At 72lb down, I'm finally getting my flexibility back.

Pics at the bottom.

I've been dieting on keto at <20g carb and <1500kcal since the end of November, last year, while trying to maintain a consistent routine of heavy weight training four to five times per week. Between then and now, I've managed to lose 71.8 pounds, coming down from 361.6lb to 289.8 as of just yesterday. While breaking into the 280s was very odd for me to acknowledge—because I feel as if my psychological state had a LOT of catching up to do with my physical progress (mentally, I still feel just as large despite the loss)—what really has been blindsiding me and snapping it into reality that my progress is real are the physical milestones and changes that are happening to me. Things like my stomach shrinking inward and not being compacted into my organs making it hard to breathe when I'm bending over or laying face-down in bed, being able to walk for longer than ten minutes without my hips feeling sore or the arches of my feet starting to hurt, or being light enough and strong enough to do a handstand.

One of the two biggest physical milestones that I'm really looking forward to are being able to jog a mile without stopping and doing an unassisted pullup. Originally, the goal was to jog a single lap without stopping, as I have always been terrible with jogging, even far back in my youth, but I've managed to go for longer than a mile on the elliptical and I imagine that'd translate somewhat onto flat-ground jogging. The pullup is even more significant. I've never done one, unassisted. In high school when I was half-assedly trying to get in shape, I managed to kind of do one on the tree-branches in our backyard, but I never counted that. As a child in physical education class being asked to see how many pullups I could do and not being able to do one in front of everyone was a pretty big blow to my self-worth. I had a panic attack in high school before I realized that our class didn't make students 'climb the rope', because I knew I wouldn't be able to. But it's something I'm looking forward to now. Being able to manipulate myself and my movement and how I interact with my environment has so many possibilities that I don't even know where I want to start when I get to my goal weight and start really building up my physical ableness with strength, endurance, and even flexibility training.

As a child, I was pretty flexible to a silly degree. I could get [one of] my legs behind my head without too much effort. Growing up people would awe at my ability to stand tall with my knees locked and bend down, reaching through my legs, and touching the ground with the flats of my palms. And I got into doing some not-so-easy yoga positions before going to bed for quite a long time because it helped relax my back pain. But over the years, that went away as the fat started to pile on around my hips and my back and the pressure of that along with the fat of my thighs would make cramping and pain from pressure on my joints show up any time I tried any of these things.

Every time I weigh in, I take a progress photo. I've been trying to think of interesting or silly themes for them in order to make them interesting, because I'd like to do something special with them all once I'm done losing weight. This week, I was thinking about what I need to do in order to prepare for starting the C25K program, and I was thinking about how I really need to start a consistent stretching routine and keep at it seriously so I don't either hurt myself or just simply feel strained and not want to continue the program once I begin. I decided to do some stretches, and much to my surprise, I was able (though not quite easily) do the splits. Things like this, even if they're small progressions into other, bigger things, really make me look back at myself and just say, "Holy ****... that's you, and you're really doing something incredible." The whole process has been an incredibly difficult teeter-totter of ups and down not just physically but in very emotional ways, too, and seeing my hard work in my actual ability to live and do things rather than just in a number, especially when it can be so hard to perceive the change in the mirror, absolutely floors me.

Managing the stretch


And below is the entirety of my progress photos from the end of November until now: