Things I wish someone had told me in the beginning

theutahdesertfox

Hi there! This is on my blog as well but I figured it was relevant here...hopefully some of what I say others can relate to. These are the things that I wish I had known immediately when making the choice to lose weight!

I'm sure there are a million other articles around the web similar to this, but since I've had my own personal struggle to lose weight, and achieved (finally) that weight loss, I thought I would add a voice to the choir. Another disclaimer--most of these are entirely unoriginal, but again, they were things I had to learn the hard way for some reason. Things that I realized after failure, not before. Maybe there are people out there who can read good advice and take it immediately, and not learn these things through trial and error, but I'm not one of those people and honestly I'm okay with that. They're valuable lessons either way.

1. Weight loss is found in the kitchen, not the gym.
So easy! So simple! But again.....so overlooked. I am one of the blessed few who absolutely loves working out. I could just live in the gym. I was under the misconception for years that my love of movement and exertion would make fat just melt off me. Unfortunately the gym is maybe 20% of your "gym body." I think that as someone who had a very complicated and unhealthy relationship with food in general, this was something I maybe knew deep down, but I refused to admit, even to myself. (Instead I fed myself the bs about working it all off) Once I finally sobered up and realized this truth, losing weight was no longer a mystery. I'm not saying exercise isn't important. It is VASTLY important, especially to mental health, which everyone seems to forget in favor of drugs and expensive therapy. Don't ever let someone tell you exercising is overrated. It's underrated. But when you're looking point blank to simply get rid of excess weight, you're wasting your time if you think you can eat what you want and run it all off on the treadmill. Unless you're literally the Flash, you won't.

I will split this subject into two parts and tell you why exercise is boss, though. Let's say you're a car. If you never strength train (lifting weights, bodyweight exercises, the stuff that builds muscle) you are perpetually a tiny flabby goobery little hybrid car with a half-charged battery. Tired? Achy? Slow? Fat? Sad? Depressed? TIRED? You will always feel that way no matter what your diet is like (unless you're jacked up on cocaine, then you'll feel great! Probably) Food is fuel, sure, but if you're not in a V8 Mustang to start with, you're never going to be able to go fast. I realize comparing human bodies to cars is both extremely elementary and makes me sound like a bro, but I don't care--it's a great analogy. Not to mention all of the added mental health effects exercise has; an hour in the gym is worth it for the mood boost alone. Use the gym (or wherever you go! Home bodyweight workouts are a fantastic place to begin) to build up your body into the sports car of your choice. Use free weights. I'll get into why free weights are superior some other time, but for now, back to weight loss!

2. Calories in, calories out = weight loss
Hey I said these were simple tips. It's not like weight loss is a new revolutionary thing that was invented in a lab. Again, this is one of those rules that cupcake lovers like myself just...seem to ignore. We think it's about a pill or a program or a fad diet or a change of religion or the sky opening up and swallowing your extra fat....it's not. A calorie is just a unit of energy and nothing more, and once I realized that I stopped being intimidated by it. Imagine every day you fill up your car's tank with gas, drive a mile or so, and then wonder why the gauge never drops past half tank. As long as you're putting in more than you're expending, the answer is blatantly obvious. Same concept with weight (except extra gas is actually nice.) Now, CAN you eat 1200 calories of ONLY chocolate per day and lose weight? Absolutely you sure can. SHOULD you? Probably not, since not having a balanced and healthy relationship with food is what got you fat in the first place. I wish I could drive home the point of how amazing it is to start logging food, how it opens your eyes to exactly what goes into the body every day. I for example was a "grazer" only eating small amounts every 2-4 hours. My blood sugar runs low and despite getting chunkier I always estimated myself to eat around 2000 to 3000 calories a day max. Imagine how stupid and sobered and fat I felt when I logged for a week and my DAILY CALORIC INTAKE was in the realm of 5000. Unbelievable. And yet that's how most of us get to becoming butter golems---we under-estimate our calories, we don't track our food, and inevitably it's us who reach for that candy bar or that donut after a hard day because of emotional and physical food addictions. It's an excruciating combination. I can't stress again the science behind calories: they don't lie. There are no good calories or bad calories. (There is good and bad food!) If you are burning more than you are eating you. will. lose. weight.

3. Food is emotionally addictive; sugar is chemically addictive
I have a very difficult history with food. I'm sure any overweight person can say the same. For a lot of us, the problems began in early childhood. Poverty-level-income children of the 80's and 90's were fed steady diets of kool-aid, white bread, and sugar cereal. I was slightly lucky in that my father was a hunter and my parents were gardeners, so I ate just as much wild meat and home-grown veggies as I did little debbies (and I ate a lot of debbies y'all.) but we were so poor I still barely had enough to satiate my hunger, between crappy government school meals and shared poor people food at home. This translated into gobbling up everything and suffering severe consequences if I didn't clean my plate; pair this with extremely cruel parents who got into the habit of calling me "thunder thighs" the moment I hit puberty and I was already on the train to glazing away my problems in corn syrup. Foster care didn't help, let's just say that. Anyway, that is a sample short version of how some people can end up tipping the scales due to events they had little to no control over earlier in life. It's not an excuse to be fat; it's a reason behind emotional eating. I've already talked a bit about sugar addiction, and it is another very, very real problem. For me, simply acknowledging that my relationship to food was the equivalent of the relationship in that *kitten*-book 50 Shades of Grey, and I was the one getting screwed over, helped me sober up and take food more seriously.

Some people may think it's extreme, or overkill, or "too much" to contact a nutritionist. I did it because I began to value my health and because I identified those addictions. It's something nutritionists take seriously as well, and I know involving a nutrition center was, at least in my case, necessary and very helpful. It may not be for everyone, but if you're like I was: fat, unhappy, at my wit's end about what to do about it, scared of my own addictions, and needing someone else to support and help me bear the weight (haha, get it, it's a weight loss post)...if any of that sounds familiar, don't feel that seeking help makes you weak. Some things we're meant to do alone, and other things we can do with help. Seek it if you need it.

4. You won't make any changes until you love yourself.
This is going to be a *kitten* thing to say and I am going to generalize, but you will not take the correct and proper steps to weight loss until you respect and love yourself. It simply will not happen. I'm not saying all skinny people just absolutely love themselves and not all fat people loathe themselves, but if you are overweight and you are trying to correct that, you won't be able to truly, truly get healthy long term until you accept who you are as a person--not physically, but your 'self' as a whole. The good and the bad. I had to accept that I wasn't the grazer I thought I was, and that I was cramming way too damn many spoonfuls of peanut butter in my mouth. I also had to accept I was addicted to sugar, which is not a happy thing to realize. I had to accept that everything I had done (and baby I've done them all) in an effort to lose weight, was a total failure. I failed myself. I failed my very own health. What I was doing was wrong--tricks and treats and supposed intuitive eating--all wrong. Even in a point in my life where I am happy with my personality I still had to tell Alex to come to Jesus and step away from the pie and stop being a goddamn irresponsible fatass. And that was tough love--but it was real love, and my realizations and self-urging to seek help and face the music was an intervention of love, not hate. There were at least ten trillion times during my depression and suicidal days where I also called myself fat and dumb, but since I lacked self-respect, it really meant nothing. I just accepted it, I was my own bully. Not conducive to healthy habits.

Loving yourself is a whole other topic, one I spent an entire year researching in the hopes I would successfully learn how to do it. And I did. This post is not about that aspect of self-help but again, self respect and being healthy go hand in hand together. If you think you're going to hate and berate yourself to sexy and confident, reassess your views and try again.