Starting Weight (August 2020): 355 lbs.
Current Weight (12/02/2020): 305 lbs.
Total Weight Lost: 50 lbs.
Weight Loss Goal: 225 lbs.
Pounds to Go: 80 lbs.
Today I reached another milestone in my weight loss journey. 50 Pounds! This beats the progress that I did a few years back on the “Lean for Life” program by 10 pounds.
I’ve had a lot of friends ask me how I’m doing it, and it’s really quite simple. Reduce your calorie intake and exercise more. It’s that easy, and that’s the secret!
A lot goes into the previous statement. The desire to eat is a powerful human drive that has existed since day one of human existence. It’s what kept us alive and going all these years. It’s so easy to form bad eating habits, especially with our grocery stores filled with garbage and fast food everywhere you turn. Let’s not forget getting caught in the “two for five” specials in the drive throughs because let’s face it, we all love a good deal.
Walking away from food is hard, especially when we may have been taught to clean up our plates before we leave the dinner table. The old saying goes “Don’t let that food go to waste”, but I would rather say “Don’t let that food go to MY waist”!
Mind-set was huge for me in this process. Everyone who is a few (or more) pounds overweight can look in a mirror and say they need to lose weight. It really takes the right state of mind to actually commit to doing this. For me it took a couple years. Procrastination is one thing, and that urge to eat was probably the biggest. I pride myself in being able to put together a meal in no time, no recipes, just using what I have learned over the years to figure it out. I like to eat (captain obvious here) and I learned to cook so I can fulfill this need. As with many things, I excelled at cooking AND EATING for too long, and it was hard to give this up. Two years of trips to New Mexico to visit family and talking about it before I finally committed to actually doing it.
I set a very aggressive goal of losing 130 pounds in a year. I have lost 50 pounds in around 3 months with little exercise (due to some other issues that are being fixed shortly). Once I can get back to my old good habits, I will be road biking and hopefully swimming again if I can find a good place to swim without worrying about COVID-19 too much. After losing a lot of weight, exercise will be required to keep up that rapid weight loss simply because the body burns fewer calories as weight goes down.
I have nine more months to go in order to meet my target weight of 225. If successful, this was my weight in my early 20’s, when I was in my first tour in the Army.