One Man’s Journey

Hello, and welcome!

Y'know, I'd suggest not investing yourself too heavily in the idea that it's going to be a rough journey. Sure, it won't be easy every second, but expectations have a way of being self-fulfilling.

Honestly, I was surprised: Weight loss was easier (in the mechanics) than I'd expected. I'd been overweight to obese for around 30 years, most of my adult life, when I got here at age 59. (I was menopausal, severely hypothyroid (medicated) - things sometimes perceived as weight loss doom). It took me a bit under a year to lose about 50 pounds, class 1 obese to healthy weight. I'm now 68, have been at a healthy weight for 8+ years since.

There were a lot of things about my habits that I needed to analyze, experiment with, and modify. But for me, calorie counting and food logging made that surprisingly straightforward.

The psychological side had its bumps, along with things like figuring out how to stay mostly full (and reasonably well nourished) on fewer calories. But I found that I could look at it as a fun, productive science fair experiment for grown-ups, learn from any oopsies rather than beating myself up about them, and actually succeed, with a dose of patient persistance.

The quality of life improvement for me was huge: More than worth the effort. I could kick myself for not doing it years earlier.

I admit, I'm a big believer in picking moderate strategies that make weight loss relatively easy, rather than using extreme eating rules and brutally punitive exercise trying to make it super fast. The "lose weight fast then go back to normal" route seems to be how some people here end up smashing up on the rocks . . . at least those folks seem to disappear pretty quickly, then sometimes reappear with "I'm back - regained" posts a few months down the road. I don't feel like the calendar is a great weight loss tool. New habits need to be found, practiced, grooved in.

If you're trying to lose 30 pounds in . . . what . . . 3.5 months-ish? . . . that could be a little aggressive, but maybe achievable. Still, in order to realize that loss, you need a routine you can stick with for that amount of time reasonably consistently (not necessarily utterly perfectly ). Sometimes a moderate weight loss rate and a sustainable plan will get a person to goal weight in less calendar time than a more extreme, difficult one that may cause deprivation-triggered bouts of over-eating, breaks in the action, or even giving up altogether.

Just my opinions/experience, though.

No matter what route you choose, I'm cheering for you to succeed: The results are very much worth it!