My weight loss journey with MFP comes in 4 distinct phases

Phase 1
The first phase started in January 2014 when I started a doctor ordered low-carb diet to get my weight, blood sugar and cholesterol under control. I dropped from 316 pounds in January to 220 pounds in November that year.

The first 40 pounds from January through April 2014 were through my doctors recommended diet and medication alone, the most important part of which was accurately tracking my food intake and hitting the macro goals my doctor assigned to me. In April 2014 I started doing daily walks through the month of July and lost another 26 pounds with the combination of diet, medication and daily walking. In August I started running and by November I ran my first half marathon, and had lost another 30 pounds, reaching my lowest ever recorded adult weight of 220 pounds for that total of 96 pounds lost in those 10 months in 2014.

This first phase was most importantly achieved through diet, closely tracking everything I ate, and the help of exercise (but clearly started the weight loss just fine without it, and can credit the great majority of those lost pounds to diet and tracking alone).

Phase 2
The second phase started soon after that in January 2015. This phase was taking running to the next level (or five). My blood sugars normal and I was allowed to eat carbs again, within reason. I used those new carbs to help fuel my running. In the spring of 2015 I ran 5 half marathons, and then in the fall I ran another half marathon followed by 3 full marathons. In order to do all of that I had to diligently do the following, without error:
1. Train, keep training, and train smart.
2. Avoid overeating! This was unbelievably hard. All of that training made me ridiculously hungry. I ate everything in sight like a wild teenager. This required #3 which is...
3. Eat right. I was strictly using the "Diet Quality Score" from Matt Fitzgerald's "Racing Weight" book to fuel my training and keep my weight from exploding. I kept only LOTS of the healthiest, best scoring foods around, and ate gobs upon gobs of that stuff.

I did gain some weight, going up to 235 pounds from 220 pounds, but I was leaner. Most of that weight was in the form of glycogen in my muscles to fuel all that running (basically just added water weight). However, the key takeaway here is, despite ALL that running (peak training was 50-55 miles/week for about 6 weeks) I did not lose ANY weight. At all. If anything, I gained that 15 pounds of water weight for "fuel". And I was eating the most healthy foods daily, every...single...day. I was not overeating, but I was unable to go into a calorie deficit either to lose weight because I needed that energy to exercise at that level. So I was technically in a year-long "plateau". But I was happy because I wanted to run all of those half and full marathons, and I did!

The key takeaway for phase 2 was, huge amounts of exercise will not make you lose weight. Even if you eat nothing but the healthiest of foods while running 50+ miles/week does not mean you will lose weight if you are not in a calorie deficit (by the way, NEVER attempt a calorie deficit while running 50+ miles/week, OK?).

Phase 3
The third phase was in spring of 2017. After running my brains out in 2015 and the first half of 2016 I wound up with a foot injury that kept me from running the second half of 2016. When I started running again in early 2017 I was back up to 292 pounds and was determined to "run that weight off", obviously oblivious to what I just stated above at the end of phase 2. But I had not learned that lesson yet. Sometimes hindsight is 20/20, you know?

So anyway, there I was, from March through June 2017, running like a gosh-darned idiot, all over the freaking place! I knew how to train, and how to train smart. I built up to half marathon distances in only 2 months, and started signing up for every half marathon within 100 miles. I'm not kidding (save for any held on the same day because I can't be in two places at once). I was averaging 35-40 miles/week. And I was not losing weight. In that 4 month period from March through June 2017 I lost a grand total of 9.6 pounds, despite running 461.83 miles and eating right!

Then something magical happened. I decided to focus on strength training, building muscle, and doing so with a primal diet. This meant tracking my food again to hit my protein goals. Lo and behold, the weight INSTANTLY started dropping! And I was getting stronger (duh, weight training). I was hooked! Granted, I could have lost weight while running had I actually bothered to track my food intake. I didn't lose much weight through the rest of 2017 though because I was trying to build strength and muscle, so I was maintaining and/or at a slight calorie overage, and gaining muscle weight.

So the key takeaway from phase 3 is...that key takeaway from Phase 2 was no joke! You MUST track your food intake in addition to exercise and diet in order to lose weight!

Phase 4
This is the 2021 story. I stopped everything fitness related in late 2019 because life seemed "too busy". Then 2020 happened. On March 8, 2021 I decided to get myself back on track. I weighed 296 pounds. From my prior lessons I knew I needed to:
1. Track my food intake and maintain a caloric deficit.
2. Eat the right foods so I can do a lot of exercise while also losing weight.
3. Exercise! This time I was going to spread it out amongst cardio, strength and mobility, like a smart(er) person!

I also found UAC this year (joined in May). I could have really benefited from UAC back in 2017 when I was learning these lessons the hard way during "phase 3".

So far, after just nearly 5 months, I am down 54 pounds, and in quite good physical shape, especially compared to the me from 5 months ago!

OK, that was ridiculously long, a wall of literal text, so putting it all in a spoiler.

I have always, ALWAYS been overweight/obese. I was a chubby kid, bullied for that at school, and turned into a chubby adult. I never really learned how to live a healthy lifestyle. I was embarrassed to work out, and didn't have a lot of money when I first moved out of home so I literally lived on two-minute-noodles, pasta and eggs. Not much nutrition there, but I have come a long way since then. Over the years, I tried many different fads to lose weight - WW, shakes, pills, keto, IF, you name it then I probably tried it. Some things worked, for a time, the most successful being a period of maybe 3 months where I was having meal replacement shakes and following the Turbo Fire program. But I felt like crap the whole time, and soon couldn't keep it up anymore.

I think in the back of my mind I always knew that these fads don't work. I wanted to believe that they just don't work for everyone, but they'll work for me. Sadly, that is just not true. Exercising hard every day and living on shakes is a miserable way to live even if it does work! And at some point, you have to stop having the shakes, meanwhile you haven't learned how/what to eat and you go back to your habits from "before".

I found MFP in 2012, had some success but never really stuck with it either. I had convinced myself that my PCOS made it impossible to lose weight. Impossible. Which of course was validated by the fact that my efforts were fruitless - because I only did it for a week or two and tried to restrict myself so much that I was miserable again.

In 2017 I had a bit of a cancer scare. I had sought out a reproductive endocrinologist (who is also a gyno) to help me have a baby, as we had been trying for a long time without any success due to my PCOS. She ran some tests first and found pre-cancerous cells in my uterus. I underwent a treatment for 6 months that made me gain even more weight. Once I had the all-clear from that, my specialist recommended that we go straight into IVF, because the chances are we would end up there anyway. In 2018 we were successful on our third embryo transfer, and in the December I gave birth to a bouncing baby boy. I had no idea the impacts that becoming a mother would have on me. Of course I knew the stuff about the sleepless nights and all that. But I didn't know that my anxiety would all but disappear. I didn't know that my priorities in life would change like they have. I didn't realise that I would feel such a strong desire to show my son how to live a healthy life.

Around a year ago, I came back to MFP properly, but with a new approach. I wasn't looking for a fast fix, I was looking to make small changes to my lifestyle that I could build on over time. I was looking for a lifestyle change, not a short-term diet. So I started out doing nothing more than just tracking all my calories so I could gauge how much I was eating. I didn't try to change my eating habits, just observe them. Then I starting incorporating more regular exercise into my day. But I still didn't change my eating. Then I had started to observe some patterns in my eating habits, like that I tend to eat more later in the day and like a big dinner. So I could start to make some changes around when I eat, and I started to reduce my portion sizes. These little things made a huge difference for me! I found some great challenges in the MFP community to join, and in the last year I have lost a little over 30 lbs. I have a long way to go, but I know that I have set myself up for success.

My weight loss journey is more of a yo-yo weight lifetime. Here is a brief timeline.

- Chubby kid, lots of home drama as a kid (lots of people close to me getting really sick and dying), ate feelings.
- Started playing 3 sports, because student althete that took the chubby girl comments to heart and just kind of stopped eating for a few years. Lost the chubby.
- Went to college, stopped swimming and other physical activity, started eating my feelings again.
- Moved in with hubby and adopted his eating habits, stepped beyond chubby - still not exercising.
- Starting running in 2010. Lost 40lbs and got down to the healthy range again, ran half marathon in 2012
- Bought our first house like a week after the half mary, and running time became house project time. No exercise = you guessed it, back to chubby.
- Stress stress and more eating feelings.
- Had baby in 2015, csection kind of almost killed me. It was a calamity of human errors that still just baffles me to this day. Took me way longer to bounce back from it than I ever expected, and I’m still not 💯
- LOTS OF FEELINGS AND CAKE
- In 2019 decided enough was enough, joined a gym. Started classes. Started running. Lost 60ish pounds slowly over 20 months. Hoping to get closer by the 2 year mark.

So basically when I have periods of my life where I cut out exercise, that’s when I start eating my feelings. The exercise - especially running even though I really actually hate running - helps my anxiety and ADHD so I don’t need the cookies and cake and sugary coffee beverages to feel sane.

This is probably TMI and a slight digression but hey whatever, we’re all friends here right - hubs and I are both 38 so if we want kid #2 it needs to be soon. The idea of a similar experience to the last one taking me out of commission physically for months and me losing all the progress I’ve made on this leg of the journey is one of the main fears I have that’s making me lean in favor of saying one kiddo is enough. It makes me feel selfish, but if my journey has taught me anything it’s that if I stop being physically active it all goes downhill.