Tag Archives: Extreme Weight Loss

Weight Loss Update (or Why I’m Trying Not To Get Frustrated)

Posted on July 23, 2014 | 3 comments

So I’ve completed 3 weeks of my Orangetheory challenge so far. I’ve been working out 3 days a week (and burning about 500 each workout) and I’m trying to eat below my calorie goals (which seems to happen about 6 out of 7 days).

You’d think that I would have lost a good amount of weight so far. Maybe even in the double digits. That’s what I thought I would have done by now.

But instead, I am currently down 6 pounds from where I started at the beginning of the challenge.

I should be happy with those 6 pounds. They say that you should lose 2 pounds a week to have a maintainable weight loss and that’s exactly what I’m doing. And I know that my body composition is changing and I’m gaining muscle so that could also cause my weight loss to stall a little.

But I still keep thinking about how when I did the RFO diet I would lose about 6-10 pounds a week (my first week I lost 14). And I’m aware that that was a medically supervised starvation diet and that the weight loss was not maintainable. But I still miss those days when I lost a pound a day.

It doesn’t help that all over the media there are people losing weight at a rapid fire pace. On Extreme Weight Loss, people lose 100 pounds in 90 days. And yes, almost all of those people have more weight to lose than I do, but it’s still a message that sticks in my head. It’s possible to lose more than I am right now.

So why am I stalled?

Besides the reasons that I’ve already listed, I know that the weather is affecting me as well. It’s very hot right now, and with my house having horrible insulation, it’s very hot even when I go to bed (averaging at 90 degrees when I go to sleep each night). I have a fan next to my bed, so that helps, but I’m still overheated. And when I’m overheated, my body swells up. So my clothes feeling tighter is an illusion. It’s a frustrating illusion, but I know that I haven’t gained weight.

Right now, there’s not much I can do to make myself lose weight faster. I’m thinking of cutting my calories back a little (maybe from 1600 to 1450), but I’m not going to do anything drastic.

I just have to keep pushing along and eventually my body will catch up to all the hard work I’m putting in. I just have to make sure that I don’t give up before that happens.

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Posted in Fitness, Food, Tough Stuff, Weight Loss

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Unreal Reality TV (or I Need To Stop Comparing Myself)

Posted on June 18, 2014 | 3 comments

I’ve talked about my love/hate relationship with weight loss reality shows in the past. They are still a guilty pleasure of mine. I really don’t know why I still enjoy them when they make me feel so bad sometimes.

The only weight loss show on during the summer that I watch is “Extreme Weight Loss” (I think “The Biggest Loser” isn’t coming back until the fall or winter). I was watching it last night when I started to think more about why I watch these shows.

On “The Biggest Loser”, time is condensed, obviously. You are watching one week of footage in a single episode. But each week there is only one episode on. So it’s almost like it’s in real-time.

On “Extreme Weight Loss”, each episode represents an entire year (each episode follows a single person for one year). Every week, it’s a different person’s year.

I think I’m holding myself to the standards that these reality shows are creating. It’s not normal to lose weight like that. And I think that “Extreme Weight Loss” is making me judge my weight journey really badly.

Within a 2 hour episode, you go from seeing someone who is even more overweight than I am to seeing someone who is pretty much at a goal weight. That all happens in 2 hours. But in real life, that took a year. It makes things seem so quick and easy when they aren’t. Even though the contestants on these shows have pretty much no distractions while losing weight so they are able to focus on it 24/7, you still don’t really see the struggles someone has when the scale jumps up suddenly. You only see the weigh-in where the weight is down (this is not technically always true, but the majority of the time it is).

Why should I think that my journey should only take 2 hours as well? And the weight loss goals that they reach are completely unreasonable for me. On last night’s episode, the guy features was challenged to lose 118 pounds in 3 months (he was over 200 pounds overweight). If I lost 118 pounds in 3 months, I’d pretty much be done. That’s not possible (or if it is, it is definitely not healthy).

I should not look to these shows to be examples or even inspirations. They are for entertainment purposes only.

It’s hard to find inspiring people in the real world who have gone from obese to a goal weight. Most of those people either gain the weight back (like I have several times), or they aren’t out and about sharing their story. And some of the ones I have seen are people who had weight loss surgery or have used some other method that I don’t want to do.

So I need to turn myself into my own inspiration. I need to start thinking that losing 2 pounds in a week is awesome instead of horrible (since all the people on reality shows seem to lose double digits every week). I need to start think that it’s ok if my journey takes a year, or two years, or even a decade. As long as I keep going. And I need to start thinking of all those reality shows as mindless entertainment instead of examples.

It’s not easy to change how you think, but I’m really going to try.

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Posted in Fitness, Health, Tough Stuff, Weight Loss

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Reality TV (or How Losing 200 Pounds Can Be Something That Is Booed)

Posted on August 8, 2013 | 1 comment

I’ll admit that reality tv is one of my guilty pleasures. I love “America’s Next Top Model”, “The Amazing Race”, and “Food Network Star”. But I also watch a couple of weight loss related reality tv like “The Biggest Loser” and “Extreme Weight Loss”.

One reason that I enjoy the weight loss reality shows is because most of the time, the people at the beginning are in a worse place than me. I know this is a horrible thought, but it’s nice to see that I’m not the most out of shape person in the world. And it gives me a bit of hope that maybe I can win this battle eventually.

But there are a lot of negative things about these shows. First of all, they are extremely unrealistic. The contestants on them typically aren’t working their jobs (and they get a small stipend from the show for participating). Also, they are working out sometimes 5 or 6 hours a day. If you have a job, you probably don’t have the time to do that. Sometimes contestants on these shows also have either a chef or food delivery service so they don’t have to worry about their food.

Another negative thing about these shows is how the contestants feel about weight loss. On “The Biggest Loser”, when a contestant loses 7 or 8 pounds in a week, they feel like they are a failure. Sometimes the other contestants mention how that person isn’t doing enough. Seriously?!?!?! If I lost 7 pounds in a week I’d be so excited!

But something that really ticked me off happened on this week’s “Extreme Weight Loss”. If you don’t watch the show, it takes place over 1 year and each episode follows one person’s journey. This week is was a girl name Alyssa. She weighed over 400 pounds when everything started. The show gives weight loss goals for every 3 months. She met her first weight loss goal and then started to struggle with the second. And in her struggle, she started to have anorexic and bulimic tendencies. The host of the show did offer her help and had her do a blind weigh in (this is something I have to do at the doctors because I don’t trust their scale).

At the final weigh in for Alyssa, they did it in front of all her friends and family (this is the format for the show). She weighed in and had lost over 200 pounds in one year! But she was a few pounds short of her overall weight loss goal, so when the final number came up, the crowd booed. My mouth dropped open when I watched that. Since when is losing 200 pounds something to boo about? They should be cheering her on no matter what.

But I guess that wouldn’t make good reality tv.

Will I still watch these weight loss reality shows? Yes. They do have good tips in them and they do help motivate me. But I really hope that other people watching can see how what they see on tv isn’t always the most helpful thing when trying to lose weight.

While it may be reality tv, it isn’t reality.

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Posted in Fitness, Food, Health, Tough Stuff, Weight Loss

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