results and now I have lost over 50 pounds.

This way of life may not work for everyone and I say way of life because I no longer diet, I have changed how I eat.  I still eat out, I still eat pizza, I still eat ice cream and chocolate and I still have the occasional Swedish Fish binge, but now I try to compensate for what I eat by walking or eating less of something else.  For some, this will not work because they are unable to control how/what they eat and I understand that.  For a long time, I felt I needed food because it was my comfort and it was also how I expressed love through cooking for others, but I needed to change or else.

One of the other things that has helped me tremendously is the ability to listen to my body.  I heard a weight-loss guru say that your body will always tell you when you are full and when I heard it I did not believe it.  But the minute I began to address some of the emotions I had with eating (remember I told you I was an emotional eater), I could hear my body tell me when it was full.  I could feel that my stomach had tightened after eating just a little bit and add some water to that and I was good.  I no longer needed to keep eating because there was food on my plate, which meant I had to become dead to cleaning my plate because there were kids starving in Africa mindset developed from when I was a kid (you know you heard that one too).  Over time I put less on the plate and I learned what was enough and what was too much for me. I still have a long way to go to my goal, but I am thankful for the changes I can see in myself, in my health and in my well-being.

There are so many other tips I could give, but the point of this post is let you know that no matter where you are in your journey – whether it’s weight loss,weight gain, getting healthy or something else entirely – you have to start somewhere and plow through.  You will not always do it right, there will be mistakes, missteps, and bad days, but when you find the sweet spot, don’t stop.  Over time, when you look back, the success you have gained will overshadow the mistakes and you will see just how much you have changed. 

In the picture below, you will see how my weight loss journey has unfolded in photos of my face.  It is actually pretty amazing and had someone not encouraged me I probably would not have done it, but now I have and I am glad that I did.  Feel free to do something similar and share it below. 

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