For the entirety of high school I had the same, very competitive, best friend. We won the "best friends" superlative in all the clubs we participated in, and just generally it was clear that neither of us was really whole without the other. In April he was the passenger in a car accident that took his life, and in an attempt to channel his incredible work ethic and to fight the obesity both of us experienced our whole lives, I decided to "dedicate" myself to him by committing to losing weight before I left for college. It was right at the start of quarantine, and just generally between being a HS senior ripped away from the rest of the world, that period of weeks was some of the worst in my life. A week before the accident, he (220 lb) and myself (255 lb) started something we'd been talking about all of high school: a healthy long term weight-loss competition. Before our first virtual "weigh-in," I chugged 11 bottles of water (figuring I could pee it all out without any consequence), and a week after we had started, I was already down to 246 while he was down to 211.
This isn't a post about how hard losing my friend was though, it's a post about how much harder losing my friend was than losing 60 lb of excess weight has been.
Stats: 6'0, SW: 252, CW: 195, GW: 182
It feels pretty surreal what I've done these past few months. I started at 255, and with an extended family where the only thing that runs in it is diabetes, my family was cautiously supportive at best of me throwing all my energy into something so soon after my friend passed. I've never tried to lose weight in my life, and I grew up in a house with two "foodie" parents who were always putting enormous, delicious and well-seasoned and buttered portions on the table three if not four times a day.
Diet: This was the hardest part for me because I've kind of always been a picky eater, and the foods I dislike are very often the healthiest ones. I don't eat many vegetables even now, and generally my approach has simply been to cut back on portion size and snacking between the 3 set meals I have a day. As a teen, I don't have 100% choice in the meals that are put in front of me, so there were times I just had to sigh and eat a small portion of whatever delicious food was for dinner, even though I was already hungry and would've preferred something a little more filling and calorically reasonable. I used an online calculator to deduce that as a 6'0 250/240/230 etc. pound male, my calorie intake started at 3,000 a day when I began and went down to 2600 now. With that in mind, I tried my best to eat roughly 2200 calories a day when I started, and I'm now down to 1900 or so. I think torturing yourself to count every last calorie isn't worth the stress, so I personally just google how many calories are in a certain food I'm having, and then I round to the nearest 50 cals and try and tally it in my head. I think anything stricter than these parameters would've lead to bingeing and cheat days, so, by allowing myself to still have whatever I want in moderation, I can think of just 2 days this summer where I had an unreasonable amount of food, and both were on vacation.
Exercise Regimen: I was a really active kid all throughout elementary and middle school, and really only quit because I was becoming fat and uncompetitive. My first run at 252 I went a third of a mile all in all, and that was with stops for cramps and to breathe (I wasn't even stretching back then). I am still an absolutely horrendous runner and cannot do more than a mile at a time (I quit after I broke 7:30 in the mile), but quite honestly, since 220 lb I've just been playing pickup basketball and soccer with my old friends from HS and I'm having the same results with way less torture. I don't think I'm burning more than 200cal's a day from exercise, so it's important to understand that the exercise is there to exacerbate loss, rather than be the primary driving force. If you have a tablespoon of nutella to pay yourself off for an hour run, you're already in the hole.
My last piece of advice is that once you've found your motivation, anything is possible. If you're trying to lose weight during the pandemic, remember that "when the escalator breaks, most of your peers will chose to remain on the ground floor. It's up to you to decide to take the stairs."
TL;DR eat little run a lot and tell your friends you love them
https://imgur.com/gallery/i0NvHgo attached pics at 250 and at 200-- I'm at 192 atm and take progress pics every 10 lb (can upload an album of every 10 lb at 180 lb)
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/loseit/comments/i8yrwj/a_week_before_my_best_friend_died_we_started_a/
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