This is primarily a weight loss blog and is dedicated to all those without hope. Know this: feeling hopeless doesn't make you hopeless - you just need to go and get some hope!
I have always always always always always always ALWAYS been fat. I'm not even much of a yo-yoer either. My weight has always been a steady ascending incline. My only successful 'diets' included the aid of duromine (30mg and 40mg) and I can tell you from personal experience that they are not the answer, well definitely not the answer for me. Diet pills for me was the classic whack it off, whack it right back on again plus plus plus. I'll get into some gory details in later posts if my ego can take it.
Today is Thursday 24th March, 2014.
180:180 - What does it mean? I currently weigh 180kg and am leaving on a much anticipated holiday in 180 days (Tuesday 16th September, 2014). I am setting myself a stretch goal of losing 75kg by the time I board the plane. It's a big number, but it works out to be roughtly 3kg/week. During my postgraduate studies I had to do a little research on goal setting theory of motivation. The academic bad boys in this area are hands down Locke and Latham. Part of their theory recommends setting difficult or stretch goals in achieving positive outcomes. I feel an equal mix of optimism and healthy scepticism as I'm expecting big numbers initially and smaller ones toward the end...when I may or may not switch to lbs :)
Metric
Starting weight: 180kg
Goal weight: 105kg
Total weight loss: 75kg
Imperial
Starting weight: 396lbs
Goal weight: 231lbs
Total weight loss: 165lbs
There are a lot of mindsets out there regarding food. Food as fuel, food as a means of survival, food as pleasure, food as nourishment, food as love. For me food is all consuming, I'd put a tee hee in there, but I find it awful rather than funny. I don't want food to be something I use to punish/hurt/kill myself with and that's what I do - constantly.
I can remember in years gone by eating until I had a full stomach and felt such pleasure and satisfaction/happiness in the feeling. Not a healthy mindset or attitude, but that's what I had developed. As bad as that was, it is far preferable to how I feel now. For the last five years my stomach has been an infinite space. I feel as though I've been chasing that feeling of comfort/fullness/satiation/satisfaction and haven't been able to 'achieve' it, no matter how much I eat. In my mind I used to (until very recently) liken it to the sink hole from The Lovely Bones - bottomless.
That was before I had hope. I can't say precisely what happened, but two days ago something tweaked in my brain. I wasn't doing anything special, I hadn't read something profound or caught a glimpse of my naked morbidly obese self in the mirror (I can only apologise for the imagery). But something did happen. I thought about losing weight and thought a simple thought: Why not? FAILURE. Then I thought another simple thought: So what? Try. Just try.
Now I love Santa Claus, every thing Walt Disney ever did and Harry Potter a LOT, but I don't believe in magic. I like to think of myself as an optimistic realist (did you see those current and projected numbers up there?). Still, the closest thing to magic I've ever experienced happened. That black hole? That infinite space? That Lovely Bones sink hole? It didn't disappear, but it did change. It became Joe Simpson's crevasse. Now I am not likening my next 180 days to be anywhere near as insanely painful or challenging as Joe Simpson's climb out of that crevasse (and along that glacier back to camp). Infact, I hope with all digits crossed and eyes skyward it is not. I am using it to illustrate the fact that I now have hope and that what hope really is is self-belief. It doesn't matter what anyone else thinks (Joe's friends thought him dead), it's up to me and I can at least try.
I plan on writing daily, so that's enough for now. Tomorrow I'll be posting on my new food regime and sharing some of my favourite weight loss sources. I know everyone loves looking at before and after pics on the internet of extreme weight loss, but I'm not ready to put up any before shots yet.
X Annie
