I started my weight loss journey in November of 2022.

But before we get to that, let’s go back a bit.

We are gonna get a little feely here, so buckle up kids.

I’ve been overweight my entire life. I was chubby as a kid, but looking back I really wasn’t THAT chubby, but anyone that didn’t fit the norm was an outsider. I remember always being the bigger kid and being teased for it as far back as elementary school.

I was always a relatively happy kid. My family moved to Arizona when I was 5. My parents were great and happy together. I have one brother, who is 4 years younger than me. I had a lot of friends and was always social and chatty and I always got along with pretty much everyone.

When I was 7, my dad passed away suddenly from a heart attack at 42 years old. This is the kind of loss that really is just a ‘if you know, you know’ sort of thing, especially at that age. The secret-not-so-secret ‘dead dads club’ (or either parent really). I remember this was the point where I really started to hold my emotions in. I didn’t cry at his funeral because I wouldn’t let myself and I wouldn’t cry at school when kids asked or talked about it and they were always in disbelief that I didn’t cry.

I started dealing with my feelings with the comfort of food. As i got older, my weight and being the ‘fat, funny friend’ took a major toll on me mentally. I’ve struggled with depression since I was a teenager. I still do. But especially back then. I felt like an outsider who didn’t belong. My friends were super pretty and thin and popular, which always made me stick out like a sore thumb and glaringly obvious of all the things I was not and would never be. Still, I always still got along with everyone and I was funny and a clown, so for the most part people left me alone. I never really dated, I was 100% the D.U.F.F (underrated movie by the way), which also contributed to always feeling less than great about myself. College and adulting, same story. I buried myself in my career, which was always an insane amount of hours and very mentally taxing, my health spiraled out of control. I was eating out all the time and rarely slept well. I was very sedentary and I was not taking care of myself. My weight continued to increase to the point that I would get extremely winded walking from my car to wherever I was going.

Fast forward to how we got here

The end of 2022 had rolled around. There wasn’t anything significant about this time, other than being completely miserable. I had gotten to the point where I wasn’t living, I was existing. I stopped doing a lot of things because I would be too out of breath all the time to be able to handle it and I didn’t want to deal with the looks of disgust. I decided November 1st 2022, I was going to try one last time to get control of my weight and my life, although I had failed every single time before at every diet or weight loss gimmick I’ve ever tried. I didn’t do any specific ‘diet’ or ‘plan’. From what I had learned from previous attempts and good ‘ol google, I knew I needed to get back to tracking my calories and keep them low. I randomly picked 1500 calories as a goal that sounded good. I still had the MyFitnessPal app on my phone so I started logging and tracking everything I ate/drank. The first couple of weeks were pretty rough until I got into the routine, but it was also insanely eye-opening. My whole day was now the calories of sometimes a whole meal. I don’t know what made this time different but I just knew I had no other choice but to keep trying because I knew I was going to die if I didn’t. After about 3 months, I had lost about 60lbs and felt encouraged that I’d made some progress, even though on my body, it did not look like much. I joined a gym and started working with a personal trainer to get active so I could make even more progress. It comes down to discipline and consistency and continuing to do the hard shit even when things suck and you don’t want to. I have gotten myself to the point where I’m at the gym 5-6x a week now. I NEVER thought that was something I would literally ever say, let alone enjoy. I hate the days that I have to take a rest day. I always secretly scoffed at the gym people thinking they were mildly insane, but I get it now. In the wise words of Elle Woods, ‘Exercise gives you endorphins. Endorphins make you happy. Happy people just don't shoot their husbands, they just don't.’

Where we goin’

We’ll see if I keep this page alive this time :)