SilverScarab
New member
Hello to everyone.
My name is Millie, I’m 22 years old and have been struggling with my weight for as long as I can remember. I was born prematurely and was really skinny up until about the age of 10, however once my grandmother became in charge of
‘fattening me up’ I started gaining, big time. I remember being 13 years old, 1.58 (5’2”) and weight 73 kg (160 lbs), that’s a BMI of 29.3! Back then it was
easier to jump over me then to move past me
blush5 I was constantly teased and harassed and excluded from any games simply because the kids in my class didn’t like ‘chunky’ girls.
Over the next few years I fell into depression, became an emotional eater, then because of all the teasing I got Anorexia, managed to get out of that horrible ED then turned to bulimia because my boyfriend told me I was fat. It was a rollercoaster of love and hate relationships with food that eventually left me quite broken. I stopped being bulimic, decided to simply exercise the living daylights out of myself and did my best in 2005 to slim down for prom. I weighed around 70 kg back then I think (154 lbs) Guess what, I did lose 4 kg (8.8 lbs) and then immediately after prom I gained another 8 kg (17 lbs). I felt horrible and hated myself for being such a failure.
Then in 2005 after moving to Holland I started working in a Chinese restaurant where I was without kidding, twice the size of all the other girls there. I was manager there and worked six days a week, was very nice to the regular customers and simply worked my ass off. However, no one even paid attention to me or to what I was doing. Customers would even ignore me in favor of my beautiful and ultra-thin colleagues, not wanting me to take their orders, not to mention that the cooks teased me behind my back because of my weight.
I was sick and tired of everything and decided to face the truth and bought a scale and stepped on it. At 20 years, 1.67 m (5’6”) I weighed 78 kg (171 pounds)!!!! I was a European size 42 (US size 12) and started even to rapidly grow out of those clothes as well! I took drastic measurements and decided that after 4 in the afternoon I would only eat melon (that’s the only fruit they served at the restaurant where I worked from 12-23) and went from fried rice to plain steamed rice. Six months later I had lost 10 kg (22 lbs) and was now somewhere between an EU size 38-40 (US 8-10). However, at 68 kg (149 lbs) I was still overweight.
It was only after I started college and moved away from my parents that I could really control what I was eating and also the portion sizes. I decided in to seriously change my life and diet as well. I had been struggling for 11 years with chronic depression and had used food, especially anything with sugar, as a way to get my endorphins and serotonin levels up, and succeeded in only crashing and burning. My psychiatrist told me that the levels of those hormones were unnaturally low and that could also be a biological reason for my depression and the reason why I was addicted to sweets.
I researched as much as I could about the relationship between depression and food and found out that there are people that are ‘sugar sensitive’, meaning that some people are biologically and genetically unable to handle sugar. I read the symptoms: headaches, depression, fatigue, overeating, anger etc. and realized that I had all the symptoms. My mother had also found it weird that after eating anything sweet, I got headaches and felt tired, while she and my sister became really lively and bubbly. Because I would feel so bad, I would always eat more sugar in order to feel better, and so the vicious cycle continued. So, on that fateful day in June 2007, I decided to for once and for all give up sugar.
I cannot stress how difficult this had been in the beginning! I was used to eating sugar waffles for breakfast, candy for lunch and 200 grams of chocolate for dessert: each day! I decided to get all the food that had sugar inside out of the house and donated it to my parents, and when I was finished I only had bread, milk and eggs left. Then I started reading labels, and you cannot believe to which extend sugar circulates in a great variety of foods. Soon I found myself giving up foods like pizza (has sugar in the sauce), peanut butter, dorito’s, most canned vegetables etc. I then switched from white flour to dark and replaced macaroni (which I ate daily) with millet and barely and decided that I would eat as healthy as I could. I went on a 30-day challenge of eating only one piece of sugar-free chocolate a day! And went on it for 42 days before completely getting rid of my chocolate addiction! I felt great!
The next month I decided to go vegan, since I saw a video on PETA about animal cruelty, and to jog each day for 20 minutes in the morning. Well, you can only imagine how great I felt! Ever since I got rid of sugar, I had gotten rid of my depression and didn’t miss sweets at all since I substituted it with honey, dried fruits like dates and prunes and of course fresh fruit. My endorphin and serotonin levels were up and in October 2007 I weighed 62 kg (136 lbs), that’s a 6 kg (13 lbs) loss in 4 months time, and am now a EU size 38 (US 8)! Really, once I started eating healthy the weight just dropped and I weight loss was so easy, I wasn’t even trying!
However, in November everything went down the drain again…. Some bad things happened in my family and due to the stress I turned back to sugar and gave up exercising. This month I had been under so much stress from college and family that I started binging again on sweets and also on meat! (so much for being ethical and upholding my values) The result: Current weight 66.7 kg (147 lbs) and most of it I gained in three weeks time.
