Please help, 280 lbs and still gaining

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Yazmin Mckean

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sorry this is long but I really need help loosing weight.

I grew up in an abusive home, believing my whole life I was severely obese. My mom was an extremely overprotective, health nut and until my junior year of high school, I was actually at a very good weight for the activities I was doing. (roughly 170lbs) I would eat 3 perfectly healthy meals a day, most of the time when they say to limit your portions, my mom took it the wrong way and I was essentially getting 3 snacks a day. My younger brother and I would do whatever we could to get different food. Even though we were already getting very nutritious meals, we were always hungry. We would have a secret stash in our attic of crackers, chips, and anything that would last a long time and be a level to be ok in the summer heat. When I started driving my junior year, we had more access to sweets and other food before and after school. That’s when I started gaining weight. By the time I graduated high school and turned 18 two months later, I moved out of my abusive home to live with my dad, at the time I was roughly 220 lbs. I continued to live the same life style, and age whenever food was available even though there was so need to stock up on food. It’s been a year and a half since I left my mom and I know I’m over 280lbs, I’m too scared to weigh myself. I don’t know what I have to do to loose weight. I’ve done two diets since I left my mom. I was barely able to last two months on the diet and ended up gaining 10 pounds and feeling miserable the entire time. I never had a scale for the second diet I did less than a month ago so I’ll never know if it worked.
I’m terrified of excerise, my mom would force me and my brother to go to the gym everyday after school and completely overdo it. My summers were spent crying as she would scream for me to run faster on a 2 mike trail for 16 miles, and no I’m not exaggerating. She would judge me as I started weightlifting and would scream at me in front of everyone there if I couldn’t do 10 sets of 100 reps and would force me to do more.
I am in counseling, and had to put off college so I can learn the things I was suppose to learn as a kid. I’m 19 and didn’t really know until 2 weeks ago about how grocery stores are really like and how they work.

How am I suppose to loose weight when I’m terrified of the gym and working out, have no idea about choice with food, and have such a negative outlook on working out in general?
 
Hello Yazmin, I have managed to lose 10 kilos in 2 months thanks to a plan that I bought. I made the investment with a little fear but the result was very satisfactory. I am very happy, I had to change all my clothes.
 
I am confident any plan will work given time if you add this important element to it.

We often eat for pleasure. Binge eating is an example of a person just losing themselves in the joy of eating. We must include personal pleasure and the "Feel-Good" hormone that is created. Eating creates these hormones but you need other sources.

The way to lose weight is to replace the joy of eating excessively with other pleasures. I lost over 70 pounds with no exercise by not letting food be the only pleasure. When we eat it produces feel-good hormones in our brain which causes other good feelings like feeling safe and secure. Some exercise addicts are hooked on these same feel-good hormones because exercise creates them too. But you can create them to uniquely fit your predispositions.

Basically, top off your meal plan's allotted portion with any activity that brings you pleasure. Experiment and explore. One of my favorite activities is talking to a distant friend on the phone. They share their love and warmth with encouraging understanding words and I feel good causing the feel-good hormones that can be stimulated with simple appreciation. I cant do this every day so another thing I enjoy is "Working" and I work all my waking hours because it brings me joy in the results and the pleasure of the activity itself. If you play any instrument if even for your own entertainment that is a healthy pleasure to have after your allotted meal. A conversation with some laughter will also create these pleasure hormones causing you to feel satisfied and also safe and secure.

Study "Pleasure and Brain Chemistry" on the net and get more details and ideas what you can experiment with doing. You should have a variety of resources in your "Pleasure Stimulating" activities and be experimenting with more.

Making pleasure a part of any program will help it to work and maintain results. When we admit we eat for pleasure of eating we are well on our way of controlling it.

James Turner
 
Hi James, I’ve been having difficulties committing to losing weight, but I’ve decided to take action NOW. I’m tired of watching life pass me by. I watched something today that really hit home hopefully this helps you guys to stay motivated too :)

Cheers
Henry
 
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Hi,

I ride my Stationary Bike for 30 minutes twice a week on Monday and Thursday for the first three weeks of the month.

