FIRST POST EVER

FIRST POST!!!!

I am a skinny happy young woman trapped in the obese body of a cranky old lady.  

I am overweight and over tired all the time, and I'm over it.  This is my journey to a slimmer, healthier me.

The situation:

I am not as active as I should be under the best conditions.  After over a year of quarantine that has only gotten worse.  In March of 2020 I can remember saying that we'd all end up losing weight since we weren't running around town and grabbing fast food anymore. It has been a long hard year of corona virus exile, and it turns out I was wrong.  All in all, during quarantine I gained 16 pounds!

I was trying really hard to ignore the problem.  I gave myself lots of excuses.  

-"Pajama pants all day is the one perk of Covid!"  

-"It's too stressful to handle a pandemic and be on a diet"  

-"But girl scout cookies are so delicious!"   

Unsurprisingly the issue didn't go away.  The turning point for me was a dress.  I tried on the bridesmaid dress I'd bought a year before.  My sister-in-law's wedding had been postponed and was now rescheduled for April of 2021.  The dress was thankfully quite stretchy, and it still fit.  However, the dress is something called an infinity dress.  If you haven't heard of these it is basically a skirt with two long scarves attached.  You have many options for how to wrap the scarves around your torso.  It looked beautiful on all the models sizes 0-14. I was a size 20.  None of these beautiful options offered me full coverage of my stomach and back. 

The Beginning: 

There I was, staring in the mirror and imagining flashes of my stomach rolls being immortalize forever in family wedding photos.  

I only had two months until the wedding and I had to shamefully text my sil and tell her I would need to order the full length version of the dress rather than the short version she and her fiancé had picked out.  I planned to pull the skirt up into an a-line style and use the skirt portion to create a more flattering fit.  I could hem it, I told her, so it would be close to the other women's dresses.  

This was the final straw.  I had to do something.  I had done it before.  Many times over the past 20 years I have found a diet, lost 30 pounds and then gained back 40.  I knew I COULD lose some weight.  What I wasn't confident in was my ability to keep it up and keep it off.  I needed to do some research.

I wanted to find something that was easy enough to keep up for forever:  I wasn't ever going to stop this time.  I wanted something that would see me fit and healthy well into my nursing home years.  Generally speaking I feel like all diet models work as long as you are willing to stick with it.  So I asked myself, what do I need in a plan to give myself my best chances for success.  I made a list.

-Carbs.  I know they're bad for me, but I love them.  I wanted to be able to eat fries, and pasta, and cake.  If I had to give these things up for all but special occasions I knew I would fail. 

-Flexibility.  I have a vacation house booked in obx for August.  I didn't want to diet on vacation.  I have plans to fly to Scotland and visit dear friends who moved away last fall.  No way am I going to Scotland and counting calories for the whole trip.  I needed something I could take a break from, and still get back to it.

-Family meals.  This was a big one for me.  I like eating dinner with my family.  We like to cook together.  I wanted to eat THE SAME food as my husband and kids.  I was not going to have the willpower to make a second meal for myself to eat while my family feasted on my famous baked ziti, everyday for the rest of my life.  

-No protein shakes.  I like protein shakes actually.  But I get bored of them.  I have tried and failed many times with the 'just sub in a shake for your meal' plans.

That was my dream list, but did this unicorn lifestyle change of a diet exist?  The internet said, yes it does.  It is called Intermittent Fasting.  

THANK YOU INTERNET.

If you don't know already, IF is a lifestyle based in allowing your body to go a minimum of 16 hours without food.  There is a bunch of science involved that tells us that after the first 12 hours without food your body will begin to start using up your fats for energy.  So you fast for most of the day and eat all your food during a medium to small window.  When you aren't fasting you can eat what you want.  Healthy foods are still preferable, but not a hard restriction for weight loss.  You can take a day off here and there.  Take a week for vacation.  Increase your eating window to allow for special occasions.  Move your feeding window to fit your schedule.  

My First Steps:

There were many plans available for IF the most popular one I have seen is 16/8.  Fast for 16 feed for 8.  I decided to hit the ground running with a 20/4 plan.  Fast for 20 hours and feed for 4.  This was my best chance for making a dent in the weight in time for the wedding.  

Could I really go 20 hours without food though?  The internet was full of success stories claiming a long list of health benefits including energy boosts and better mental clarity all from IF.  It was worth a shot.  I skip breakfast most days anyway, and often I will forget about lunch until 2 or 3.  Was it really such a stretch of the imagination that I could make it to 6:00?

I downloaded a cheap app to help me keep track of what I was doing.  I use fasttracker, but there are a ton of options.  I set up my app to keep me on a schedule of clean fasting (lemon water and black coffee only) from 6pm to 10pm and then I would eat a good dinner with my family (CHECK!) and let myself have a protein heavy snack around 9:30.  

I even got out the dreaded scale.  My starting weight was a ridiculous 266 lbs.  This is the heaviest I've ever been in all my life.

My first fast started the evening of March 16th, 2021 and lasted right up until 6 pm the next day.  It was St. Patrick's Day and the luck of the Irish was with me.  Not only did I make it, but I didn't even feel truly hungry until around 5:00.  It was easy.

Let me say that again.  I went 20 hours with no food and only lemon water to drink and it was EASY.   I knew any time I started to think about food I would drink a tall glass of water and set a 20 minute alarm.  By the time my alarm went off the hunger had passed.  Turns out that I might not really know how to recognize true hunger in my body.  Shocker, I know, considering my ongoing battle with food.  

Not only did I make it to dinner no problem, but I even forgot my 9:30 snack and still managed to have success the next day too!

Where I Am Now:

This has been a long read!  If you stuck with me this far you probably want to know how it's going now.

Well today is day 4.  

I have had success each day with my 20 hour fast.  Twice I have gone 22 hours by accident due to forgetting my 9:30 snack.  I had one bad headache.  And a quick, passing moment of weakness when I wanted to open a bag of Doritos.  That was easily dispelled by an encouraging and distracting chat with my sisters.

I have absolutely felt more energy, and moments of happy highs that feel like I just ran five miles instead of sitting in my office chair all day.

In four days I have lost 11 pounds!  I weighed in last night at 255 lbs.  My pre-pandemic weight was 250.  In half a week I have lost more than 2 thirds of the weight I gained in a year of quarantine. 

I have definitely decided to commit myself to this journey.  I even decided to start a blog to help keep me from alienating my loved ones with constant updates. 😄

Where I Hope to Be in the Future:

I am a numbers girl, so I like to set goals for myself.  Let me preface these goals by telling you that I know that muscle weighs more than fat, and that everyone is different, and that we should focus on healthy feelings and how our clothes fit more than on what the scale says.  But the scale is a source of quantifiable data, and, like I said, I am a numbers girl.

My goal milestones are as follows:

240 pounds (-25) by April 24th (bridesmaid dress day)

220 pounds (-45) by Memorial day (bathing suit season)

200 pounds (-65) by August 8th (OBX vacation)

180 pounds (-85) by Halloween 

175 pounds (-90) by Christmas 

170 pounds (-95) by February 1st

165 pounds (-100) by March 17th

That would be 100 pounds in 365 days!

I know it's going to be hard, and I know I might not hit all my milestones, but I also know that if I have something to reach for I am more likely to say excited.  

You may notice that as the year goes on I have drastically lowered the amount of weight between each milestone.  This should accommodate for some muscle gain, and also allow room to catch up if I miss a mark.  

So here I am 11 pounds down, 89 to go!  I will be sure to let you know how it goes!