A Slimmer, Leaner, Healthier Jorj95

So after seeing pictures of myself when Cooper was born along with other motivators such as constantly feeling fatigued and just simply wanting to be healthy as my son grows up, I decided to finally do something about my eating habits.  I weighed myself on Feb 15 for the first time in probably 6 months at least, thinking I would be around 240 or a little more, like the last time I weighed myself, but instead I weighed in at 258.6 pounds (I actually took a picture of the scale but I can't seem to find it now).

After a few minutes of research on the internet, I found the secret of weight loss:

It all seemed so simple.  And me being the type of person who either does something full-scale or not at all, that very day I decided I was going to start eating healthier and probably more importantly, just quit eating huge portions.

The first 5 days or so were really tough, I was probably averaging around 1000-1200 calories a day if I had to guess (I didn't really keep track but I made a point to look at the packaging sometimes).  For comparison I was probably averaging something like 2500-3000 calories a day before that if I had to guess, and probably even more than that on some days when we would go out to eat.  I know 1000 is probably a little lower than what is considered "healthy", but the way I'm wired, there's just no chance I can make gradual changes.  I really needed to kick start it as quickly and as dramatically as possible.  

I wasn't really eating that much healthier at that point but I was cutting my portions in half, and sometimes less than half, and also quit snacking on crap food like Cheez-its late at night.  I was pretty miserable and hungry for a few days and forced myself to go to sleep with a growling stomach a few nights but I got over it pretty quickly.  Gradually I started adding healthier foods to my diet, and also upped my caloric intake a bit and I'm probably averaging something like 1200-1500 a day now, which is definitely more sustainable for the long term.

So anyway after about 7 weeks of making healthier choices, I weighed myself today:

I have to say it's pretty exciting to lose 21 pounds in 7 weeks.  The really crazy thing is that except for those first few days it really hasn't been that hard at all, and in fact I find a lot of foods that I loved before to just be disgusting now.  Also with the baby around, we're just naturally not going out to eat as much, and I'm also just busier during the day so I don't have as much time to think about being hungry.  I'm just super motivated to do this and not as a temporary thing, but as a permanent change to my lifestyle.

I wasn't even going to post this to the blog at first and have hesitated to do so for a few weeks now, because frankly it's somewhat embarrassing that I am as big as I am, but I know if hundreds of people were aware that I'm doing this, that there will be pretty much zero chance that I will fail at this.  Whenever that delicious cookie is staring me in the face, I'll think of my blog readers.  Okay, maybe I'll have one cookie, but even that would be a huge improvement over what I used to do.

My original goal when I started was to get down to 200 pounds by the end of the year, and maybe something like 170 by the end of next year, but that almost seems too easy now.  I really feel like I could get to 190 or even lower by the end of the year without much more effort than I'm already expending on this.  I know the weight gets harder to take off as you lose more so I'm not getting my hopes up too high, and also I don't want to set unattainable goals and set myself up for failure.  But 200 seems more than reasonable, that's only about a pound a week for the rest of the year.  As long as I'm eating reasonable portions every day I can't imagine this will be hard at all to accomplish.

Just for fun here is a recent pic of our family:

Poor Cooper looks like he's trying to take a crap, but he's still pretty cute in my biased opinion.