BEFORE AND AFTER - how diiiiddd you do it?!?

Loved your story its sounds a bit like my own! you go girl!

Awesome! Thank you for sharing!

Drew that is an awesome story. Can't wait to post my success.

wow you look great

great thread,will love to see more of this

Great thread! Keep your stories coming!

keep um comminh\g

I go into a lot of detail in my success story blog. It tells of my exercise and diet. Just click on the link in my signature. (it has pictures too)

bump

This topic is awesome. I find it really helpful.

I just joined a month ago in the hope of losing 80-100 lbs, but I'm currently about 150 lbs below my peak weight, so I figure I might as well share.

At my biggest, around my 25th birthday, I weighed ~465 lbs (the doctor's scale only went to 450, and I don't know how much to trust the gas station bathroom scales, not to mention that I've never been big on weighing myself). I wore the largest size most clothes were available in at casual male, and they were snug. 6xlt. 60x34 pants (I'm 6'7"). I couldn't fit into the largest of suit jackets in the store. I struggled with suicidal depression, I was sick a lot, I'd self-medicate with cannabis most of the time just to deal with reality. I got into meditation, and did an all-natural food diet for like a month, and started feeling better. I made some minor progress towards improving my diet, following that, thinking about eating better even if I often fell down and ate at the buffet or McDonald's or downed a couple bags of chips. That was when it started, beginning to make the mental changes. I moved to Seattle into a house with a bunch of other musicians, mostly vegetarian anarchists, and I'd cook more. I still wound up eating too much McDonald's and go to the indian buffet near my house frequently, but I'd generally avoid having crappy food around the house just so I could feel less embarrassed about my poor food habits. Then in fall of '05 I moved back to Vermont to live with a really athletic vegetarian chef friend of mine, and became a vegetarian for a year, while learning a lot about cooking good food. We lived by a soccer field, and we'd play frisbee whenever it was nice, and do some other exercise besides. I didn't really diet much, and I was a MORE CHIPS AND CHEESE kind of vegetarian, and I ate a lot of fake meat, but I did lose weight, despite still struggling with depression.

Then I moved to Washington DC, in August '06, when a friend got me a job at a guitar shop. On the way down to DC, I weighed myself at a service area, at just over 400 lbs. Certainly a lot less than at my peak, but still I generally wore a size 58 waist and 5xlt shirt. At work, my feet hurt incredibly, like I'd barely be able to walk at the end of the workday, from all the standing. It was completely untenable, and it was a heck of a wake-up call. I decided to diet more seriously, or I'd be dead soon enough.

The diet I worked out was to eat absolutely no sugared drinks, candy, beer, or fried food for the duration. I decided I'd eat whatever I wanted for the first meal of the day, if it were 800 calories or 2000, so long as I stuck to the rules. Then I'd limit myself to 500 calories for the other two meals of the day, generally aiming for ~300. Usually I'd go to the diner nearest my house before work, usually going for a turkey dinner for days I'd go in at 1, or a big breakfast for mornings. For lunch at work I'd go to subway and eat a six inch sub with baked chips, or I'd put cheese on it instead. For dinner it was usually a lean cuisine dinner or similar, around 300 calories, though sometimes I'd have a serving of nuts or something to kick me up to 500. I'd be incredibly hungry in the evenings.

There were some things about the diet that were not at all healthy, even aside from the microwave dinners and sausage breakfasts. Each day I'd usually have two diet energy drinks, and we smoked inside the apartment, so I'd basically chain-smoke all night. The kitchen was tiny and dark, with nearly no counter space, so we never cooked. Not only that, but I did no exercise other than standing and walking around at work, and I lost enough muscle mass over the diet that I was noticeably weaker moving heavy boxes off the top shelves of the store room at the end. Worst of all, I lived with alcoholics at the time, and I drank like a fish the whole time. I'd have between 10 and 20 shots of straight gin or whisky each and every night. I know that's like an average of 1500 calories from alcohol, so it should have totally messed up my results, but it didn't. I hypothesize that the lack of volume to it and my empty stomach meant that it was all processed by my liver. I don't really know. Apart from thanksgiving, christmas, and new years, I didn't take any skip days.

Anyway, the diet worked great. I lost ~80lbs in just over 5 months, leaving me around 320lbs. By the end, I felt much better, and I was thin enough that I started getting a lot more attention from girls. I started going on dates again, and started going to restaurants again. I didn't really care that much that I wasn't actually healthy yet, I was just high on life, so I didn't bother continuing the diet. I stopped at the end of February '07.

Since then, I moved to Portland, OR, and I've been maintaining my weight at ~320 lbs pretty darn consistently, like if I noticed my jeans getting a bit more snug from a bout of overeating the junk, I'd sort of cut back for a few weeks until they loosened up again, though it was never a big deal one way or the other. Figure 2800-3800 calories a day, though I never really tracked it, and not too consistent about it either. For the last several years, I've been swordfighting in the park with kendo weapons and improvised pads, lacrosse helmets, etc on the weekends, but other than some mild walking around the neighborhood that's about it for exercise. The problem is, the gout and achilles tendonitis I first started experiencing at 400lbs has kept coming back, and I'm still nowhere near healthy, not to mention that the ladies of fit and trim Portland tend to be a bit more picky, not to mention less impressed by my other traits, what with all the musicians around town. Worse though, the rush of being lighter wore off years ago, and I'm just not happy with where I'm at anymore. I tried starting a diet at the beginning of the year, but without tracking and support, it went by the wayside shortly thereafter.

Anyway, to bring us up to date, I'm working with a personal trainer, am eating pretty healthy in a way that I enjoy, and seem to be having very little problem keeping myself in the weight loss zone this time, mostly by spreading the calories I'm allowed throughout the day and watching my balance of carbs/fat/protein and what different amounts seem to do to my mood and energy. I dropped an entire pant size in the last month, and am now smaller than I've been in fully 15 years. I'm hoping to hit 240 lbs by the end of the year, and get down to 225 by my birthday at the end of March, with considerably more muscle than I now possess. I really like MFP. It turns a confusing, murky process into a MMORPG, full of min/maxing stats and figuring out how to maximize my enjoyment while losing weight. Right now, with advice from my trainer, I'm at 30% carbs, 45% fat, 25% protein, and enjoying it greatly. I have no doubt that I'll be here through to my goal. I'm especially looking forward to skiing this winter without major foot pain, for the first time since I was 16 years old.