Hey Everyone!
So, I’ve been debating wether to post my story here or not, but I feel reading someone else’s experience when it comes to any situation helps others put into perspective the “rights and wrongs” of certain things, fasting/dieting being a huge question mark to many leaves endless possibilities in the many routes you can take to lose weight.
My journey started March 2021, around the last two weeks of march I decided that I was going to start fasting. I was 210lbs, 5’2 in height, 22 years old, I was obese to say the least. But you know what’s worse than being obese? Being obese and NOT recognizing it, I had developed many health issues due to my excess amount of weight but I refused to pin any of those health issues to my weight and tried finding any other reasons as to why I felt so bad. I had developed shortness of breath, taking 2 steps was like running a marathon, I started breaking out in random sweats and rapid heart beats at any moment throughout the day, I was 1 point away from being diabetic, I had developed high cholesterol, I took every medical test I could to try to rule out why my health was deteriorating so much. Finally taking the hardest step and accepting I was extremely overweight for my age and height, I took on fasting.
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While I was going into a diet plan I knew nothing about, I just started doing what I figured was “fasting” and started cutting my meals to One Meal a Day also known as (OMAD DIET), I ate everyday but only once around 5pm when I got home from work.
Here was my eating schedule/menu from March 2021-July 2021:
Starting August I began counting my calories excessively! (what calories?!, if I didn’t eat shit!)
and my one meal a day became one meal a week or one meal every two days, meaning I wouldn’t eat anything at all the other 5 days of the week, only water, strictly ONLY WATER. you couldn’t get me to eat a cracker or a piece of candy, I was completely wrapped around fasting which little by little was becoming starvation due to my obsessive need to lose all the weight that was making me feel so shitty. I started telling my mom I would go out to eat with my friends so she wouldn’t notice that I went a whole day without eating. I would simply go out, not eat anything at all, but come home letting her know I had dinner and it was delicious, to ease her mind and not make her eye my eating habits since they started becoming more and more extreme as the weeks went by.
By this time frame (august 2021) I was at about 150lbs now, yup 50lbs down eating only lettuce with lime and tuna (un seasoned, undressed, just straight out the can onto a plate) and starving myself as much as I could. I had cut out any other forms of protein, on the day I did decide to have a meal it was always just that, tuna and lettuce. My workouts now were more intense and from only being able to do 10 minutes of cardio, I started doing 1 hour of HIIT cardio everyday, making sure I burned at least 800 calories or more solely through cardio, I was trying to burn off as much fat as I could before I started toning my muscles. I kept this up from August till present day (12/31/2021) it is currently still my daily workout routine. I make sure I don’t miss a day, if I do, im flooded with guilt, feeling as if I was gaining back every pound I was losing by not working out or getting off routine.
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Now we are at October 2021, my birthday was on the 3rd. I turned 23 years old and I was weighing in at 125lbs now, I felt happy, I looked in the mirror and I was happy with what I saw reflecting back at me but this is where I started to realize, my fasting was really an ED I had developed. I realized this because despite dropping all the weight I had dropped in such a short period of time, I still felt as if it was not enough, instead of accepting my new weight loss, I beat myself up over it on a daily and made sure that even tho I was losing now about 2-3lbs a day, to not loosen up on my routine, I felt like one day of rest or one “cheat day” would set me back so far and make me gain the weight again, I was torturing myself at this point but I couldn’t stop. I started doing the worse, I started taking laxatives and body detoxes thinking that whatever I DID eat, I didn’t want it digested into my body. I would eat and about 30 minutes later would be downing a laxative or a detox shake to make me shit it all out and seeing that the next morning I had lost another pound or two when I stepped on the scale just encouraged me to not stop drinking laxatives as well.
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Currently it is the last day of December 2021, and I weigh 107lbs. I see myself and I know I am more than fine physically, health wise its like I never had high cholesterol or was pre diabetic, I feel great in that sense. but mentally I feel like I abused the term “fasting” and went my own unhealthy route to get the results I wanted, but in all honesty I didn’t have a certain goal, I didn’t have a set weight or number I was aiming for, I was just trying to not be OBESED at 22 years old.
