Me at 13, 15, 20 and 26 (now) years old.
I think the craziest thing about this journey is that I did this whole thing twice.
When I was in high school, I lost close to 100 lbs. The thing about it was that I did it extremely fast - in only about 18 months, and I didn’t learn anything about myself in the process. I didn’t bother to find out why I was overeating or what caused me to gain so much weight to begin with. I was not overweight as a child. This happened relatively quickly between middle and high school. And the weight loss the first time was a really quick fix. I became obsessed with getting the weight off me as fast as possible and by any means necessary because it felt so foreign and alien to me to begin with, and I ended up developing an eating disorder that landed me in the emergency room twice with life-threatening heart palpitations, electrolyte imbalances, and left me without my period for nearly 2 straight years. Majorly depressed, suicidal even, and told that I could not exercise at all anymore, I went right back to my old ways of eating. I ate everything I hadn’t allowed myself to eat for the last 2 years and more. I didn’t stop for years. And I gained the 100 lbs I lost back + 30 more.
It took an incredible amount of soul searching to begin the second journey. I knew that I couldn’t do what I had done the last time. And I knew it was going to be extremely hard. I knew how hard weight loss was, especially when you have 100 or more lbs to lose. I knew because I had already done it once. And when you have THAT much weight to lose, it feels impossible. It feels like, why even bother to start, because you knew its going to be so difficult and it’s going to take forever. It took me years to even get started again.
But I did. I finally decided to commit to living a healthy life. The difference was that my end goal wasn’t just “lose weight by any means necessary” like it had been as a teenager. I was now an adult, married, and living on my own. I had to learn how to make good food choices. I had to learn how to grocery shop for a healthy life, how to incorporate exercise in a full-time work schedule, how to meal plan, how to cook. I had to learn how to change my entire life. When I was 15, it was easy to eat microwave meals and exercise all afternoon because I didn’t have to work. This time, it was a whole different ballgame. But still, I learned to navigate it and despite the fact that most of the time it felt like 2 steps forward and 1 step back, I realized I was still moving forward.
It took a long time to lose the weight the second time around. If you really start from the beginning, it’s been about 5 years. I finally figured out what works for me: running and hiking, two things I love and don’t feel like work; eating a mostly vegan diet, meal planning and cooking everything from scratch (which I found out I love and is extremely therapeutic for me), and just living my life as a happy, healthy person. I learn how to manage my depression (hello, therapy and anti-depressants!) so that I don’t fall back into the holes that caused me to gain so much weight to begin with, and I learned how to cope with feelings of doubt, stress, and grief without resorting to food.
So much of the time you see a before/after, especially of someone who was morbidly obese, but you don’t get to hear the back story. Gaining and losing 100 pounds or more isn’t just about food. It’s about changing your entire life and figuring out how you got to where you were to begin with. Being overweight to me was not just about my body and how it looked - it was about being majorly depressed (bipolar, actually) and untreated for it, and living a life that was so unhealthy that I cried when I looked in the mirror. This time, I actually changed all of what was going on inside and not just what I looked like on the outside. That’s the difference in why this time, it stuck.
Above, there are two before and after photos.
There will never be a third set.
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