What Keeps You Going

Nowadays, quality of life for sure. Being slim feels better - lots better - than being overweight, and it's easier and more fun to do active things when I'm slimmer. My health markers are better, too - all solidly in the normal range, even ones that were seriously bad news when I was overweight.

While that's true, that doesn't really help others much since a person has to get near to goal weight to fully feel that.

To start, what initially made me commit to weight loss was my doctor getting increasingly emphatic that I should be taking statins for my persistently high cholesterol. I didn't want to do it, since brain fog reportedly is a common side effect, and I figured I'd already given up enough cognitive bandwidth to chemotherapy. (Yes, the chemo was for a cancer more common among overweight people.)

I tried every other intervention I could think of to improve my blood test results: Good exercise schedule, trying various supplements, eating my veggies/fruits. (I'd already been vegetarian and hippie-dippy whole-grain-y for literal decades.) There may've been tiny improvement, but not much. So I finally decided I'd better seriously try weight loss, and mean it.

Part way through weight loss, I had to have my gallbladder removed, not because of stones or sludge, but because of something called adenomyomatosis. When I got the pathology report, that kind of sealed the deal on weight loss. It was an ugly thickened cholesterolized thing with actual holes in it. Not good. High odds other internal organs were compromised, too.

Eventually, as I got lighter, I started to feel better and get better blood test results. Then more came into focus: I realized that for me calorie counting was the perfect tool to balance my short-term hedonistic impulses (to eat all the yummy things) while still giving my future self better quality of life. That realization also kept me going.

I began to notice that among my friends and relatives - all people I value - some were more inactive and overweight, others more active and healthy weight. Among those of similar age, the inactive/overweight people had worse quality of life. They were sick more often, needed more surgeries and recovered more slowly, were physically unable to do certain fun things like art fairs/music festivals/stadium events because of walking and stairs, had to spend more money on health care items and paying for services they could no longer do themselves so didn't have as much discretionary money, couldn't eat/drink what they really wanted because of health conditions or drug side effects, and had a bunch of other unpleasant side effects from the combinations of their multiple medications besides. They tended to die younger, and after a long, slow decline. On average, those negatives were much less true for the active/slim people, and the active/slim ones tended to live longer with more likely a short, sharp decline right near the end.

It finally sunk in viscerally that if I was active and slim, I could shift my odds toward a happier and longer life.

Along about the same time, I noticed that doctors' offices I visited had a high proportion of overweight people my age who appeared quite unfit, compared to places like malls or grocery stores where there were more of a range of people even in the same age group.

One thing here that helped when things got difficult was this thread:

I'd read a few pages now and then, and feel heartened. Eventually, I'd read every single post (and still read all the new ones). So many positives happen along the way to goal weight. It isn't necessary to wait until the end to feel some rewards. Knowing that helped.

motivation — wanting to age well, with the strength and mobility to do anything I want to do when I want to do it.

Challenge — my husband saying ‘you don’t need to lose weight.’ But he’s been much more ‘supportive’ or at least not a barrier after he said that in front of a neighbour and the neighbour stood up beside be with her head held high and said to him ‘It is not your body. If she feels like she needs to lose weight to feel better in her own skin, then it shouldn’t matter to you.’ she is a tiny 4’11” woman in her 80s.

What keeps me going is what I'm able to do now compared to a year ago. I'm now about 10 months into my weight loss/fitness mission. It is getting tough to sometimes keep going - weight loss is so slow that you can get unmotivated really easily (they actually say people shouldn't plan on doing weight loss more than six months in a row, and this is likely part of the reason.) Any time I get frustrated with the scale, I look back on what I'm doing now compared to before. I've done 70 flights on the stairmaster when I used to get out of breath on a flight of stairs. I also am doing 1 minute spurts at 5mph on the treadmill when I used to max out at 2.5mph. Those and others are motivating.

The biggest challenge has to be the plateaus. Now that I'm >50lbs lost, my body is starting to fight me (although I have a lot more to go). I'll drop weight, then plateau for 2-3 weeks, and that is frustrating. You seem to stall when nothing has changed. I just keep working through these stalls and remind myself of how much healthier and fitter I am now.