To embark on the journey towards your goals and dreams requires bravery. To remain on that path requires courage and the bridge that merges the two is commitment.
I am a 22-year-old and want to put light on my weight loss journey. At 17, I was around a big figure of 160 kilos. The matter didn’t remain to just being an overweight child, rather along with it I was suffering from a lot of health issues. When you are 10 or 11, you do not know the word “Body shaming'', but then you are exposed to it, firstly from your relatives, from your peer group and then from the rest of the world. It starts with relatives telling your parents about your body, then in the classroom where you don’t have any partner to sit with in the class and somehow, all these little instances pile up to make such a big impact on a child’s head giving the child a traumatic exposure, insecurity and feeling of not being good enough. I wish we could be more sensitive towards one another.
If all of it were not enough, my health problems started getting more complex being a woman. I started visiting gynecologists because I had an irregular menstrual cycle. Sometimes life forces you to make a decision that would change your life and for that, you have to take the hard route. Once you transition from school to college, then you feel like wearing beautiful clothes, being a part of college fests, societies, traveling with friends, and socializing.
When I saw all this in my first year, I realized that I really want to reshape my life, and I came home and told my dad that I really want to see a dietician and lose weight. It's not that I had not tried earlier, but it's just that there is a time when it is meant to happen.
I was an introvert but I decided to make a change in my way of living and through this article, I want to convey that when you have made a decision, no mountain is big enough for you to not climb it. It was in my first year of college that I started thinking about losing weight and changing the narrative of my life. I always wanted to be on the center of stage, be an extrovert because that’s how I truly was. But due to my insecurities, I couldn’t do as much.
I altered everything for me, the unhealthy eating, lethargic schedule. The initial months were very difficult, when I felt like cheating, wanting to eat everything but then from the fourth month onwards, I saw some progress and wanted to see how far I really can take it. I got very serious and started following everything and started losing so much weight. Initially I had not joined gym, I used to go to the park in the afternoon so that no one would see me. I just controlled my mouth and 40-45
minutes of walking in the sun. I completed one year like that and lost 50kgs, then the next 6-8 months were slow but I still continued and started keeping short goals for myself and kept accomplishing them, I was consistent and determined. I used to come from my college and work on my goals and it took me one and a half years to lose half of my body weight. And now I’m in a very healthy position and there have been a lot of changes in my body due to the weight loss.
The sad part is even when I started working on myself, people still had questions which were different now. They would always comment saying you must have taken pills and medications. Nobody can appreciate hard work even if they see it but what I learnt is you can never make everyone happy, they will always have something to say so it’s better you do it for yourself.
I started my journey and my parents became my biggest support and have been with me throughout the way, planning meals and even following them with me. My father did the 11 months of diet with me so that I didn’t feel lonely or get unmotivated. These things just kept me going and now that I’m at a healthy weight mark, I feel that I don’t want to strictly stop myself from eating what I craved, rather I would want to follow a balanced diet, workout well and never cross an
unhealthy mark ever again in my life. This journey has been so wholesome that it was not only about fitness and diet that I learnt but mostly life. With a feeling of gratitude in my heart, I have learnt to be more compassionate and empathetic towards myself and everyone around.