Hey everyone, long time lurker here (29M, 5'7). I've been feeling really good about my health and fitness progress lately and wanted to share my story in the hopes that it'll help motivate others to do the same :). This is not my first foray with /r/loseit -- back in 2017, I posted here to share that I'd lost 105 pounds between 11/2015 and 1/2017 from my peak of 267lbs. I've learned a lot in the past 6 years since doing that in regards to my weight, and many of the lessons I had to learn the hard way as I slowly backslid up 70 pounds. When I first lost the weight, I did it solely through calorie counting and restricting myself to 1200-1300 calories a day. After I'd reached a weight I was content at, I grew complacent with my progress and started tracking less vigorously... that, combined with becoming even more sedentary with the start of my tech-based career, lead to a slow increase in my weight over a few years, until it eventually shot up hard during the initial year of COVID lockdowns (where I somehow willed myself into thinking that I shouldn't care about keeping myself together while everything was going crazy in the world).
As soon as gyms opened back up, however, I decided that the only thing keeping me from being healthy was myself, and stopped allowing myself to use things like COVID and other things out of my control as excuses for not taking better care of myself. While I had already started calorie counting again in the Summer of 2021, I doubled down and committed to changing my habits permanently and got a gym membership in October 2021. Starting on day 1, I refused to let myself make any excuses for missing a scheduled workout, going 5 days a week without fail from then on (at some point in 2022 I increased this to 6 a week :) ). While it was hard at first (especially because I still wanted to be careful about my health with COVID and wore a mask for the first ~6 months or so of going), after a while I was able to make going to the gym part of my habits and no longer felt like I was forcing myself to go, and even started enjoying it. Since then, I've dropped all of the weight I put back on since my first weight loss, back down to ~160lbs, except this time I have muscle to help make me look even thinner than I did back then. After I really started getting serious about working out, I cleaned up my diet as well, in the hopes of better improving my performance at the gym. I now each mostly lean meats (chicken and turkey mostly) and veggies, with a very high protein diet overall.
I've really come to love my new fitness-focused daily routine now; I have so much more energy than I used to, I feel more comfortable showing off my body (I used to buy clothes that I could hide in, now I only ever want to wear form fitting clothes), and I've picked up physically intensive hobbies that I never would have even dreamed of doing even a year ago, like bouldering. It's gotten to the point where I consider working out to be one of my main hobbies now; I'm always trying to find ways to further improve my fitness or push for new goals (on cardio days, I try to get as many steps as possible. My record so far is 60,000 steps in a day).
My weight trend, from 2015-2023
Progress Pic (shirt off, mildly NSFW)
Happy to offer any advice or suggestions!
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source https://www.reddit.com/r/loseit/comments/13b9a5y/sv_ive_completely_changed_my_lifestyle_and_habits/
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