I honestly feel like crap now that my once ‘toxin-free’ body is trying it’s best to fight against the insane amounts of sweets (a chocolate bar a day added with 200 grams of candy etc) and also animal products that I’ve fed it. I seriously don’t want this any more and am saying telling myself that it’s ENOUGH and I shouldn’t do more damage to my body. I constantly feel tired, have no energy and cannot concentrate while learning and am depressed again….
My goal is to:
1. Get rid of sugar from my diet FOREVER!
2. Get back to my Vegan lifestyle
3. Reach my goal weight of 58-55 kg (127-120 lbs) most of my weight being from muscle and not fat.
4. And finally slimming down to a EU size 36 (US 6)
Basically, I don’t care that much about the numbers on the scale, as long as I don’t have this ‘Buddha belly’ hanging over my waistband or anything else that hangs due to fat (except what’s supposed to hang hihi). I’m more interested in reaching a weight in which I feel great and look great as well, as opposed to looking great and feeling like crap. So health and feeling good first, esthetics later!
So, now that I’ve written down my goals and on the computer and posted it on my wall next to the bed, I plan on getting back to my previous healthy lifestyle. That means: no animal products, lots of veggies and fruits and of course lots of exercise to raise those endorphins and tone flab.
I plan on exercising daily: 15 min jog in the morning, followed by 15 minutes stretching and yoga then another 30 min in the evening. (I am stretching to become a contortionist and always loved yoga). This means that I’ll be exercising 1h daily (as before) and toning up.
When it comes to food: I have already placed all the junk food that managed to infiltrate my pantry in a bag and gave it to my mother (who was delighted with the treats! She can eat anything and not gain weight) I have replaced it with tons of veggies and fruits, nuts and seeds and of course tofu (delicious!). So basically the only thing I need to do is simply avoid buying junk and start exercising again!
I want to thank you all for reading this large introduction. I will do my best to post my results daily in order to keep me motivated, and also others who whish to not only loose weight and look better, but also feel better, for eventually I think health should come first, looks later!
Thank you for your time and I wish you all success.
My name is Millie, I’m 22 years old and have been struggling with my weight for as long as I can remember. I was born prematurely and was really skinny up until about the age of 10, however once my grandmother became in charge of
‘fattening me up’ I started gaining, big time. I remember being 13 years old, 1.58 (5’2”) and weight 73 kg (160 lbs), that’s a BMI of 29.3! Back then it was
easier to jump over me then to move past me
blush5 I was constantly teased and harassed and excluded from any games simply because the kids in my class didn’t like ‘chunky’ girls. Over the next few years I fell into depression, became an emotional eater, then because of all the teasing I got Anorexia, managed to get out of that horrible ED then turned to bulimia because my boyfriend told me I was fat. It was a rollercoaster of love and hate relationships with food that eventually left me quite broken. I stopped being bulimic, decided to simply exercise the living daylights out of myself and did my best in 2005 to slim down for prom. I weighed around 70 kg back then I think (154 lbs) Guess what, I did lose 4 kg (8.8 lbs) and then immediately after prom I gained another 8 kg (17 lbs). I felt horrible and hated myself for being such a failure.
Then in 2005 after moving to Holland I started working in a Chinese restaurant where I was without kidding, twice the size of all the other girls there. I was manager there and worked six days a week, was very nice to the regular customers and simply worked my ass off. However, no one even paid attention to me or to what I was doing. Customers would even ignore me in favor of my beautiful and ultra-thin colleagues, not wanting me to take their orders, not to mention that the cooks teased me behind my back because of my weight.
I was sick and tired of everything and decided to face the truth and bought a scale and stepped on it. At 20 years, 1.67 m (5’6”) I weighed 78 kg (171 pounds)!!!! I was a European size 42 (US size 12) and started even to rapidly grow out of those clothes as well! I took drastic measurements and decided that after 4 in the afternoon I would only eat melon (that’s the only fruit they served at the restaurant where I worked from 12-23) and went from fried rice to plain steamed rice. Six months later I had lost 10 kg (22 lbs) and was now somewhere between an EU size 38-40 (US 8-10). However, at 68 kg (149 lbs) I was still overweight.
It was only after I started college and moved away from my parents that I could really control what I was eating and also the portion sizes. I decided in to seriously change my life and diet as well. I had been struggling for 11 years with chronic depression and had used food, especially anything with sugar, as a way to get my endorphins and serotonin levels up, and succeeded in only crashing and burning. My psychiatrist told me that the levels of those hormones were unnaturally low and that could also be a biological reason for my depression and the reason why I was addicted to sweets.