I have been doing that for around 10 years now and that has always kept me in shape.

Goodluck,
Mathiew Burkett
 
I like James Turner's idea, but here are some of mine as well.

Just to put you in perspective I am only 2years older than you (21), so I understand the age your at, and I still go to school as well (but I still live with a parent, so I have some luxury with not having to buy food myself, among other things)

Exercise - You do not have to go to a gym to exercise, there are plenty of exercises that can do if you have a little bit of space to stretch and jump. I recommend looking at FitnessBlender on YouTube, the duo do a great job in showing workouts you can do at home (or any private space) with none or limited equipment at a variety of difficulties. I have exercised using their videos before (when I went on my every-day for a month exercise streak).

I also recommend if you cannot get yourself to workout, to try to do something with the workout. This is my 3rd week of getting into the groove of exercising again after my hiatus since the summer. As I get bored easily, I tend to watch videos/shows while I exercise. I usually break down my exercise with 15-20min cardio/stretch and then a 15-20min muscle-based exercises on a exercise machine I have; thus for each exercise I would find a video/show that matches the length of how long I wish to exercise. This could also help with subsiding the stigma/anxiety of exercising because your attention will be split between the video/show and the exercise itself. (You could attempt to listen to music as well, but I personally find when watching videos the time feels like it goes by faster then when listening to music)

If you are going to exercise outside, because of the trauma, I recommend you just walk, but in longer distances to burn more. This way you are still exercising, but you don't feel the stress of the exercising-nature of the past.

Diet - To best way to lose weight with diet is to change you eating habit PERMENTENTLY (i.e., lifestyle change), this is so you don't bounce back because you went off your "diet" in the future. If you are in the store, instead of thinking what you should buy, think what you should not. If you have certain food around you, you may be tempted to eat, and that could ruin your eating habits, especially when you first start out (trust me, once I fixed my eating habits, certain foods were just completely off-putting to me).

Things that I completely cut out were chips, pop, pre-pared food (the ones in boxes), pizza, chocolate bars (though I still eat dark-chocolate almonds). Things you should look for before buy food that isn't fresh is the sodium content (i.e., salt) and fat percentage, the higher these are, the worse they are for you. I find that if you want to eat something sugary, the best is fruit or yogurt icecream (stick with plain flavours like vanilla or chocolate).

The MOST important when taking into account diet is portion sizes. Cut down your portions and you are almost guaranteed to lose weight. As well, once you get into the habit of eating smaller portion sizes, it trains your body to accept less food so you can become fuller with less food than you used to. DO NOT starve yourself, many times if you choose healthier choices you can eat more of it than unhealthier food and still loss more weight.

You should avoid fast food, especially things like burgers (its much healthier to make your own burgers). Coffee shops are ok, but you should limit your sugar/cream content (milk is much healthier than cream anyways - oh and if you drink more than 2%milk, you should drop down to at least 2%, best would be 1% (and I don't recommend skim because it taste like water, yuck).

I understand that healthier food may be a bit more pricy, but if you stick to the basics and use fresh food (like if you buy meat, buy if fresh, not from a pre-made box, as you can prepare much more healthier than whatever they put in the prepared one), you can cut down some of the costs (and organic/non-organic is honestly not going to make a difference, so choose the cheaper opinion if you can.

About me, so if your thinking I cannot do this, use me as a reference. I may not have weighed 280lbs, but I was 220lbs at my supposed highest (could have been more honestly, my doc weighed me because he said I looked like I lost weight - which is possible because I had a depressive month before going to the doc, and would barely come out of my room and wasn't hungry - thus after this weigh-in I started my weight loss, but on purpose). SO a year later I had successfully stabilized at around 160lbs, which according to my height, 5"9, is in the normal weight range. You being a male might make things different in terms of weight, especially based on your height (For example you can be 6ft, and 180lbs and look ok health wise, even at 200 you'd be ok). I recommend you look at BMI just to see a general look for how much you should weigh (the range) based on your height/gender, however, your weight is unimportant if you starting eating healthier and working out at LEAST once a week (try for 2, every second day is the best).

I hope this advice helped. Any other questions, feel free to ask.
 
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