So my eating habits now look a little like this :
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I know the habits I have developed are not healthy to say the least and I do not recommend for you to go about losing weight in such an unhealthy way. Currently now, I am struggling with my relationship with food and eating and with the acceptance that I do deserve to have a meal I like or an ice cream or a cup of juice, I have accepted that I fall under the ED spectrum and wanted to tell my story so others can see that you can get lost if you obsess over anything really and hopefully you take the wrongs I made with my weightloss journey and go about it in a much more healthier way. I lost 100lbs in about 9 months and I don’t know when im going to get back into a normal eating routine but its something in the front of my mind that I slowly am working on.
If you made it to this point thank you for reading the whole way through!
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below are some before and after pictures:
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What you did was much healthier than staying obese so don’t beat yourself up too much for it. Your weight is not too low but you definitely don’t want so lose more, so be careful. Try not to get obsessed over food too much and eat more. Have a rule that if you think about food and weather you should eat it or not for longer than a minute, just stop, and maybe eat it some of the times, even if it’s “unhealthy”, it really won’t make much of a difference physically, and when eating it, watch a movie or something and try to think about the plot and not food, as if the food doesn’t really matter…
You already had an eating disorder to turn you obese. Becoming healthy is not a numbers game, it’s an investment in your mental and physical health. Hopefully, you can change your perspective and good luck.
Fasting has nothing to do with wanting to lose weight obsessively. It’s the complete opposite, but when your end goal is what it is, unhealthy behavior will follow any way you lose weight. Apparently, you seem to understand that well.
Congratulations, happy new year, and don’t beat yourself up. I’m the same age and I was obese at one point too. There’s nothing to be worried about, just take it day by day. Don’t listen to the bullshit and learn how to eat small even if you’re not hungry. If we had normal bodily cues, we would never had problems in the first place.
First off, I hope it’s okay to say that your transformation is amazing. I’m not encouraging the starvation part of the fasting, but maybe part of helping you is to just be another person to tell you that you did it when it comes to fixing your health and losing the extra weight… you’re “there” now! It’s no longer a dream you’re chasing, because you did it!
You seem like someone who is still pretty self aware and that’s a big plus to overcome any hate you have developed with food. You’re already catching it before you end up on the other side of being too skinny and very malnourished. For me, I look at food similarly to how I look at computers. Obviously food is even more important than computers, but the fact is computers have also become a huge part of our lives, be that a good or bad thing. Unfortunately, the convenience of technology has become an addiction for people as well. I know first hand how great technology is, my love for it pushed me to become a computer scientist. And yet, when I catch myself becoming too consumed by it, it’s time to take a step back and moderate my time around computers or the internet, because real life is still important, and just relaxing or meditating is too. But I’ll never completely cut technology out, it’s a tool and that’s how it should be seen.
Food is good for us, we will die without it. However, it’s a similar problem with convenience over the last 3 generations as it became so easy and designed to be addictive everywhere. Most of use are straight addicted to food, which reasons why is a huge topic in itself. That said, most of the crap out there hardly even deserves to be called food. Regardless, it’s important to take control of our relationship with food and as the saying goes we “eat to live, not live to eat”. Fasting definitely helps. It forces us to kick that addiction, in possibly the cleanest most efficient way, since scientists are now catching up to religion’s claims made for thousands of years in the health benefits of fasting.
But we can’t hate food either. Developing the hate for food/addiction to fasting is very understandable though, most of us here probably get it. Here, many of us, myself included, we spend years trying diets and struggling to lose just 5 lbs and it’s like nothing works, we keep feeling worse and any slip up and we gain back, possibly extra. I’d lose 40 lbs working out 6 days a week over 6 months, and over the next 3 months gain back 60 lbs. Talk about depressing, confusing, and disheartening.
Suddenly with fasting, once we make that switch to fat adaptation, our appetite goes way down and for the first time in our life we lose 10 lbs in a week or two. That turns to 20, 30, 50+. FINALLY something worked!! But in the back of our minds there’s still that fear “I don’t want to go back again, please 😣”, to gain the weight all back and the weight loss becoming more like a cruel dream.
