I Lost 70 Pounds
When people see me now, they don’t believe me when I tell them that I used to weigh 240 pounds. The people who first met me when I was overweight have the funniest reaction toward my progress. They always highlight how they are in disbelief with respect to the progress I’ve made, and then I like to sarcastically respond, “I know, right? A flight of stairs used to be a journey; I run marathons now.” Questions about how I did it and whether there was a secret started to flood in. My answer is as vanilla as ever: you must eat healthy and exercise. The real obstacle of weight loss is the mental hurdle of coming to terms with the reality of your lifestyle.
Growing up in a traditional household with Iranian parents was a culture shock all on its own. I was ashamed of my family; our food smelled weird, our house looked so different, and how my family spent our free time was vastly different from what I had seen throughout the years on television. I got over all the shame thanks to education and the promotion of diversity in culture. However, what was left behind was my culturally taught, bad eating habits.
Since I was a kid, I was told to eat until I was full. My idea of full, however, was dictated by my mother, who decided that a 2,000-calorie plate of food is considered a healthy portion. I remember being seven; I would feel stuffed to the point of vomiting, and my parents would discipline me about not wasting food if there was any food left. That being my earliest experience of the idea of full, I had now adopted the mindset that if my stomach wasn’t expanding to the point of feeling pressure, I was not full. Over the years, my stomach’s capacity for retaining food kept increasing, so I kept pushing the limit with cereal and Oreos. Meals went from portions to just items. In my head, I eat a sandwich for lunch; the size of the sandwich, of course, wasn’t taken into consideration. I just thought that a 16-inch sub was “better” than an 8-inch sub. This delusional point of view of food endured until I finally reached a point where I was worried about my health. It was when the scale read 240 pounds that I decided I needed to make a change in my dietary behavior.
I started counting calories, doing fad diets, and starving myself. Counting calories taught me the importance of food labels and helped me understand portion control. The fad diets taught me about the importance of every type of food, and through eliminating certain food groups, I learned about how each food affected my body in a controlled experiment. Starving myself taught me a lot about how my body operated with a lack of nutrition. I would try my best to operate under the lowest number of calories. It led me to finding out what vitamins and minerals I naturally lack and need to compensate for with dietary pills or eating extra of a specific food group. In the beginning of starting all these methods, I was really overwhelmed and tired. But as I found small bouts of progress approaching each of them, it made me more passionate about the process of maintaining my body.
Exercising was, of course, another factor that played a role in my weight loss. I hated running; I could not even run a quarter mile. It turns out it wasn’t because I am not a natural runner (which isn’t a real thing; we can all run); it was because I was overweight. Running with seventy extra pounds of weight is insane, especially when you consider a reasonable pace to be what kids in high school ran during track. One of the positives of getting older and having a hazy memory of the past is you lose your sense of what normalcy is with respect to exercise. It turns out the insecurity of running performance is the number one thing stopping people from taking part in the activity. The sentiment that you can’t just show up to work; you must perform does not correlate with exercising. Showing up to the gym is ninety percent of the hurdle. Being around other people and being insecure that you aren’t doing enough will force you to exercise longer and harder, even if you don’t want to (one of the rare positives of insecurity). After showing up for a year, ONLY A YEAR, you start to have drastic improvements. I tell my friends their goal with respect to exercising should be to not have to look in the mirror to find inspiration for your next workout; you do it because you need to get rid of stress.
So, what’s my overall sentiment towards weight loss? It’s just hard to get the ball rolling, the same way it's sometimes just hard to get out of bed. But as soon as you start, you forget about how you had just overcome a mental hurtle. Every time I see older people lose weight, I love it because after experiencing my own journey, I know it’s never too late. If you are alive and breathing, you can probably get in shape.