Losing 100 Pounds

This is my journey. It will be different from yours but, in many ways, it will also be the same. I am writing this after losing more than 80lbs in the past 15 months. I am a work in progress with a goal of losing 120lbs overall. This series will focus on each step of my journey and what I have learned about myself, weight loss, and general health along the way. I hope that it will help you with your own story.

Everyone has a Beginning. Some have experienced obesity since childhood, others later in life, after childbirth, during life or career changes, or during health issues. Each situation is unique and none of us can be lumped into a specific category. Life is rarely like that. My story starts in early adulthood. I did not experience any weight issues during my child and teenage years. I kept fairly active by riding my bike, walking, casually playing sports, joining cross country running teams, and so on. Then, seemingly with the flick of a switch, at age 18 I started gaining weight quite rapidly. I put on about 50 lbs in two years and I have continued to struggle for the three decades since then. It really opened my eyes to how obese people are treated and how they can feel about themselves. Even in a large body, I felt invisible at times.

How did I get here today - to the point of losing more than 80lbs in just over a year? Mainly it was my “mindset”. I think that word feels a little over-used these days, and that can desensitize people to the true power of it. A change in my mindset is really what directed my success this time around. Because this is certainly not my first spin at losing weight. I lost over 70 pounds about 18 years ago. I felt fantastic and was so close to my first goal of being below 200lbs, but somehow I lost my way. The pounds crept back on until eventually, I was an even higher weight. And then - I had a heart attack. I was only 46 years old and had been working on weight loss again so this event caught me off guard. I count myself lucky because I did not need surgery, but I was still airlifted to a larger city to undergo an angiogram and then two stents were placed in one of the blockages that were found. I endured another mild heart attack during the angiogram, and vowed never to return to that unit again. Great staff, but I never wanted to see any of them again!

Anyone would presume that was my big wake-up call, my reason for finally losing weight and sticking to it, the catalyst for dramatic weight loss. But it wasn’t. It took almost exactly one year post-heart attack before I was able to gather my thoughts and put a real plan in action. I could find any number of reasons or excuses for this, and while some of them are valid, such as my whole province shutting down only six weeks after my heart attack and my job being forced to close, most of the real reason is because I did not value myself enough to change my eating habits. It is as simple and direct as that. I can easily state that losing my job for a year brought on depression, and that would be very true, but I also have to acknowledge that I continued to eat in unhealthy ways despite my knowledge of what it was doing to my health. That is a fact I cannot ignore.

Prior to my heart attack, I had also been told that my blood work showed I was in “early Diabetes”. Basically, I was a blood test or two away from becoming what many refer to as a Type 2 Diabetic. I have family history of that on both sides and have always been aware of the possibility but I remained stubborn and willfully blind to it until I pushed it close to the brink. So now I was facing high sugars and high fats in my blood to the point that absolutely caused me physical problems and a big scare. Yet, another year passed before I mentally slapped myself into action.

One evening in early February 2021, I found myself in such deep despair over what I was doing to my heart and other organs, I decided it was time for immediate action. For whatever reason, I had been eating more and more food in larger and larger portions, to the point where I felt the physical strain on my body. My chest was tight, my stomach felt heavy and pressured, and my lungs felt like they were labouring because I couldn’t seem to fill them up fully with deep breaths. Despair is not a strong enough word for what I was feeling. I looked down at my chest and said “Oh my God, I am going to die”. It was a life-changing moment.

I had one of those strange incidents where it feels like our devices are reading our minds - a sponsored ad for a weight loss group I had tried in the distant past popped up in my face. I clicked it, joined it, and haven’t looked back. The name of the program is not necessary for this article but I feel that it is important to note that it is not a restrictive plan, there are no shakes, powders or special food purchases involved, no fasting required, and so on. Almost any plan will work if a person follows it. I have been on general plans as well as restrictive plans over the years, and I lost weight on all of them. I lost 22lbs at least three times on three different plans, and I lost over 70lbs just by watching what I was eating (and it was possibly related to leaving an unhappy relationship, contributing to my improving my mental health at the time). I joined gyms, went to aerobics classes, bought exercise bikes, walked for hours, purchase various weights - you name it, I probably did it. But I could not or did not sustain it. I eventually got to over 280lbs. I was quite shocked. I not only didn’t lose any weight after my heart attack - I had gained five more lbs. It was time to smarten up for my own health and future.

This was my mindset shift.

