My Weight Loss Journey: 1 Year On

It's been a year since I embarked on a personal health journey. It was definitely challenging and at times, felt impossible - but I've learned so so much. There were plenty of new habits/routines that I've adopted over this time and I wanna share some of them with you guys!

Before I go on, just wanna preface: some of the stuff in my list involved a lot of trial and error which fortunately worked for my natural build. I'm not assuming that my methods will work for all body types but the main takeaway from my article is about being brave to try new things, while truly understanding ourselves and the wonders of our bodies' capabilities!

Being a competitive athlete when I was younger, I took for granted the degree of training/exercise I had to do to keep up with my humongous appetite and strength needs. When I started uni and dropped all sports, the unhealthy weight started creeping it and over a span of 6 years, I eventually weighed almost a 100 kilos - the heaviest I've ever been in my life.

Being at this weight compromised so much of my daily life. Walking to the bus stop for a mere 3-5 minutes caused so much chronic pain under my feet, I had frequent heat flashes even in an air-conditioned room, and worst of all, my digestive system was a wreck. My looks, while it was a concern, was a minuscule one compared to the hampered quality of life that I was leading.

It was time for a change and now being 25kg lighter, the journey has evolved from one of weight loss to lifetime health. Here are a few things I've learned that helped make this a reality!

NO SOCIAL MEDIA "PROGRESS" POSTS IN THE EARLY STAGES

I'd go as far to say that this action guaranteed the discipline I needed to kickstart my weight-loss journey.

The start of any life-changing journey is a crucial one, and social media validation could cause a whole lot of complacency, at least for me. So any changes I made to my diet, any new workout I took up, or anything related to my weight loss at all, never saw the light of day on my social media until about 4 months later.

Also, I wanted to tackle a prevailing issue I had with social media - and that was beauty editing.

By beauty editing, I don't mean a slab of filter pasted on our photos, or correcting a photo's saturation, etc. What I mean is the purposeful aesthetic manipulation of changing our looks through unrealistic angles, light direction or even just using an editing app to alter of our faces/bodies themselves. Not proud to admit it, but I've been guilty of this - especially during weight gain periods.

So how I started this journey on social media was by first, removing every single photo that I knew I edited my body in. At the end of the day, we can lie to our followers, but we can't lie to ourselves. Keeping the initial struggle of my journey to myself and some close ones made the journey seem more real and I could be fully honest myself.

And so, no misleading pictures or ego-enabling posts was the number 1 rule .

Now I'm willing to share progress photos like these (no matter how unglam) since social media likes/validation no longer affect my discipline levels

I've come to terms with the fact this journey isn't for me to look more attractive or hardworking to others on my social media - it's for my body, my health, and only I can make the change that I want.

FAD DIETS WERE NEVER SUSTAINABLE FOR ME

This one's more of a personal take, primarily because I've experienced first-hand how unsustainable it was for my body.

The most basic theory to losing weight is to have a calorie deficit. Simply put, calories consumed has to be less than the calories going out. However, letting myself go definitely imparted a certain level of laziness which unfortunately seeped into my health journey at the start. I initially looked for shortcuts so I didn't have to exercise.

This was of course, before I found out about how dance exercises can be the most fun and fulfilling thing ever. But yes, I tried to find shortcut diets to satisfy my lazy ass and one of them happened to be drinking "zero" sodas. I'm very fond of sweet drinks (definitely was a factor in me being unhealthy), so I wanted to enjoy drinking sweet drinks but still having a calorie deficit.

Source: https://www.huffpost.com

So yeah, from a numerical standpoint, I wasn't consuming as many calories with these zero sodas - but boy, did my body pay for it. I found out quickly that my body couldn't process any type of sugar alcohol. Tummy issues aside, fatigue became a very real thing and as I discovered my love for dance workouts, this became a real big bummer. Worst of all, I wasn't really losing my weight, AND I was losing lots of muscle.

So I decided to experiment on this. I started consuming regular sodas again (albeit at a lower volume) and boom, my issues were gone. Thus, my biggest takeaway from this was that there are no shortcuts to getting healthy. Portion control definitely goes a long way compared to extreme diets. More importantly, portion control and doing fun exercises that I actually look forward to are sustainable ways to get healthy.

Weight loss or a weight goal is so short-term, but life is forever. If I have to take zero calorie drinks but feel fatigued for the rest of my life, then uh... no thanks. I'd rather still enjoy my root beer while keeping a tab on my workouts and portions.

FORGIVE YOUR BODY

Our bodies are our temples, and as much as I want it to get stronger and healthier, I had to forgive it for its limitations.

Now this is in no way an excuse for not pushing myself extra hard during a workout or to slack off, but I've learned that it's okay for my body to have its limits. Particularly at the start and getting to the first milestone of being lower than 90kg, I started to resent my body for the things it couldn't do. It felt shitty that my body couldn't jump as high as I did in my bball/netball heyday.

A funny photo of a dear friend hugging me at my fittest in 2011

But hey, it took years for me put on the weight I had - so it's gonna take some time to work it off. So this lesson is all about patience. This 20+ kilo weight loss didn't happen overnight. With all the burnouts, plateaus and muscle soreness - this journey was definitely not linear.

Even metal has to be melted and beaten down to turn into a badass weapon - so why not our bodies!

This journey has been and is continuing to enlighten me everyday! I've definitely learned more that just the 3 things above but I'll reserve those extra lessons for another article - a "2 years on" article maybe! Haha, hope my journey and the little tidbits I've learned on the way can help you guys on your own health journeys! Onto the next one!