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Home » How I Lost 41 Pounds – My Weight loss Journey

How I Lost 41 Pounds – My Weight loss Journey

losing 41 pounds -My weight loss journey

losing 41 pounds -My weight loss journey

 

I have been overweight for many years now. According to some medical experts I have become Obese.

The biggest weight I ever had was about 246 pounds and at 5’9″ was not a good fit for me.

My health was going down and I had to make a change or I will be held hostage in my own body.

What I am going to explain to you is how I got started and finally how I ended up using the Keto diet.

Like I said earlier I balloned to nearly 250 pounds and knew I had to fix it. I really hated to see myself in photos. Don’t let me be in the middle or front and I look like a giant compared to others. My face and head looked like it can take over the whole entire photo!

The strange thing is that you become comfortable with who you are and then you start to neglect whats important in life. I’ve become complacent with who I was.

Last December 2016 I was signing up for life insurance. One of the requirements was too off course get a blood test and speak a with a traveling nurse. I had to get the life insurance updated and getting this medical test was inevitable.

I told my insurance person to try to delay it out so I can drastically improve my health. He gave me two weeks.

Not sure what I can do in two weeks but I was able to loose about 20 pounds since the beginning of the year. During the month of December I was about 235 pounds. Exactly one year before that I got sick and caught walking pneumonia. I was in bed sick for nearly 1 week. During that time I was able to drop my weight to 221! But slowly I was able regain the weight back up.

What I did to bring my weight back down to 235 was simply Calorie in and Calorie Out. CICO

Basically I would eat around 2,000 calories for the work week Monday to Friday and then Cheat meals over the weekend. Eat anything I wanted!

The way I controlled my calories is by doing Sunday Meal Prep. Basically I purchased all my food bulk and make everything on Sunday. I would be cooking Beef Pot Roast in the slow cooker and at the same time baking chicken in the oven. On top of that I would have all four pots cooking on the stove of various vegetables stewing.

The strange thing is that you become comfortable with who you are and then you start to neglect whats important in life. #keto #diet #weightloss Click To Tweet

In the sink would be full of vegetables like Kale, Spinach, Celery, and carrots all being in the process of chopping up.

Sunday Meal Prep. Photo From Strictly Fitness Meal Preps

Start putting things in little sandwich baggies and Tupperware. Some was packed into the freezer for ready made dinner meals. I even got really good at making Mason Jar Salads.

Here were a few problems that I was having for this setup. Yes I did loose the weight but this Sunday Meal Prep was taking too much time (8 hours at times) and I was eating way too much on my cheat days.

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But now back to 2 weeks before I get my medical exam for insurance.

Started thinking about what I can do to loose the weight and get back healthy again.

I started thinking back to what I did while I was sick. Didn’t have an appetite and thought about basically fasting my weight. Had no clue to what my weight should be to get the prefered weight but just went at.

It was difficult and failed miserably but I will say I did loose 4 pounds,, haha

Needless to say 5’9″ at 231 pounds still was considered obese. There was some good results. Most of my blood tests were in the normal range just my weight was too high.

Now fast forward to Christmas 2016 and I was taking a long drive to my in laws (About 3 hours) after I got out of the car my ankles were swollen to the point that I couldn’t bend them anymore!

I was concerned,, was this a diebties? Was this an illness?

Did some research and found out that this was pretty normal for people sitting for a long period of time. But normal for unhealthy obese individuals

TIME FOR A CHANGE

I did what people normally do in the month of January when it comes to my weight loss. Join a Gym.

I ended up picking a gym that I was on my way to work. That was Planet Fitness. It was only $10 a month well more like $15 a month if you add that annual fee they charge.

The first few weeks I was focused at going to the gym every day. It was great but the problem was it didn’t last. Waking up an hour early to head to the gym was not all to fun for me. I rather go to work early then waking up earlier than I normally should do.

Something had to change

FOCUS on DIET

I was listening to a Tim Ferris Podcast about the legendary music producer Rick Rubin. He talked about the amount of weight he loss (Over 200 pounds) just by focusing on diet first. Basically he and Tim mentioned that before you start exercising you need to figure out your diet.

The first process you need to correct is choosing the right kind of diet. Once you become discplined then adding exercises will be much easier. Too many people fail because they try to do both. Technically you don’t need to exercise to loose weight. You could lose weight by sitting in the bed all day. Hence that time few years ago when I got pneumonia.

So I started cutting my calories in half and reduced the cheat days from all weekend to just one day. Increased my vegetable greens and reduced my sugar/carb intake.

 

Focus on your Diet before you start exercising to lose weight #diet Click To Tweet

Mindset training

Fast forward to February 2017, My weight loss is slowly getting traction but still not like what I wanted. Still was hovering around 230 pounds. I stumbled across a Youtube video about a guy named Wim Hof. This guy has broken bunch of Guinness Book of records

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Wim Hoff did things like swim under artic ice cold water, hike up Mount Everset with his shirt off, marathon run across the Sahara desert without drinking any water.

