Over 100 down and it's still a struggle every day (very long)

Despite the title of my post, I am not looking for help or advise, nor am I complaining. I wanted to post this for anyone who is also struggling and needs some words of encouragement.

My story: One day about 4 years ago, I woke up and decided I was tired of being fat. I didn't have an epiphany. There were no earth-shattering events. I didn't decide to turn my life on its ear and change everything, I just decided I was done living my life the way I was and I needed to change something. I decided to start walking every day because I couldn't walk a block without having pain and gasping for air. I wasn't relishing the idea of an upcoming vacation that was going to require a lot of walking, so I decided to start walking on my lunch hours to hopefully feel a little better on my vacation. Well, after about a week of walking, I decided to track my food consumption and joined MFP. I started tracking, but not with any intention of cutting calories. However, it was easier than I thought to track, so I decided to see what kind of calories MFP would give me if I told it I wanted to lose a half pound a week. The number of calories didn't scare me, so I set my goals and tried that for a while, even upping my goal to 1 pound/week after about 2 weeks... Fast forward to my vacation 4 months later and I was down 25 pounds and could comfortably walk a mile to a mile and a half! While on my vacation, I continued to keep track of my food intake, even though I wasn't trying to limit calories, and I walked a lot and I came back having lost another 2 pounds. So after vacation, I decided that it wasn't so hard and I was curious how far I could get so I just kept right on trucking. The rest, so to speak, is history.

Now, here I am four years later and over 100 pounds down. I just received the results from my work metabolic screening and, for the first time in my life, I hit every positive health marker! I am still 20 pounds from goal and was going to wait until I hit goal to write this post, but decided I needed to do this now, because I need to hear these words as much as anyone.

I have learned that weight loss is both easier and harder than I ever imagined. It's easy to lose weight. It's hard to keep it up day after day, year after year. The formula is simple. Eat less and move more. You don't need a special diet; you don't need magic pills; you don't have to spend 3 hours killing yourself in the gym every day; you don't have to give up any of your favorite foods; and most of all you don't have to be miserable. However, in practicality, it's not quite that simple! It is as much a mind game as anything and It is a struggle every. single. day. Some days are harder than others, but every day is a fight.

While I haven't given up any of my favorite foods, I still have to make choices daily. If I want ice cream for dinner, I can't have cake for lunch. If I want pizza for lunch, I can't have hamburgers and fries for dinner. It's all a balancing act and walking by the cookies in the break room or passing up the chocolate being offered from a co-worker never gets any easier and some days I fail. I just fail on far fewer days than I succeed, which is all you need to do to be successful over all.

I weigh every day because it's useful information to me. I know my cycles and how different foods and exercises affect me and I can predict when I will be up and when I will be down and by how much, but I still cringe and feel disappointment when I see the scale go up.

I get tired of always eating at a deficit. Healthy, sustainable weight loss is slow and it seems to be even slower than the average bear for me. This has taken me a LONG time - much longer than I ever imagined! If you had told me 4 years ago that I would still be 20 pounds from my goal weight at this point in time, I am not sure how I would have responded. Would I still have kept going? Maybe so since I never started with the intention of losing everything anyway and I hope I would have, but I was a much different person back then so I don't really know.

I get bored with the gym. I get bored walking the same trails. Some days I just want to sit at home in front of the TV and do nothing! I exercise in cycles. Some times I'm great at it and other times I'm not and that's OK. It took me a while, but I learned that exercise and weight loss are not conjoined. I now exercise for fitness and eat for weight loss. I do feel better - healthier, happier and more motivated - when I exercise, so I do try to exercise more often than I don't.

Plateaus are hard and frustrating and I hit them often. I'm in one now! I can go MONTHS at the same weight and I want to scream at the scale and throw it across the room every morning it doesn't move but giving up and going back to my old habits would not solve a thing so I suck it up and keep plugging on.

More than the weight loss, I have learned so much about myself. I am determined and I am strong. Even when things are difficult, I can still overcome them. A bad day is just that - a bad DAY - and everyone has them once in a while. It makes much more sense just to pick myself up and dust myself off and just keep moving. I am truly not the same person I was 4 years ago and I don't really even recognize that person in the old pictures any more.

I don't know how to post pictures here, but if anyone is interested, my profile pic is a before and after of me.

The moral of this post: Everyone struggles every day. No matter how successful you are, or how successful you think someone else is, there will still be difficulty and that's normal. Just never ever ever give up! Learn from your challenges and move forward. Like Dorie the fish says: "Just keep swimming..."