I Lost 150 Pounds Twice

How you can avoid going backwards in your weight loss journey

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I have always been large from an early age when I started at school aged 4; I was always the biggest in the class, at least twice as big as the next kid through high school and college.

It took me until the age of 30 to finally reach a healthy weight, having joined Slimming World a few years earlier and losing over 150 pounds. The problem is, it all came back, and I had a new mission to lose it again!

What I learned the first time

Slimming World was a revelation. They presented a way that I could eat whatever I wanted, including lean meat, vegetables, fruit and have a small amount of “syns” which included anything with fat, sugar etc.

It didn’t matter why it worked initially; I was getting the results. In my first week, I lost five pounds, followed by a further sixty pounds over the next four months and over 150 pounds over the next two years.

My partner also joined me at SW and lost about fifty pounds herself. However, she struggled to maintain motivation for an extended period and eventually slipped away from the regular meetings due to a busy work schedule.

SW works by encouraging you to eat foods with a low-calorie density, I later learned. By allowing people to eat as much lean protein as they want, combined with vegetable-based carbohydrate, you can eat more and feel fuller.

My biggest revelation was that someone could lose weight without doing any exercise. I had a sedentary job and worked long hours; I didn’t have time to exercise. The others at the SW group also used to joke regularly about how much they would drink, I was certainly partial to the occasional drink, and it didn’t stop me losing weight.

When you lose weight in a club like that, they often include things like certificates and stickers that are small motivations for reaching significant milestones. There were over a hundred stickers on my weight loss diary; I had won “Slimmer of the Month” at least six times and “Slimmer of the Week” more times than I could count. Every certificate I got went up on the wall.

I have a competitive streak a mile wide, and these stickers and small competitions set it off in a big way. I was so proud of them.

What I learned is:

• Food doesn’t need to taste like cardboard during weight loss. You can use spices, herbs and make sauces that are low in calories.
• Cooking your food from scratch is the best way to lose weight, so learn to cook if you can’t already!
• Losing weight is 100% dependent on what you consume.
• A little bit of praise goes a long way and can be exceptionally motivational.
• Having a supportive partner will make a world of difference.

How did it go so wrong, after going so right?

I had made a catastrophic mistake in my weight loss, by not exercising it was setting me up for failure. I hadn’t addressed the cause of my eating, and in losing the weight, I had also lost a lot of muscle.

My weight loss also led to the development of some unhealthy habits. Weigh-in days would involve barely eating to achieve the best result. I also developed a few dangerous tricks for when my week hadn’t gone to plan.

The real trigger for my backwards slide was losing my father. We found out that he had stage 4 cancer and six months to live without treatment, but they hoped he could have 18 months with treatment. He only managed ten months in the end, but he got to see me at a healthy weight before he died.

The loss of my father sent my drinking and eating into overdrive. Over 18 months, all of the weight came back, and I was back to where I started. I had the new stress of running a Startup, and my long-term relationship had also ended.

The drinking progressively got worse; on some nights, I would consume up to two bottles of wine. Afterwards, I ate whatever I wanted. It was beginning to seriously affect my health when previously I had no existing health conditions.

I was disgusted with myself that I had let it slip, I took down all the Slimming World certificates and threw away my weight loss diary.

I hadn’t earned them anymore.

Getting the motivation back again

It took me three more years to get the motivation back to try again, I had a few false starts and lost 20–30 pounds with Slimming World, but it would always regress to my steady state.

Fast forward to January 2019, and I set new goals in a different way to previous years. Mainly the technique was to select multiple targets that included easy to achieve ones and more long-term goals.

The goal that I set around eating was to reduce my food bill. The household food bill was about $1000 a month, a truly ridiculous amount of money for myself and a cat. I was eating junk and not cooking regularly.

My goal was to reduce my food bills to under $500 a month, still a lot but a considerable reduction. My approach was to cook more often and use my dinner leftovers as lunch the following day. With a roasted chicken for dinner, it might become chicken sandwiches for a few days after, or become the protein in a salad.

This approach worked well for the first four months of the year, and when my birthday came around, I was suddenly the wrong side of 30 and getting nearer to 40. My new goal was that I would be a healthy weight by the time I hit 40.

What I did differently the second time around

The new resolution to reduce my food bills did not, however, address the potential to slide back into old habits. I needed a different approach.

Slimming World had worked previously, but after a few more failed attempts with it, I had lost faith. I still had some great recipes to use, and I could cook, those were the real gifts that I gained from the first time around.

After sticking to the food bill target for five months and losing thirty pounds, I needed to address the potential to slide backwards. That was good, but I knew I needed to do something different to avoid the trap I had fallen into previously.

