150 Lbs Lost

My Biggest Lesson From The Loss

On July 8, 2021 I was at my doctor for a visit. It had been 5 or so years since I had seen a doctor outside of visits to urgent care or the emergency room. Luckily when I moved back to Galesburg my previous primary care doctor was accepting new patients, which was good because I liked him. I hadn’t had the courage to schedule this appointment just for a checkup alone. I had a small abscess in my skin that concerned me enough to schedule that appointment. That minor issue now seems so fortunate in retrospect. 

On that Thursday the abscess had long healed so I only had my second issue to talk about, my weight. For the year of 2021 my theme was “ask for help” and I decided it was time. My weight has always been an issue in my life, whether direct physical issues or the mental issues caused by my body image. It felt like I was finally in a place where I was ready to ask for help because it was now obvious I wasn’t going to be able to do it alone. I was finally in a mental place where I could accept it if I ended up needing gastric bypass surgery. I wanted to get better and I’d do whatever was needed.

The nurse called me in from the waiting area. Here came the moment of truth, how much did I weigh? It had been many months since I had weighed myself for a combination of reasons, but all that didn’t matter now. I stepped on the scale and saw the news, at 26 years old I was 522 lbs. I had expected about 490 so I was a little shocked, but wasn’t too shocked because in the grand scheme of it all that wasn’t much of a difference.

I then discussed the possibilities with my doctor. Lucky for me he had taken a personal interest in the subject of weight loss, there is hardly any required training for doctors on weight loss but my doctor knows his stuff. He laid out two options, I could diet to lose weight or if that didn’t work I would be a candidate for bariatric surgery. I left the meeting feeling encouraged, my doctor was on my side and if I was unsuccessful in my personal efforts then there might be some relief through surgery. 

I went home and did some research. My medical insurance required a patient to go on a diet for 6 months before they would approve them for bariatric surgery. Presumably the idea is to see if they’re serious and to hopefully increase the chances of success. 

So from there I decided I will diet for 6 months, full-ass 100% effort. I was going to summon all my willpower and use all I had learned to try and make it work. I wanted to know that I truly gave it my all if I ended up needing to go for surgery. I had tried and failed to lose weight so so many times in my life and never succeeded like I wanted. My earliest attempt to try and modify my eating with the aim to control my weight was at 12 years old. This now seems insane to me that this is something I was worrying about at such a young age, and I remember too that I had been thinking about it for a year or two before I even did anything. 

I had to try one more time and then I could know for sure that I was broken, that it couldn’t be done. There was a comfort in that, that it was just for 6 months and not forever. I could manage 6 months to truly know.

So I put together a plan. I was going to do the Keto diet like my doctor recommended. I had tried Keto in the past and liked it, even if I hadn’t seen the lasting results I wanted. My doctor’s appointment had been on a Thursday, so I plotted to start on that Monday. I went shopping to make sure I was stocked up on as much food as I could need. I also crucially decided no cheatsy stuff, so no keto cookies or anything like that, it was going to be meats, cheeses, and eggs all the way. That Sunday I even made what I called the Big Bag of Bacon, which was like 4 lbs of cooked bacon to have on hand in case I ever got hungry or got triggered to get fast food. I also made sure to throw away all my food that didn’t work with my new diet, I didn’t want anything to tempt me. 

That Monday I started and then after 6 months of full-assing it I was down 80 lbs. It worked! I was seeing great results. I had been able to assert control over my life after years of being off the rails. From that first attempt I lost a total of 120 lbs. 

This week, which is also the week of my 29th birthday, I have officially reached the 150 lbs  lost mark. When I lost the original 120 I ended up gaining 70 of it back after losing my job and other life stuff happening. But in the last 11 months I have lost 100 lbs getting me to the 150 lbs lost mark at a total weight of 372 lbs. 

I’ve long told myself that I will write a book if I am ever successful with my weight loss. While I still plan to write a book I’m still at least a couple years off from finishing my loss, so for now I’ll do a substack post. There’s no way I’ll be able to fit everything I’ve learned into one post so there’ll definitely be more to come in the future.

While there are many lessons, here’s the single biggest lesson I’ve learned.

The First Step is Getting Your Mental House in Order

In order to be able to take on any big task, and especially one that works directly against your biological signaling, you’re going to need all the resources you can muster. Every person has a limited amount of willpower and mental energy they can use in any given period of time.

For many of the years I was attempting to lose weight I was in great mental anguish. Basically from the ages of 14 to 24/25 I was in a prolonged depression that was at times debilitating. With the power of hindsight I can see now that it was tipped off when I broke my leg at the age of 14. It never fully healed properly which limited the amount of physical activity I could do without pain. There were other contributing factors to the depression but this seems to have tipped it off.

