Before I start I am going to say that within this article there are no secret formulas or magic tricks that will help you lose weight, just honest advice and the steps I took to achieve my particular success. I was always a chubby child. I admit that fact. I am not one to say that I was a skinny child who grew into a fat adolescent and then onto an even fatter adult. No, I was always overweight. When I was young it got to me since I was bullied at school but as I grew into a teenager I used my weight to my advantage and the bullying stopped since I found that my weight also gave me some decent strength (must have been the massive fatceps).
I did play sports just not to any great degree that they would allow me to lose weight or maintain a rather athletic look. I played football (soccer to the uncouth), baseball and rugby through school. I tended to play positions that required the least work, i.e. goalie, baseman and prop respectively.
It was at college that I started to really pile on the pounds. I became even more sedentary than I was originally and took up computer gaming as my “sport” of choice. I would spend hours a day sitting down in front of a computer at college before transitioning to sitting in front of my computer at home playing video games. I got particularly good at Unreal Tournament, Counter Strike and World of Warcraft. I would have junk food scattered across my desk far enough away that I could play my games to a reasonably high degree but close enough that they were within arms reach if I needed a quick sugar pick me up.
If the junk food stocks ran low or, heaven forbid, were completely extinguished then a midnight ASDA run was put into place to replenish stocks so as gaming could continue. Gaming would continue to the small hours of the morning or until the sugar high wore off and the inevitable crash came.
After 3 years of gaming, eating and stumbling my way through college I came out the other end with a degree and went off into the big bad world in search of a job. I landed a job at a large-scale computer company as a level-1 phone support technician. As you have probably already guessed my job involved a lot of sitting around in front of a computer talking to people about there computer related problems.
The time came for my friends and I to go on holiday and we decided that Florida for 2 weeks sounded like the best
Florda 2008
option. A few of us had decided that when we came back from holiday we would start going to the gym, I had came to this conclusion as it gave me something to do not because I thought to myself that I was overweight and needed to lose a few pounds. I bought had bought new clothes, all from Slaters I might add since that was the only store that had things to fit me, and was ready for 2 weeks in the sun.
Never once while I was on holiday did I really think about my weight as I just constantly told myself that there were people in the world much larger than I, justification at its best. I suppose I started to realise that I was on the slightly big side when I couldn’t even fit into the sections of the rollercoasters that were designed for big people, they were specifically made with big people in mind yet I couldn’t fit into them either. Much to my annoyance I spent most of the holiday, the parts we spent in theme parks anyway, hanging about waiting while my other friends had the time of their lives.
After we got back from holiday pictures were put up on Bebo, which was all the craze at the time much like Facebook is just now, and it was then that I seen how truly big I had become. Standing next to my “normal” sized friends I was at least twice as wide as them and not in a good way. I didn’t even have a neck!!! I somehow still managed to convince myself that I wasn’t that big compared to others in the world and that I had it all under control.
Florida 2008. Full Frontal.
So, much like we had decided prior to going, we went to the gym and had workout programs designed for us by our friend’s cousin who was a personal trainer. Mine was slightly different to the rest since, at my size, I couldn’t really put the same amount of strain on my system as the others as it might end up killing me. My workout was based around resistance machines and there was virtually no free-weight work in there. I thought to myself that I needed to change my eating habits to coincide with my new workout program.
I started off changing my eating habits slowly. The first thing I did was to change what I was drinking. My usual routine would be to drink up to around 4 litres of fizzy juice a day, which, if my calculations are correct, contains an absolute boatload of sugar. The bigger issue with fizzy juice is that it never truly quenches your thirst and always leaves you wanting more. I changed from drinking fizzy juice to drinking water. My eating habits remained the same; the only thing that changed was what I was drinking.
Removing the sugar from my daily diet helped me to start losing weight. The scales that I had bought before I started the gym only went has high as 28 stone and when I stood on it I got an error, much like the joke except my scales didn’t tell me to get off. I eventually did get weighed and came out at a whopping 30 stone, which to those who don’t use the metric system is 420 pounds. During the initial stages I could sometimes lose 10 pounds a week sometimes but that didn’t last long as when you get closer to your goal weight the weight loss starts to slow down since you don’t have much left to go.
After my drinking habit had solidified and I was drinking water only I started looking at what I was eating. I decided that the first thing I should do is keep the same meals but reduce portion size. Once I had accustomed to the new portion sizes I then started changing what I was eating bit by bit. I would add lean meats and vegetables in along with snacking on fruit and nuts. The combination of hard work in the gym as well as dedication in the kitchen allowed me to lose a lot of weight.
I never denied myself the foods I loved. I used to incorporate them into my diet so that I didn’t feel guilty for eating them like a lot of dieters do. I made sure that if I ate something that was deemed “unhealthy” (although there is no truly unhealthy food more just unhealthy eating patterns) I fit it into my daily totals and went from there.
Eventually as the weeks turned to months and the months turned to years I seen myself changing in the mirror. People who see you everyday will not really notice the difference in you until you have lost a substantial amount of weight but those who have not seen you in a while will notice almost instantly. The biggest thing that seemed to change in me was my confidence. I started to be more outgoing and started to drop my shy exterior. I had always been a shy, retiring type of person since I didn’t like drawing attention to myself but after losing a lot of weight that all fell away, mostly. There are times that I catch myself relapsing into shyness but I ensure that I pull myself out quickly.
NYC 2010
The main reason I see people failing at diets is because they jump in with both feet and change everything and try to be as strict as possible. That sort of approach just won’t work. Things have to be taken slowly because you have to change your habits one at a time. Think of it this way, the habits that you have today have been developed over your lifetime so to change them instantly and expect to be ok is foolish. Some may be able to do this but the majority will not. The other debilitating factor in dieting is the dieter’s own will power.
So there you have it; my story in all its glory. As you can see there is no magic formula in this article about how to lose weight. I do not have some inside secret that I can give you that will instantly give you all the knowledge on weight loss or help you drop 10 pounds in a week. I can offer sound advice and plenty of support on the topic of weight loss but I cannot do it for you.
-Andrew
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