I've always been a self concious girl. Growing up, I had parents who wanted the absolute best for me. My mom, when she was growing up, was overweight, and as soon as she turn 18, she knew she had to do something. The way she lost weight was such a horrible one, all she ate was crackers and water, which caused her period to stop.
But once she reached a good weight for her, she ate normally and she has maintained that weight ever since. She is 5'0" tall, and very much like a typical Chinese woman, petite. My dad is like any typical grown man when they have too many beers. Growing up, he had a fast metabolism and played sports. When my dad reached about 50 years old, he started to pack on the pounds. Living in the Chinese culture, there is such a pressure to stay thin, and my dad had many bad attempts at losing weight but never fully keeping the weight off.
My parents didn't want my weigh to escalate, like any good parents would, they wanted me to eat healthily and also participate in a lot of exercise. I remember always being self concious and unhappy with my body. I'm only five feet and one inch tall, and I have very muscular legs. I have a love-hate relationship with my legs, on one hand they were strong and allowed me to run fast to play soccer, on the other hand... they were always big. The only time I ever liked my legs was when I was playing soccer. As you can tell, I didn't have a very good self image of myself. Never have, never will. I'm my harshest critic.
Anyway, during my senior year, I reached the highest weight I've ever been, 138 pounds (63.5 kg). In my junior year, I was about 124 pounds (56 kg). I have many reasons why I gained so much weight, all of them contributed, and I'm really kicking myself for not being smart enough to realize them. Firstly, I was employed at my local Best Buy for two months. I resigned because my grades were suffering, and my grades are the most important thing to me, so having a job wasn't even an option because of that. Secondly, I was taking the birth control shot called Depo-Provera, which is
notorious for making women gain weight. One dose is 3 month's worth of birth control, I took 2 doses and then I quit. Is Depo-Provera worth it? NO, but that'll be another blog. Thirdly and fourthly, I was simply not eating as healthily as I used to, and not getting enough exercise!
On the top is before I even started my senior year. On the bottom was during the fall.
Now, on the picture to the top, I was probably around 126 lbs, and on the bottom I was about 136 lbs. You can definitely see the difference between the pictures, mostly in my face. I have a heart shaped face, which gives me this great pointy chin, but in the picture to the bottom, you can only see the doubles. Gaining that much weight depressed me. I literally would not take any pictures of myself. I still don't. Already having bad self esteem about yourself and then having something like this happened? Ridiculous, I cried every night.
After reality hit my square in the forehead, my dad and I decided that we
needed to do something. He had also gained a lot of weight, and in January we decided to try a new diet and got our gym memberships. If you think you're going to lose weight and still maintain an awful diet, you're wrong. You can't out-exercise a bad diet. I'll briefly go over my diet, it's called the
"Four Hour Body" diet and Tim Feriss came up with this idea and published a book about it. Basically, I can't have any carbs or sugar 6 out of 7 days of the week. So, no pasta, no rice, no fruit, no bread, and no oatmeal. As an asian, when I first heard this, I rolled my eyes while thinking "Pfft, we'll see how long THAT lasts." I'm still doing this diet today. The main idea is that sugar, the basic component of ANYTHING delicious, is the match that lights a full on craving for more sugary things. Makes sense right? As soon as you burn off the bagel that you had for breakfast (it'll do that really quick), you'll want something else, probably a slice of toast, and so on and so on. On that 7th day, you can eat anything you want to eat and as MUCH as you want. The idea of that is to encourage you waiting until cheat day to have your bagel, AND to kickstart your metabolism for the next week. Most diets don't work because after the first few weeks, they stop working because your metabolism (what burns that food) is so low. To keep your metabolism going, you need to eat more food. Metabolism is what burns off the food. If you want to lose weight, you want a fast metabolism.
With our working out, we also paired what we ate with a high protein diet. We had a lot of fish, a lot of vegetables, a lot of chicken, and we also had a whey supplement. We wanted to gain muscle because muscle burns more calories when rested, the idea is that the more muscle you have. No muscular person is ever fat.
She is a great example. I'm sure that most women want abs like hers, right? Truth is, her body fat percentage is probably around 13-14%. The models you usually see that are "fit" are about 16-17%. For women, an average body fat % is around 20-25%. I can tell you that she worked her glutes off to gain those muscles. One day, I'll aim to achieve her body, but right now it's not going to happen.
My dad and I were going to the gym 5 times a week for 5 months. When May came around, my dad had to leave to Malaysia for 2 weeks and cancelled both our memberships. I tried to do Insanity for a little while, but I just gave up.
This whole time I've been in Malaysia, I just could not break the 60kg mark. No matter how little portion size I ate, I would never be less than 60kg. But, today, I was 59 kg (130 lbs)! And let me tell you, it feels great! This week I took on a new approach to losing weight, I went to the gym 5 times this week and did both cardio and weights. I'm going to do this from now on. The past 5 weeks I've been in Malaysia, I've been lazy, I was only watching what I ate instead of going to the gym. I feel very crappy about that. After losing 1 kg this week, I'm determined to do this again! I used to do it in the states, and now I'm going to do it again! To lose weight, you need to be inspired and you need to be motivated! Now that I've found my motivation again, I'm going to go twice as hard!
My next blog will be about how to plan a workout.
If you have ANY questions, please don't hesitate to comment down below!
Thanks for reading!
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