Once I got to college the mental load increased considerably. I started off my college career in a major (music education) that I quickly discovered was totally unfit for me. I tried but was not able to get grades that I could be proud of. I was also trying to take engineering prerequisites and was also doing badly in those. After my first year I had failed a couple classes and felt considerably helpless. Part of my mental image of myself is someone who is smart and competent, and that first year completely nuked my self-image in so many ways between my horrible academic performance and other events.

So for the rest of my college years I was barely hanging on which created a massive mental load. If I even went to half of my college classes over those 5 years I’d be shocked because it definitely feels like I went to fewer. I felt like I had hardly any control over any facet of my life. I started college at 300lbs and finished my last class at 450 lbs. 

Only after I finally completed all my classes and started my first post-college job did my mental health get any better. I still wasn’t good but I was better. It was a slow gradual process to losing my depression that I didn’t even know I was doing, I was just doing whatever I thought could make my life better one thing at a time. 

I ended up moving back to Galesburg, got my own place, got a job that didn’t suck the life out of me, found community, rekindled quality friendships, worked on dressing better, took care of myself, and finally one day I realized I wasn’t depressed anymore. 

In the years when I was depressed I did so many weight loss attempts, so so many. Every single one I treated like it was somehow my “last chance at a normal life”. In the end none of them offered any lasting loss. It’s easy to see now that I had no spare mental energy to devote to it. I was way too stressed and depressed to a point that there was almost zero chance that I was going to be successful. When you can barely take care of yourself day to day, you’re most likely not going to be able to make big changes in your life with the aim of fighting your biological systems.  

Now you could take the hardass attitude and tell yourself to suck it up and just do it. While it is true that you alone are the one who can fix the problem of obesity I don’t see that way of framing the problem as particularly helpful. Putting more pressure on yourself when you already can’t handle the current amount of pressure will most likely not be very successful. 

So if you’re chronically overweight and unable to sustain a loss long term it’s most likely that you need to do work on your mental health. I know that’s a tall order too, but it seems to be the truth. Do I have great advice on how to work on that? I do not. Depression seems to be the result of chronic mental stress because something is wrong in your life in regards to your mental needs. At best I recommend trying to improve one step at a time. I acknowledge how lucky I am that I was able to get out of depression, it was a lot of wandering and I definitely didn’t think it was a possibility to be cured. The best you can do is whatever you think is the next step that’ll make life a little better for you. For other mental issues I don’t have great advice because I don’t have experience with them, I recommend listening to professionals. 

Related to being mentally healthy, I was able to start my weight loss once I was finally able to love my body. While I disliked that I was 522 lbs, I had grown to accept and love who I was. 

Some people will say that fat shaming should be brought back to try and reduce obesity rates. I’ll tell you right now that is very misguided. I am most likely to relapse and go off the rails when I feel worse about my body. Being morbidly obese is living a whole life in shame. I was so ashamed of myself. I was also basically disabled. I could hardly live. Walking more than like 20 feet got me winded. I was confined to my house and car and not much more. If I had then been additionally shunned or shamed by friends, family, or strangers I would not have been able to handle it.

Shaming can maybe work in the short term, maybe for a few months or a relatively small loss. But I’m 2.5 years into my journey and still probably have another 2 to go, there is no way I could keep up the self hatred that long. And even then, self-loathing increases stress and stress is bad for weight loss. How could actively hating myself for 4-5 years possibly be good for me even if I lose the weight? And what am I supposed to do, just flip the switch and start loving myself the day I reach my goal weight? Loving yourself is a much better strategy than hating yourself. 

Another key lesson is that life doesn’t just get better at the goal weight, it gets better along the whole journey. I’ve lost only about half what I want to lose. Even though I’m far from my goal, far from “healthy” weight, my life is incalculably better than what it was at my maximum weight. If you are actively burdened by your weight, any loss can see improvement to your life.

I love my life now and am so stoked that it’s on the right track to keep getting better. I have found my groove and what works for me. Don’t get too upset if your weight loss attempt doesn’t work well. I had 14 years of experimenting with mine before I figured out what worked for me. 14 years of attempts, of trial and error to figure out my needs. I’m still doing trial and error to this day, it’s a battle and the best you can do is try and learn from the setbacks.

I plan to release more of what I’ve learned in the future, but this is my biggest lesson learned so far. The first step is getting your mental house in order. If you’re out there struggling, I’m hoping for you. I struggled for so long and feel so grateful to no longer suffer those great struggles. The road ahead is still long, but I’m happy where I’ve made it so far.