16 Things For You to Learn, Which Created a 162 Pound Weight Loss For Me!
Jodi Davis
| 4 min read
When you’re overweight, obese or even morbidly obese, you start to feel as if you are continuously fighting a losing battle trying to get rid of all those awful pounds. It seems as if you are the only person in the world who can’t seem to figure out a way to lose weight, encountering days when you begin to wonder if you should just give up altogether. I’m here to inform you that you can NOT give up.
Understand that I was exactly where many of you are today. I truly believed in my heart that there are two types of people out there. The ones who were born to be thin – the lucky ones in my book. Then the ones who were born to be fat – the unlucky ones, which included me tipping the scale at 300 lbs. I tried dieting, of course, thousands of times, so it seemed. I even took a few diet pills during my teenage years. It was nothing too extreme since they were not prescription, but I believed what the package back said: “Controls your appetite for 12 hours.” Those stupid pills didn’t control my appetite long enough though. By dinnertime I felt as though I hadn’t eaten in days, I’m sure you can assume what happened next. Oh well, there was always tomorrow I’d figure …
I was learning how to continuously fail at all my diet attempts. I had enough practice. What gets me it that I felt like the next “diet” would bring me any success. It had just become part of my daily life. The diets started a normal routine for me that looked like this:
- Complain about my weight
- Inform others that I was starting a new diet
- Begin the diet
- Find excuses for why I hated the diet
- Look at every thin person around me and wondering why I was fat, why I was the unlucky one
- Become extremely unhappy
- Turn to my best friend, food, for comfort
- Gain any weight I’d lost back
- Complain about it
- Repeat
I eventually learned several things, things that I had to learn before I could ever accomplish true weight loss success. These things allowed me to finally lose weight. Did I mention that these things didn’t cost me anything?
I lost more than half my body weight! 162 pounds were shed in sixteen months and I’ve kept this weight off for over 10 years all because I finally “got it” – I learned how to succeed and leave failure in the dust! I learned to:
- Believe in myself and know without a doubt that I have the ability to lose all my excess weight
- Keep that four letter word “diet” out of my vocabulary
- Focus on continuously making healthier food choices not just for one day, but every day
- Cut my calorie intake by taking the recommended portion sizes and no second helpings
- Never skip any meals during the day no matter how busy my schedule
- Avoid purchasing unhealthy items at the grocery store that I knew would tempt me at home
- Accept that one bite tastes the same as twenty when tempted by food that’s full of calories & fat
- Drink more water by consuming half my body weight in oz of water per day, i.e. 200 lbs = 100 oz. water
- Face the simple fact that exercise is essential to lose weight successfully
- Give myself time to exercise daily even if it means putting off a household chore until later
- Keep my 1.5 mile (3,000 step) daily walking routine enjoyable, treating it as a reward to myself
- End the excuses, each and every single one of them
- Accept that I have only one life, I can’t “go back” in time and attempt to do better
- I wasn’t born to be overweight
- I CAN become the thin and healthy person that I wish to be
- Repeat the first line until it happens, thousands of times if necessary.
It CAN be done, but only you can do it. I’m here for you if you have any questions …
Photo credit A Healthier Michigan
