Hiya, probably atypical story.

1000knives

Hi, I'm a 22 year old male.

I've lost weight before, actually. After high school, around 18-19 years old, I was 230lbs (maybe even 240) at 5'9. As a kid I wasn't fat, and had a fairly organic/nice diet, and lots of activity. Then a bunch of stuff happened in my life, and I ended up eating a disproportionate amount of processed food (hot pockets and frozen pizza) as the parent who cooked the organic/nice food was no longer there, and I got frustrated/my parents ran out of money to sign me up to try sports.

My first big very noticeable weight loss, though, happened quite interestingly. I moved near the skating rink I tried hockey as a kid at. I just turned 20 at the time. I just had the little idea of "gee, it'd be fun to try ice skating again, it's been a while." And then I kept coming back. Ice skating burns a ton of calories, caloric it's like the same as running or jogging. My rink is really cool, if you're a member of the gym next door, you get free public sessions. So I got my ice time and gym for $27 a month (now my whole family is signed up for $60.) It's a pretty ideal situation if there ever was one. Within about 4 months of skating everyday for an hour and 20 minutes to an hour, and maybe 3-4 hours extra cardio a week, I was down to 180lbs (from 210 or so at the time.) My dieting at the time wasn't starvation, I guess it was half "paleo" and half restricted eating (ie, have like 2 chips instead of 10.) Didn't count calories at all. Now I'm skating around the same amount (slightly less,) and am training to be a figure skater.

Then I started weightlifting, and shot up to 195. Some was muscle, some was fat. I hit 200 for a month or so at times. I was probably around 17% bodyfat before, I didn't really lose any bodyfat, maybe gained a tiny bit. At this time I started playing around with low card/keto/paleo diets. At first it was nice, but I eventually "crashed" on those extreme kinda diets. I tried even eating like all carbs and low fat, too, but still "crashed" on those as well.

So FINALLY now I've decided to actually count calories. It was sorta interesting. I realized some days I was getting like 1500 calories, and others like 5000, and it wasn't really dependent upon training loads, I'd just get busy/forget to eat/stress eat later, what have you. I found out with my activity level, to not lose weight, I should be eating around 4000 calories a day. Due to processed foods being the culprit to bulking me up in a not nice way as a kid, I'd rarely eat anything I didn't like, cook myself, so I had a bit of orthorexia going on.

So my sister got this thing (Myfitnesspal), and I pretty much wrote it off as "girly fitness" at first. But I got it, basically for giggles. I had 3 burger king dollar burgers, it was telling me I had 1000 calories left for the day. That's when I realized I wasn't being realistic with the calories I was eating per day. Apparently with my current activity level, I should be eating 3500-4000 a day. My figuring is, things should stabilize nicely once I get consistent calories in per day. Even at a 1000 cal deficit, I feel better than I did before, simply because things are consistent and I'm getting my macros in. It should have been apparent for me, I know another male skater like myself who I see eating McDonalds almost everyday and is still very lean.

So yeah, quite atypical story here, and I've typed a gazillion million paragraphs and went on and on, but yes. Consistency. It's key. Also don't do fad diets unless you have a real medical person tell you such, don't self diagnose yourself with all kinds of stuff, and while you should eat healthy, and try to eat all you can from scratch/fresh, don't be orthorexic either. I'm not sure my story is all too relatable with most people here.

But hi everyone!