Today, I am at a lower weight than I've been in over 5 years. As my flair says, my stats are 27F 5'8'' SW:198 CW:157 GW:132. I figured someone may be interested in how I ended up putting on so much weight, and how I lost it, it may help someone else.
Putting on weight
I was 121lbs in highschool. I had a body that I loved. I hated sports and anything related to that, but my parents made really crappy food that didn't taste of anything, and they made a stew during weekends that we ate a whole week out of, so I didn't eat much of it.
At college, I started cooking for myself. I discovered how to make my favorite foods (hint: it's stuff fried in oil, usually). I bought a ton of pastries, pizza, McDonalds, and frozen meals. Since I loved them so much, I would eat huge portions of them. It didn't help that I had undiagnosed ADHD, making me very impulsive with my food purchases and my cravings really intense.
The first that started growing was my belly. It used to be 24in, but it was growing fast. I quickly got to 135lbs. Since I didn't know much about food and calories, part of me started believing the whole "your metabolism slows down when you get older". And everywhere I read that I just needed to start exercising.
So I started exercising. I had several bouts of 100 sit-ups a day for a week, but saw no change and got discouraged. I felt completely unattractive and had no idea what to do, so I kind of just gave up. I got to 165lbs by the time I finished college.
At this time, I moved in with my boyfriend and studied some more. He's a great cook and makes a killer Lasagna. Needless to say, I would eat a ton of what he made every night. I couldn't understand why he ate twice as much as me, and was close to underweight. At the time, he just told me he had a fast metabolism and exercised, and that's why (he would run 10 miles several times a week).
So I started exercising too once I got a job. I would bike to work rather than taking the bus, and we would go for long walks during the weekend (I couldn't run, would be out of breath really fast). While doing that, and still seemingly eating half of what he ate in the evenings, I got to 198lbs.
The reason - my daily food intake looked like this:
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breakfast - a bowl full of cereal (I needed energy to bike, right?) - 600 calories
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pastries - I needed energy to work after all that biking - 600 calories
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lunch - usually sandwiches with butter and stuff - 500 calories
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snacks - I told myself they helped me focus at work. Usually coke, chocolate, or other snacks - 500 calories
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take-out on the way home - I needed energy to paddle back, right? Usually McDonalds or more pastries - 700 calories
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dinner - half of what my boyfriend was eating! - 600-1000 calories
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desert - usually ice cream - because I deserve some after a long day at work! - 200 calories
I sometimes would skip the pastries, takeout and/or desert, but even so, the calories paint a pretty clear picture of why I gained weight.
My boyfriend, who ate "twice as much as me"? He would never buy pastries or takeout (prefers to cook his own stuff), and he often forgot to eat for breakfast and lunch, so dinner was his only meal of the day many times. So he could easily eat 2000+ calories in one go and still be close to underweight.
Losing weight
TL;DR: CICO works!
My wakeup call was when I stopped fitting into the largest size of clothes you could buy at the supermarket. I calculated my BMI and realised I was actually obese, not just overweight.
I read about MyFitnessPal and started reluctantly playing with it. I was shocked when I realised how much I ate on a daily basis.
Soon after, the company I worked for had issues, and I started working from home. That meant no bike riding daily, but also no convenient place to buy pastries and McDonalds. I would still order a big take-out sometimes, or buy chips and peanuts at the supermarket with my regular food, but I stopped putting on weight.
At the end of October last year, I decided to give it a try with just restricting my calories to under 1200 a day. No exercise, no fancy diet, no changing anything else about my life. I made a rule: before I buy it and eat it, I write it down in MFP. Often times, seeing how many calories some things had, I realised I didn't like them that much. Other times, I could just work around my calorie limit, by eating a big bag of chips for lunch, for example.
It was... amazing! Almost every day I would get on that scale and I would lose 0.4 lbs. It would fluctuate a bit, but I weighed myself daily and I saw in MFP how the graph was quickly zigzagging downwards.
Now I started a new job. I bike to it too, past all the delicious old pastry places and McDonalds. It was a struggle when I started, and I stagnated around 161 for quite a long while, but I came up with a system that works for me.
I currently eat something like this:
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breakfast - cereal (weighed and portioned) - 300 calories
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lunch - sandwiches or leftovers, pastries or McDonalds if too lazy - 300-500 calories
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dinner - enough to make me feel satiated, but not overeating past that just because "omg so good", now I eat about 1/3rd of what my boyfriend does. And I sometimes replace it with pastries/McDonalds too- 300-500 calories
I still eat the same kind of crap, I am just mindful about how much of it I eat. I also am looking into trying healthier recipes that are more filling, and found some that taste quite delicious and have more veggies in them.
But I feel quite energetic. I can run now without feeling out of breath. I can focus better at work. And I am starting to like my body again.
So this is my story on how I lost weight with pizza, lasagna and McDonalds, and little to no exercise.
Sorry for the long post, felt a strong need to share this with somebody. I hope it helps clear up some common misconceptions about losing weight and inspires at least one person to try CICO.
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