Truly weightloss can be a lottery.
The choice of what is out there is like nothing else and half the products are dangerous to your health or just simply a joke. Maybe you have tried some.
Maybe your own lack of information has led you up blind alleys or you have been flooded by repeat subscription products where you did not know how to stop the deliveries and your card suddenly showed you had become someone's benefactor without knowing how....
And worse than this,everyone seems to have an angle,everyone's an expert and you have been flooded by so many bright ideas on how to lose weight that you could write a book about it!
Boring, huh?!
Trying to lose weight should be fairly straightforward but in reality it is a world full of quacks,imposters,charlatans and amateur chemists and before you know it your problems could have doubled in this ocean of greed,ignorance and negligence.
I was there once, a seemingly lost soul in this ocean trying to figure what to do with all that weight.
I was totally miserable carrying a whole load of excess weight which seemed to go up and up and up.I was spreading out seemingly unstoppably. Every week I felt a little heavier,a couple of pounds,say. It went on and on....the car springs groaned and sank lower as I got into it,offended by the excess burden;the stairs would creak in protest as though they might splinter at any moment; the bath would acknowledge the heavy weight and displace half its contents onto the floor! I was worried.
I wondered constantly how `I was going to turn the tide of acceleration of weight gain towards obesity. I'd feel the fabric of jeans stretch across my thighs and the button become harder to do up. I looked at myself in the mirror and it told me things I did not want to know. I drank steadily in the neighbouring pubs without any real pleasure-a continuation of my post divorce period when I'd chosen drinking as my next career move.
I'd become a joke to myself and to others, and my ability to deal with it was not up to standard.Life was quite hard and the constant conversation within me was about finding the solution to this weight problem.
At this point counting calories in relation to weight of food seemed beyond my skillset. I tried a couple of solutions, one of which seemed downright dangerous. It involved sachets added to water to create shakes which were instead of food. For three days I felt faint and sweated very unnaturally. In the end I decided being fat was safer to my wellbeing. Other things were suggested and it seemed everyone was a weightloss expert except for me.But I had to lose the pounds. I was in reality a thin person inside trying to get out!
One scheme involved drastically cutting my liquid intake,so that all the cups of tea and coffee were eliminated and I just drank small amounts of water. Fortunately I have an inbuilt safety mechanism which threw this one out completely for I know the effects of not drinking anything and they are worse than being overweight.
I ate more out of necessity than out of any interest in food and my cooking was cursory. My diet was haphazard and lacked protein especially. I was vegetarian but I suspect I'd have been better off eating meat. Basically I was nutritionally semi-illiterate and along with my lack of confidence I presented a fairly sorry sight. Really I existed and survived but not a great deal more and inside me I was sad and angry because this matter was so hard to solve.
So it was with some scepticism that when I was told about the food plan that I decided to give it a look. It was not hard to leave my life as it was; the people, the places and activities because I was bored and unengaged. When actually I discoved that there was a way of losing weight I could actually follow it was mindboggling. I had to change what I ate but it worked and became really involved in it and saw results soon. I also felt I was being saved from an early heartattack. It was a revelation and after a few weeks I knew that my body was getting the proper nutrition.
My attitude towards food and cooking was doing a 180 and I found I was beginning to enjoy food again, as one should.One does enough eating, so why not let it be a good rather than a curse?
I found the dedication and the desire to get to where I wanted fairly easy. Alcohol dropped away like it had never been a part of my life; there was not even a hint of withdrawal or psychological angst.Which is just as well as it packs on the pounds like no tomorrow exists.
I met my old drinking buddies from time to time.Why was I not with them still when there was nothing wrong with being fat and propping up a bar? I had an answer but I am sure they would not have understood. The simple truth was that it was actually more amusing losing weight and not being around people without insight. I enjoyed spending more time on my own pursuing constructive plans at last and I developed my more creative side while I was about it.
I had every incentive too that year as it was suddenly a brilliant summer for once and being thinner meant one could be more out there in the sun. Adapting to a slimmer form was not hard as I still possessed clothes from before I put the weight on and going down sizes and finding I slipped into smaller jeans was a brilliant encouragement for me. My desire was total and noone could have put me off because they would just be moved aside if they did. Singlemindedness is like that!
When I finally reached my target weight I had solved a number of ills in my life,not least health and potential health problems, and my personality had benefitted massively too. Really I had undergone an inner transformation which was akin to ALCHEMY.
You see losing weight is not just about the pounds you lose but how it affects you on the inside. The inner journey can be as special as the outer one and I noticed many changes within me as I progressed and I felt far more real to myself.It was great.
Confidence was one obvious change, and self belief. It was more possible to feel like I knew things and could make points with authority.Also I had had to focus on this one project so much that I knew I had the self discipline to do it.My mindset had changed and the depression I felt before I started gave way to a certain lightness of spirit.
Alchemy is the process of turning base metal to gold using the philosophers stone. I had found this process in relation to my body and outcome of my slim self was as precious as any gold.Truly I had become my best version!