This fear, if we let it, forms a hate against the food. But food itself was never the enemy, just the sugary, highly processed, high in omega-6 fats, foods. That’s what is breaking our systems. The fact is we obviously need food to remain strong.
I became very interested to researching health over the last 2 years, why exactly fasting and cutting out carbs, cutting out seed oils, and other tricks work. I think one last thing that may help you and anyone else reading this noticing a fear they’re going to gain back all their weight and/or some sort of hatred against food, understanding the science behind what’s going on will help you. Let me try to summarize it really quick…
While the “eat less, move more” bs they promoted and some people still do, to count calories, has a 99.9% failure rate for long term weight loss, fasting is way different. The majority of the population is dealing with what’s called Metabolic Insulin Resistance Syndrome. In short, your metabolism is literally broken. Until this is REPAIRED, you’re stuck against an uphill battle of staying in a “fed” state where your body is trying to store everything you eat, rather than use it.
Intermittent fasting, periodic proponged fasting, and removing the processed/high carb foods, finally allows the body to start to actually heal and fix your metabolism. By the time we are obese, our body has been fighting for years, with the liver becoming fatty, the pancreas pumping out insulin like crazy, visceral fat around the organs building, hyperinsulinemic (high insulin), inflammation that never goes down, and insulin resistance. But sticking to the changes I just mentioned with the fasting and removing the processed foods for 1, 2, 3+ years, your liver has healed, that visceral fat has gone down, your insulin has dropped, inflammation has dropped, your cells are now more insulin sensitive like they should be, all the fasting has increased autophagy and mitophagy that’s detoxed your body, even repaired/replaced your mitochondria, and many more amazing things.
My point in all this is you’ve repaired your body in so many ways, you’re not going to become obese again unless you go back to processed foods on a daily basis for months and let all those parts of you start to mess up again. Your body is now the most efficient it has ever been. What you eat now is being handled far better than what it was, so you’re actually less likely to gain the weight back.
Calories have never been your enemy! Insulin spiking foods and toxic oils have been your enemy. One of (several) the biggest mistakes we’ve taught people is to think all calories are the same…this is absolutely and dangerously FALSE. If you’re eating 4,000 calories of vegetables, grass-fed meats, quality eggs like pasture raised eggs, butter (and other natural fats), even bacon, that is NOT the same as 4,000 calories of McDonald’s big mac, fries, McFlurry and soda. The first one you’re going to be back into fat burning mode within maybe 8 hours, the second could take you 24 hours, and for metabolically unhealthy people as mentioned earlier, could be even longer.
So to wrap this up, you should be absolutely proud of yourself, you look amazing, and you’ve healed your body in so many ways, the outside doesn’t even start to give a clue to what you’ve done for your body inside. Calories are not your enemy, it was the processed foods that were. You’ve obviously conquered any addictions you have to them. Now you want to keep yourself strong with quality sources of food. Our ancestors followed feast and fast, not just fast forever. 😉
An amazing book, especially for it’s price, that I recommend to anyone who wants to learn more about the science behind the food and what changes to make to our diet, is the “Eat Rich, Live Long” book by Ivor Cummins. This brings to light the High Fat Low Carb diet approach (like keto as the farthest side to that). I loved it so much I binge read it, then bought copies for many friends and family. It can be found on Amazon for like $15.
Good luck to you and everyone else on their roads to recovery!
Thanks for sharing your journey.
Have you had a chance to learn more about the calories in/calories out model and how caloric restriction can affect your metabolism? With severe caloric restriction, your body tends to compensate by slowing your metabolism. That can make it much harder to find a happy maintenance routine that leaves you satisfied, healthy, and at your goal weight.
You’ve recognized that what you’re developing is an ED, and I agree that some of the stuff you did and your mentality towards food and exercise does appear to have some ED red flags.
Have you perhaps considered therapy for this? I found therapy to be soooo beneficial for many things in my life. Perhaps a therapist who specializes in EDs would be beneficial for you?
Best of luck to you!
