1/4 Weightloss Wednesday: A Look Back at 2016!
It’s time for a Weightloss Wednesday! Today’s WLW is extra special as it is the first one of the new year which means we can use it to look back on 2016 and see how we’ve done. First, the raw numbers. I am at 229 lbs this morning which means I have lost 171 lbs since I was at my biggest a few years ago.
However, let’s not talk about that. Let’s talk about just what I did in 2016. January 1, 2016 I was sitting right at 300 lbs and you can see what I looked like in that first Weightloss Wednesday of 2016 here. That means in one year I managed to lose over 70 lbs. Even as I type that number and see it here on the screen I find it difficult to fathom how much weight that is. As an experiment, I threw 70 lbs on a barbell and tried curling it. 70 lbs is heavy! Good grief, I had that just sitting on my bones for decades!
To be honest, I’m struggling not to tear up right now as I watch that first WLW of 2016 linked above. I talked a good game but I can see in my eyes how scared I was that I wasn’t going to be able to follow through, that I was going to hit 2017 just as big as I was at the start of 2016. I knew that was a crossroads for me and if for some reason I failed, it was only a matter of time before a heart attack took me out and left Dian a widow. I knew what the stakes were and I was terrified I would fail just like I had failed every other time I had tried to lose weight.
But that’s not what happened. I stuck with it. No sugars, no grains which quickly morphed into a ketogenic diet (which just means I started eating a lot more fat) and here we are. Another year older and significantly smaller. It’s been a good year. If you are reading this and you are where I was at te beginning of 2016, let me tell you that there is hope. The weight can come off, you can reverse your Type II Diabetes, end your Metabolic Syndrome, and get off all those medications you have to take every day. In the financial world, they talk about people having a “lottery mentality” where instead of taking small, incremental steps every month to save and invest money for retirement, they wait to strike it rich in an instant. I think that type of magical thinking exists for people’s health as well where they just assume that there will be a pill or a surgery that will fix all their health issues. There is another way! Just like preparing for your financial future requires a series of small steps that add up to big wins, so losing weight and repairing your health is done little by little, or actually meal by meal. Every time you put food in your mouth you are making a choice to get healthier or sicker, fatter or leaner. You but enough good decisions in a row and one morning you wake up, a year has gone by and you are 70 lbs lighter. Let me tell you, it’s a good feeling.
Now let’s talk about 2017. We just started the first 28 Day Challenge of 2017 so we will completing that first before moving on to anything else. Starting February, we will start posting new ketogenic recipes as I continue to create new foods for me and my family to eat. I also want to start talking more about the crazy amount of bad science out there that tends to confuse people when it comes to diet and try to clear up some of those misconceptions. It’s very clear that you guys love my “What’s Sugar Free at Restaurants” series so we will be continuing that in 2017. (In case you were wondering, my “What’s Sugar Free at Starbucks” post was far and away my highest trafficked post of 2016,) I’ve also got a few more ideas for what I want to have on this site moving forward that we will discuss after we get through the challenge.
But besides all that, my #1 most important goal for 2017 will be to get under 200 lbs. I’ve never seen my weight on the scale start with a 1 in my adult life so the prospect of getting to that is exciting. Beyond that, I’d like to drop another 20 lbs or so and get down to about 180 by the end of the year. I think that’s doable but we will see.
How are you doing? What are your goals? Let me know in the comments below!
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