201.8 last Wednesday –> 202.6 Thursday –> 202.4 Friday –> 201.8 Monday –> 200.2 yesterday –> 199.6 today
Well, it’s never taken anyone longer in the history of mankind, but I finally made it to the promised land, friends. And here’s an embarrassing photo collage and my little progress story to prove it.
On the left is a photo from a trip to Puerto Rico, where I weighed 265 pounds. I had lost weight low-carbing before but gained it all back in the way only a New Yorker can, with 15-course tasting menus every weekend and dinner delivery every weeknight.
So I went back to low-carbing and got down to 225, which is what I weighed in the middle picture, my passport photo (hence the weird smile).
I continued generally low-carbing through 2016 but never lost any more weight. I wasn’t logging any of my meals, I would cheat as often as I wanted to, which was usually a couple of nights a week, and I rarely even weighed myself.
But in 2016, I got tired of trying and not seeing any results. I was depriving myself of a lot of the food I wanted, thinking about wanting to be thinner all of the time, and still being just as fat. So I joined Tumblr.
And spent another year not losing any weight! Hahahaha, literally the worst dieter ever. My problem was that I had never tracked anything, because the myth of keto/LCHF is that you don’t have to count calories. And maybe you don’t when you’re younger or if you don’t have a messed up view of what a portion size is. But as someone who grew up thinking it was totally normal to have three slices of pizza for lunch, a chicken parm sandwich and fries for dinner, and half a pint of Ben & Jerry’s for dessert on any old day of the week, I needed to watch myself.
I also desperately needed the friends I eventually made on Tumblr! I spent my first nine months here trying to figure out what I was doing wrong. You can see from my MyFitnessPal weight graph that I was still bouncing up and down well into 2017:
But then, when you all taught me to track everything I ate, to calculate my maintenance calories and decide what deficit I should eat at, my graph suddenly got a nice downward trend (with a few minor interruptions for vacations):
I still have a long way to go to hit my initial goal of 160 pounds, and I’ll probably make more mistakes along the way. But to feel like I have a handle on what works for me and to have a plan for going forward is AMAZING!
And I just wanted to say THANK YOU to all of you for motivating me! Legitimately, I would still be floundering at 225 pounds without you. I seriously think about wanting to make you all proud, and it affects what I put in my mouth! Knowing that you’re going to check in on me and having one of you even write a post about waiting for me to hit 199 was so incredibly helpful.
So here we go! 65 pounds down so far!
(Thank you for bearing this extremely self-indulgent post.)