I researched as much as I could about the relationship between depression and food and found out that there are people that are ‘sugar sensitive’, meaning that some people are biologically and genetically unable to handle sugar. I read the symptoms: headaches, depression, fatigue, overeating, anger etc. and realized that I had all the symptoms. My mother had also found it weird that after eating anything sweet, I got headaches and felt tired, while she and my sister became really lively and bubbly. Because I would feel so bad, I would always eat more sugar in order to feel better, and so the vicious cycle continued. So, on that fateful day in June 2007, I decided to for once and for all give up sugar.
I cannot stress how difficult this had been in the beginning! I was used to eating sugar waffles for breakfast, candy for lunch and 200 grams of chocolate for dessert: each day! I decided to get all the food that had sugar inside out of the house and donated it to my parents, and when I was finished I only had bread, milk and eggs left. Then I started reading labels, and you cannot believe to which extend sugar circulates in a great variety of foods. Soon I found myself giving up foods like pizza (has sugar in the sauce), peanut butter, dorito’s, most canned vegetables etc. I then switched from white flour to dark and replaced macaroni (which I ate daily) with millet and barely and decided that I would eat as healthy as I could. I went on a 30-day challenge of eating only one piece of sugar-free chocolate a day! And went on it for 42 days before completely getting rid of my chocolate addiction! I felt great!
The next month I decided to go vegan, since I saw a video on PETA about animal cruelty, and to jog each day for 20 minutes in the morning. Well, you can only imagine how great I felt! Ever since I got rid of sugar, I had gotten rid of my depression and didn’t miss sweets at all since I substituted it with honey, dried fruits like dates and prunes and of course fresh fruit. My endorphin and serotonin levels were up and in October 2007 I weighed 62 kg (136 lbs), that’s a 6 kg (13 lbs) loss in 4 months time, and am now a EU size 38 (US 8)! Really, once I started eating healthy the weight just dropped and I weight loss was so easy, I wasn’t even trying!
However, in November everything went down the drain again…. Some bad things happened in my family and due to the stress I turned back to sugar and gave up exercising. This month I had been under so much stress from college and family that I started binging again on sweets and also on meat! (so much for being ethical and upholding my values
) The result: Current weight 66.7 kg (147 lbs) and most of it I gained in three weeks time. I honestly feel like crap now that my once ‘toxin-free’ body is trying it’s best to fight against the insane amounts of sweets (a chocolate bar a day added with 200 grams of candy etc) and also animal products that I’ve fed it. I seriously don’t want this any more and am saying telling myself that it’s ENOUGH and I shouldn’t do more damage to my body. I constantly feel tired, have no energy and cannot concentrate while learning and am depressed again….
My goal is to:
1. Get rid of sugar from my diet FOREVER!
2. Get back to my Vegan lifestyle
3. Reach my goal weight of 58-55 kg (127-120 lbs) most of my weight being from muscle and not fat.
4. And finally slimming down to a EU size 36 (US 6)
Basically, I don’t care that much about the numbers on the scale, as long as I don’t have this ‘Buddha belly’ hanging over my waistband or anything else that hangs due to fat (except what’s supposed to hang hihi). I’m more interested in reaching a weight in which I feel great and look great as well, as opposed to looking great and feeling like crap. So health and feeling good first, esthetics later!
So, now that I’ve written down my goals and on the computer and posted it on my wall next to the bed, I plan on getting back to my previous healthy lifestyle. That means: no animal products, lots of veggies and fruits and of course lots of exercise to raise those endorphins and tone flab.
I plan on exercising daily: 15 min jog in the morning, followed by 15 minutes stretching and yoga then another 30 min in the evening. (I am stretching to become a contortionist and always loved yoga). This means that I’ll be exercising 1h daily (as before) and toning up.
When it comes to food: I have already placed all the junk food that managed to infiltrate my pantry in a bag and gave it to my mother (who was delighted with the treats! She can eat anything and not gain weight) I have replaced it with tons of veggies and fruits, nuts and seeds and of course tofu (delicious!). So basically the only thing I need to do is simply avoid buying junk and start exercising again!
I want to thank you all for reading this large introduction. I will do my best to post my results daily in order to keep me motivated, and also others who whish to not only loose weight and look better, but also feel better, for eventually I think health should come first, looks later!
Thank you for your time and I wish you all success.
. Apart from the two exercises from Billy Blanks and Electra, the crunches and sit-ups are mainly for raising my metabolism and not for reducing the fat on my stomach. Yoga I do mostly for toning up and burning fat and I stretch because it makes the muscles I build look leaner and longer + I want to become a contortionist.
. Because I was so busy learning though, I kept postponing on dinner, constantly saying to myself: just 10 more kanji and I'll go eat.