I had my diet under control, but this time I needed to do exercise. My resolve led me to join a Bootcamp gym; this was a big step and a very intense step into training. The first session was a complete mess; I ate before I went, I almost threw up and for two days after I wasn’t able to move my arms. But I went back!

They encouraged me to use MyFitnessPal, and go back to the essential “calories in vs calories out”, with higher protein and fat and lower carbohydrate.

They also gave me some new recipes to add to my repertoire, including a fantastic lemon mustard salad dressing and a coffee beef stew. There were also occasional competitions including one over Christmas to lose the most combined inches and pounds over four weeks. Fueled by my competitive streak, I came second having lost 12 pounds and two inches.

Six months later and I had lost almost 100 pounds. I was going to the gym four times a week and had developed a positive relationship with food.

A change at the start of the year can be healthy, and in my case, it was getting more help. I started working with a personal trainer who helped me manage my exercise routine, focus on exercise goals and tweak my eating habits. Even though they had improved, I would still occasionally have bad habits. He will joke about my breakfast to this day, popcorn and a peperami is not a good breakfast.

When the Coronavirus lockdown started, I had to manage my exercise routine through a significant change. My gym switched to doing online bootcamps, but they weren’t the same. My tracking app showed that I was burning less than half the number of calories I had been doing during the in-person gym sessions.

I looked at getting some weights to do training at home, but everyone else had the same plan. Weight training was out, online bootcamps didn’t work, so I looked to try something entirely new. I took up running.

Running was entirely new to me; I had done some running at school but felt it was more like a punishment than a form of exercise. There was something that clicked in my brain, and I was stuck working from home, my only real company was my cat. Running was suddenly a way to decompress after a long day.

I grew to love running over the lockdown period. It gave me clarity and time to think. As someone who enjoys thinking creatively and problem-solving, that time during a long run became when I had my best ideas. I would find new solutions that I applied directly to my business.

That taught me not to be afraid to change up my exercise sessions and try new things. I emerged from the lockdown having lost another thirty pounds and reached my goal for 2020 of losing fifty pounds.

What I have learned the second time losing over 150 pounds:

• Consistency is key to losing weight. It is the day-in-day-out choices that make the difference. You can’t be a saint during the week and eat junk during the weekend. You are going to make slow progress and get demoralized.
• Count calories while losing weight, it may seem tedious, but like everything, it is about having a system in place to help you be consistent.
• Count everything that goes into your mouth, if you can also weigh it. Do it immediately because this is the only way to track accurately. Guesswork leads to mistakes and demoralizing results.
• Be honest with yourself. If you have a terrible minute, hour, day, that is ok. Make the next day better, and don’t punish yourself.
• Don’t be afraid to get help and admit that you need it. Make sure that whoever you get to help is a professional and not a TV/Youtube gimmick.
• Food is how you lose weight; exercise is what helps you maintain weight loss.
• Exercise sessions can be therapeutic and give you new opportunities for creativity.

One additional mistake to avoid

Losing weight during the Covid-19 lockdown was a colossal challenge and meant that I had to manage my routine through a significant change.

Mistakes are how we learn, and while this article may help to avoid some mistakes, I can guarantee you will hit bumps in the road.

A mistake I ran into recently after running my first half marathon during the lockdown. My eating had occasionally been bordering on a binge, and there were days where I felt I could not stop eating if I had some chocolate or bread. I would undo a good day in five minutes.

Exercise sessions were also a chore, halfway through a run I would suddenly not feel that I could continue and start walking.

After some investigation and discussion, it turned out that my calories were far too low for the amount of exercise I was doing. I set my calorie target at 1800 for a year, but my weight loss had plateaued, and my runs were hitting a wall. My trainer suggested increasing them to 2100, and the improvements came about a week later.

What you eat is a balancing act that you have to manage through the entire journey, if you go too low, then it can cause adverse outcomes.

After over 170 pounds lost, I emerged from the lockdown, and people don’t recognize me anymore! Someone started at me for 45 minutes because they couldn’t believe how much I had lost the other day.

When it comes to losing a lot of weight, my three recommendations are:

• The secret to weight loss is to build a good routine and stick to it; cook your food from scratch, count calories and be consistent. Don’t be afraid to get professional help when you need it.
• Losing a large amount of weight is about building healthy habits and getting control of your relationship with food for the long term. Remember, it took a long time to make the body you don’t want, so it will take time to build the body you do want.
• Most importantly, you have to want to do it. Your motivation will adapt over the journey; however, without the right driving factors, it will be challenging to succeed.