The man is a super human but he explained what he did ANYONE can do. Simply just by doing his breathing method and Ice cold shower exercises.

I did it and I was hooked the very first time. Cold showers was tough but took some time to get use to. The biggest benefit of Cold Shower is that it burns FAT!

After breathing I would meditate for another 5 minutes and sometimes would fall asleep and wake up totally refreshed. I typically do these sessions right before or after noon.

Cold Showers burn FAT #wimhof Click To Tweet

You Gotta establish goals

I started to realize that I need to create goals and speak about them daily in order for me to get on the correct traction. This is what I learned while listening to Earl Nightingales the “Strangest Secret”.

What I did is put my target weight loss every Friday. What I did was put my target weight for the summer. On June I wanted to be under 200 pounds. I counted the number of weeks and subtracted the amount of weight I had to loose.

The number I came up with was to loose 2 pounds a week. My goal was so much clearer now. I just need to loose 2 pounds a week! How simple was that. I couldn’t believe that just simply putting my goal on paper made it so much easy.

My Daily Routine.

Every Morning I would print my daily schedule and write all my tasks of the day. I used this method while listing to a podcast about Deep Work. What I did added what tasks I was going to do at what hour of my time.

At same time I would journal about my weight. Every morning I would weigh myself and journal about it on my daily schedule. Typically it was something like. This morning I weight X and getting close to my target weight loss of X. I will walk an extra mile during my lunch break to burn some extra calories. Etc etc etc.

This helped me become highly productive and more focus.

Another Hit on my health

I had some serious issues with my teeth. I absolutely hated going to the dentist. Also it didn’t help that I didn’t have any dental insurance. My fillings in my back molars had fell out last summer of 2016. I can bare the pain and my gums got little tougher. Only issues was that it was constantly irritating that food would get caught and I would constantly pick and my teeth to remove it.

One day during lunch I felt like again food was caught between my teeth. Not having any toothpicks I broke of a tip of a plastic fork. Used it to Jam it between my tooth and then blood started gushing out my mouth.

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I cracked my tooth right off!. I immediately went to the dentist.

The dentist was like “hey we haven’t seen you in 4 years! How is it going”  Yea they was funny, but they said my records showed that I had high blood pressure and before they worked on me they had to check it.

The hygenist took my blood pressure and it was like 175/130! I explained to them that I was just shocked of the broken tooth but they refused to work on me without a note from my doctor that it would be ok.

The doctor still looked my teeth and said it does need to pulled because of the decay but can wait til I get my blood pressure back down.

Drastic Change was needed

I stumbled across a diet I never heard off and it was called the Keto Diet. Basically you have to eat FAT. It was very similar to Atkins diet which I heard of but it was all about the protein. Keto was all about FAT and low Carbs and sugar.

This is what I gotta try out.

Good news is that the first week on the diet was like WHOOOSH. Lost a lot weight but it was going up an down. The keto diet in the beginning is basically losing lots of water weight.

I am not going to lie that the first three weeks was very tough. Eliminating carbs and sugar was very hard to transition. I was like a crack head trying to go cold turkey. I felt like Pookie in the movie New Jack City

What I had to do is replenish my body with the right electrolytes. Even made my own recipe of Lite Salt, Magnesium, Himalayan pink salt, and lemon juice.

I kept pushing and now finally became Fat adapted. Basically I had reduced the use of insulin in my body and use my stored FAT as energy rather than carbs and sugar.

It’s not the end but still the beginning

I am still learning new methods to tweek my daily ritual. Started adding Bullet Journal and Intermittent fasting to my regime. Who knows what else I will be adding but that is my journey.

So far as May 7th, 2017 I can say that My mind is so much clearer and my body is burning fat everyday. This morning I weighed myself and got 205 pounds. That is almost 41 pounds in over 1 year.

Lets Review my Method AKA TWOOL9 STACKING Method

  1. Focus on Diet first (Not heavy exercise)
  2. Mindset Training (Wim Hof method and Meditation)
  3. Establish Goals and Keep track by using Bullet Journaling
  4. Daily Cold Showers
  5. Add Exercises.

Here is my Open Source Weight Tracker for Public Viewing
https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1_XkvFXVAazjF4n2xPr4RdJ20sEf-6fKi3Z85a1wzV3U/edit?usp=sharing

https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/1HpV6E4bnFghRp3zFUpDu2IbDV12aJcb2Cp009BtJXHo/edit?usp=sharing

Make sure you subscribe to email and keep in touch with my journey.

Here is a video of how i got started.

 


Also published on Medium.

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