For as long as I can remember, I've been overweight. I take that back. Before the 3rd grade, I wasn't overweight. I had baby fat, but I was within the healthy weight range for my age. That all changed when my family moved to a different county and I had to switch friends, schools, and neighborhoods. I started eating and I didn't stop. So growing up, I've always been overweight and it wasn't easy to deal with. It was especially difficult since I went to a high school with less than 50 people in my class and only 3 people were overweight, and I was one of those 3. At one point when I was 16 I decided to lose weight and I did. I walked a mile a day on our treadmill and went from 200 lbs to 165 lbs, a 35 lb weight loss. But I had no idea what I was doing, so when I got down to 165 lbs, I stopped exercising. I had no idea that I would gain the weight back since I had not learned how to maintain that weightloss. After that I never tried losing weight again, since I didn't see the point if I was just going to gain it all back.
I could never have gotten where I am today with regard to my weight loss if it wasn't for my husband. We met in March 2008 through two mutual friends, who are also recently married. I was probably 240 lbs then (and only 5' 6" tall). We were inseparable from the start and we moved in with one another after 6 months. I was happy, content, and I didn't pay attention to my weight since I was with a man who loved all of me. We got engaged on my birthday in November 2009. A few days after the proposal, I had a very bad sinus infection and I went to the doctor. As usual, I was weighed, but it had been a year since I had been to the doctor since I am hardly ever sick. When the nurse told me I weighed 260.4 lbs I thought I was going to have a heart attack. I was 22 and only 40 lbs from being 300 lbs!!! I knew that I had to do something, especially since heart disease and diabetes runs in my family. I came home and told my (now) husband and he helped me come up with a plan. I should mention that my husband is the most fit person I know. He rides his bike for 14 miles for fun, and he is extremely conscious about eating healthy.
So we did some research on the foods we had in our apartment. People just don't realize how much sodium and fat are in every day foods. I was consuming more than 2000 mg of sodium over what I was supposed to consume a day. We cut my fat intake to less than 45g a day and my sodium to less than 2400 mg a day. We chose to focus on my fat and sodium intake because fat contains the most calories than anything else, so by controlling how much fat you eat, you control how many calories you take in. We also concentrated on my sodium simply because of water retention and heart health reasons.
Pizza, bread, and chocolate are my weak points, and I knew from the beginning that if I had to deprive myself of the foods I love that I would never be able to lose weight in the long run. It was a little disheartening at first, but I soon realized that I didn't have to stop eating what I love. I just had to find the healthiest versions of it available to me. It took a couple of hours to go through the grocery store and look at all the labels for the foods we eat until we found the healthiest ones, but after that initial outing, we know exactly what to get. So instead of buying frozen pizza, I started making pizza. Now, I am no cooking genius, so I simply bought the small premade pizza crusts, pizza sauce, low or fat free shredded cheese, and veggies. I completely cut out pepperoni. By making the pizzas at home instead of buying them premade I was able to go from 14g of fat for ONE slice of pizza to 14g of fat for one ENTIRE small pizza. And the homemade pizzas took less time to prepare and cook than a frozen pizza, so I wasn't out any extra time. Next comes bread. Boy do I love bread. I'm not picky about the kind, wheat, white, whole grain, so we just focused on finding the healthiest bread out there when it comes to calories, fat, and sodium. People get messed up when they read labels, though. We would find a bread that seemed healthy, but a serving size was only one slice instead of two. We eventually found a bread that had excellent nutritional value with 2 slices as a serving size. I have a serious sweet tooth and chocolate is definitely a weakness. What I've done is I buy the bags of the individual chocolates (dark, since it's my favorite) and I buy the chocolate cake or brownie mixes that have the "low fat" alternative, which uses apple sauce instead of oil. I'm not a very good cook, so I haven't really tried making food truly "home made," but I plan to start that up eventually.
These are just a few of the things I've changed. So far I have gone from 260.4 lbs to 220 lbs. I am now smaller than I was when I met my husband and when I graduated high school. My current goal weight is 165 lbs, but I may decide to go down to 150 lbs since that would put me in the normal weight range, but we will see how it goes once I get to 165 lbs.
Even though I've had a relatively easy time adjusting to the healthier foods, weight loss still isn't easy. I'm not a very active person, so making myself exercise 3-4 days a week was really hard. Luckily, my husband was helpful in this area as well. He really pushed me to get out and exercise, and he exercised with me, so that I wouldn't have to do it alone. Now he didn't do this because he wanted me to be skinny, since he fell in love with me when I was heavy; he knew I wanted to be healthy and that I wouldn't be able to do it myself. I will be the first person to admit that if he hadn't exercised with me, I wouldn't be 40 lbs lighter today.
With weightloss also comes frustration. For about six months now, I've been stuck at 220 lbs. Part of it was that we got married almost 4 weeks ago, and I wanted to be able to fit in my wedding dress, so I didn't want to lose too much weight. But part of it was that my workout got stagnant. But I didn't really workout. We walked a mile to a mile and a half 3-4 days a week. That was it, but it just got so boring being on a track. Now that the wedding is over, we have amped up our walking to 3 miles every morning on a back road in our community and so far we are on track. It's nice having a walking buddy since my husband and I spend that time simply talking about whatever comes to our minds, and if we don't have anything to say, we just listen to our music. Hopefully with the longer walks every morning, I'll be able to get over this plateau. But we'll see. More changes may be in store, but right now I'm just walking it off.
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