I’ve been fat pretty much my whole adult life.
I now feel confident I have adopted a true lifestyle change and that what I am doing on a daily basis is a long-term change and not only the most recent fad we are all following in the hopes of losing weight in a fast and easy manner.
For me, it all started almost two years ago, when my second baby was born. After giving birth to him, in March 2019, I weighed 113 kilograms. I had been taking care of myself during the pregnancy, because I wanted the baby to be OK, and as it had happened during my first pregnancy, I had lost a couple of kilos during the pregnancy and that got me thinking – while these beautiful creatures and I had shared the same space, I was taking care of myself, but I knew I wouldn’t be pregnant again, so what excuse could I use in the future to take care of myself? In fact, why did I need any excuse at all?
So, taking care of what I was eating, breast feeding and with a bit of wishful thinking I managed to lose the first ten kilos within four months after the baby was born and I was super excited thinking things would stay like that and I needed to do nothing more… ha ha ha. Poor naïve me.
Something I have learned along this process is that the human body tends to get adapted very quickly to anything you throw at it. That’s something pretty cool when you have undergone a traumatic event and you need your body to bounce back, but it’s not so cool when you are trying to lose weight, because that forces you to constantly adapt your approach and find new ways of challenging your system. So once I had spent a couple of months without seeing any weight loss I started researching my options to see what I could do. I got a
n appointment with a sports nutritionist and signed to an online psychology program to help with the weight loss. I only went to that one appointment with the nutritionist because the option she provided – the keto diet – made a whole lot of sense to me. By then, it was already September 2019 and I weighed 103.3 kilograms.
Luckily for me, it worked out pretty well, because during the following six months I lost 8 more kilos and by January 25, 2020 I weighed 95.3 kilograms. At that point I decid
ed I would give my diet a break – I was following the keto diet and although I found the beauty in it and lots of acceptable alternatives to carbohydrates, I started thinking of my gastroenterologist’s advice, about giving my gut a break every now and then in order to avoid a possible problem with fat absorption, and it was all good until the pandemic fully kicked in a couple of months later, because I found a way to be distracted and entertained at home, including the sourdough bread experiment you may have already read in this same blog, and some other cool – but less benefic in terms of nutritional value – endeavors, such as baking apple pies, typical Mexican bread like 
conchas, or having fun making colorful pancakes with my daughter.
And there I was, quickly gaining that weight I had struggled for so many 
months to get rid of.
And then my digestive system started doing strange things and back I went to the gastroenterologist who told me there was a very good chance I could have IBS and recommended to adjust my diet, and see if things improved because of that.
So there I was in August 2020, back to 99 kilograms, constantly bloated and uncomfortable but – to my very deep surprise – I didn’t feel as if I had dropped the ball or done anything terribly wrong. I somehow felt it had all been part of my process, and there’s where I discovered the psychology program was indeed paying off. I was (am) no longer living by this absolute philosophy, in which everything is black or white – either you take care of your regime, your exercise routine, your overall health every single second of the day, or you don’t take care of anything at all at any point.
Life is not something most of us live in absolute terms. Some days you will have a fantastic day where all the stars are aligned and everything works out perfectly for you – what you eat, the exercise you did that day, your state of mind – but if there are some days that are not as ideal as you would like them to be, there’s no problem, because you can always try again tomorrow. Not next Monday; not in two weeks after the holidays are over; not next year on January 1st… tomorrow, because this is not a diet, it is a lifestyle, and you must do this every day of your life for the rest of your life because that’s what works best for you. And it all clicked for me and I felt so relieved to know for sure I was not just doing it expecting to lose just five more kilos and then break lose and start eating like a maniac again, but truly knowing this is what makes me happy because I’m feeling much better – physically and mentally – living like this.
And then again, I was introduced into something that was a new nutritional concept to me, macro counting, and I simply loved the concept, the flexibility and what it is doing for me. Since August 2020 – at 99 kilos – I have been counting macros. These first weeks of December I am just under 90 kilos and have learned many cool things 
that make me think in terms of nutritional economy and help me make smart decisions that adapt well to my individual needs, so I don’t feel bored or stuck doing this.
It is quite an advanced concept I am not going to describe here, not because I don’t like to talk about it – oh gosh, no, people who are close to me and who have spent time with me know for sure I love to talk about this thing – but because it involves a lot of specific mathematical estimations, which I would love to describe if any of my readers is truly interested and wants me to get into more details, but I won’t do it unless somebody tells me about it, otherwise I will just be the person who speaks like a sect leader trying to convince others to join her cult.
I like watching these shows like “My 600lb life” or “Extreme Makeover Weight Loss Edition” because usually by the ten-minute mark you can already tell if the person in the show will make it or not. There is something about the attitude of people that can tell you if something has clicked within a person or if they are just pretending for the cameras and they will still weigh 600 pounds by the end of the show. I’m glad in the ongoing show of life my numbers are improving and I can’t wait to see where they take me.