In the prior three decades, I focused largely on how I looked and felt about myself. “I want to wear shorts again without being embarrassed”, “I want to take my kids swimming and not feel mortified when I see someone I know”, “I want to shop in the Regular size section instead of Plus”, “I want to have more energy to play with the kids or go for hikes”, “I want to feel good when I look in the mirror”, etc. None of those things is a bad reason to want to lose weight, but it had not helped me in the past thirty years and it wasn’t helping me now either. Society has also been in a movement to end body shaming, so there is a lot more positive acceptance going around about Big Beautiful Bodies - which I appreciate greatly after so many years of feeling invisible, or unworthy, or subhuman. But I realized that there is an underlying factor that gets pushed aside when I strive to be accepted “as I am” - the physical effects of excess weight on my body. It doesn’t matter how I spin it, excess weight is very harmful to the body. My lower joints were in absolute agony when I walked. I literally could not run ten steps because my ankles and feet would scream in agony and were not able to flex properly. My knees had started giving out and I had to see a surgeon. My neck, back, and shoulders ached. I could only sleep in very specific positions or it felt as though I was being choked by my own body. My lung capacity was below average. I found out I had Sleep Apnea and stopped breathing multiple times every hour of sleep. I had two blockages in my heart that led to a heart attack. I had chronic swelling of my feet, legs, hands, arms, and face. I had been on medication for blood pressure for over 20 years. I was facing early diabetes. I had kidney issues from time to time that cause great discomfort and had produced a stone years earlier. I found out in January 2022 that my left atrium is “almost severely enlarged“ (a severe enlargement gives a person only a 40% chance of still being alive after ten years). It is irreversible but I can keep it from getting worse by continuing to lower my weight to a healthy range. What more did I want to happen to my body?

Back in January 2021, I had an ultrasound on my neck to check the arterial blood flow to and from my brain, as part of my post-heart attack diagnostics. Cardiology called to tell me that the carotid scan went well but they saw lumps on my thyroid and parathyroid as well as a swollen lymph node between the lumps. I was terrified it was cancer. Fast forward to February 2021 and I found out they did not look malignant, but I had to undergo several more tests to see what was going on. It hit me like a freight train that if I developed a disease like cancer, my body wasn’t fit enough to get me through the treatments and trauma! This was the pivotal point for me, laying in bed that night while eating myself to death - realizing I was going to die if I didn’t do something real for myself. Big beautiful Body be damned - I was not healthy and I needed to make changes right now so that my body was strong and able to fight off whatever else life decided to throw at me.

It has not been a perfect journey for the past fifteen months - there is no such thing as Perfect, in my opinion. It’s called life. I eat bread, cake, cookies, cheese, and chips. I drink beer and pop. I lost 57lbs, then regained 14, then lost that again plus more, and regained 12, then lost that and a few more, and now I sit at over 80lbs lost. I am working toward my grand milestone of 100lbs loss, and then I will be in my final stretch. I hit the huge milestone of being below 200lbs almost two weeks ago. It feels amazing and my health has improved so much already, it’s unreal. I am no longer considered early or pre-diabetes. My cardiologist is very impressed with my progress. I did not have to follow up with the knee surgeon because my knee has not given out or been in dire pain since I lost the first 20lbs (almost zero pain since losing 30lbs). I have had no pain at all from Plantar Fascitis, something I had dealt with for 19 years. And I can run! I manage about 30 seconds at a time but I accept that as a win, not a limitation. I signed up for a 5km charity run that takes place next month. My heart and lungs and other organs have benefitted so much from this weight loss, I probably could not count all of the positive effects. I’m most likely not even aware of some.

I want others to experience this with me. I want them to understand that we can love ourselves and accept the bodies we are in right now, we can feel proud and confident and continue to educate society about accepting each person for who they are - but we can also accept the fact that it may not be healthy for us. We must also learn to accept the reality that carrying an extra 50, 75, 100, 200lbs and more puts strain and stress on our organs. Our hearts pump harder and faster to keep up with a larger body to circulate blood to, our joints start to fail under constant daily pressure that is beyond their capabilities, our extremities can experience loss of circulation and lead to freezing cold feet and hands, our dietary intake can lead to cholesterol buildup in important heart arteries, higher blood pressure can increase our chance of stroke, and a countless number of other medical issues. These are not really things that “might” happen, they will. And they are. I had to be real with myself and face the fact that I could dress well, feel good, be proud of the person I am no matter what my weight was - but that wasn’t going to help my body. My brain could be at peace, but internally it was the opposite.

That was the day my mindset shifted. I needed to save myself. I needed to take this seriously and use my second chance to be well, make healthier choices as part of a new habit for the rest of my life, and refuse to give up on myself this time. My father passed away from a heart attack when he was only 49 years old and I couldn’t wait around to see if I was going to have another one. I couldn’t sit and thumb my nose at statistics any longer. I tried to defy the odds for decades with an unhealthy amount of food, somehow thinking I was invincible I suppose - and then finding out that I was not. So it was crunch time, time to be realistic - and here I am at 83lbs below my highest weight in less than a year and a half of work.

Please follow me as I share my story in future articles. I hope to reach some of you and inspire or help guide you through your own journey to wellness and good health. I don’t want anyone to go through what I did in January 2020. I was the youngest person on the cardiology ward and one of very few females. I didn’t know if my heart would give up again at any second and kill me in front of my three children, and I have spent the last two years battling those same negative thoughts. I take eight medications per day for my heart alone. I want to help others avoid that result or deal with it and move on, as I am learning every day as I move along this journey.

Please share your thoughts from your own journey as well as suggestions for future articles in this series!