ObesityVolunteer Bloggers
Today’s blog post comes from Deji Ajose-Adeogun. Deji shares his 20-year battle with weight loss and explains how a recent change in mindset gave him the motivation and discipline to succeed in his quest to lose weight.
I have been dealing with being overweight since I left college. I never thought about what I was eating when I was younger because I was extremely active, so my eating was never an issue. Hours playing sports and lots of activity kept my weight in check. Well, as college finished and I proceeded out into the real world and got a job, my physical activity levels decreased drastically, but my way of eating did not change. So, I was eating more calories than I was burning. The math meant that I was going to gain weight. The pounds kept creeping up until last year when I topped out somewhere between 285-295 pounds. My clothes were not fitting me. Can you imagine that I left for college at 180 pounds, then I dropped to 165 in my first year of college. This was partly due to all the walking because that was the only mode of transportation and campus food was ok. Over the years, I have tried to lose weight. It has been like a yoyo, up one minute, down the next. This has been a battle for the last 20 years and it needs to end.
This is how the cycle has been. I joined the gym about 18 years ago, which I have been to on and off. One minute I am heavy with the gym, another minute I am not. In my 20’s it was easy to drop the weight, and it has also been a battle of the wits. When you lose that weight you start to feel good and like you can take on the world. Then you feel you can control it, and start back to old eating habits because I am lighter, next thing you know you are back up in weight again. Mind you, I thought I had it all under control. This is how the yoyo diet works. Your eating habits are only temporary until the weight is off. This is what it has been like for about 20 years. Then one day you say, “I give up” you start putting on weight, you get discouraged, you drown yourself in more food. It becomes self-defeating. I have been on cholesterol medication and blood pressure medicine. My doctor said I really need to do something about this so I am not on this medication for the rest of my life. I am not sure when it struck me. Was it my mom’s health situation and her passing in 2019? It might have been, but I knew that I had to deal with this immediately. I had to show my children, by example, what it means to eat well. I also have to be there for my kids, I know we are not promised tomorrow, but it did not mean getting there in a race car. It was embarrassing that I could not even get on a ride at an amusement park with my children about a year or two prior. I had to wait outside. I said to myself, the next time we came back, I am going on that ride with my children.
I had to figure something out that works for me and will not be a fad diet. I started to hear about intermittent fasting. I started to do more research to see if it will work for me. It involved fasting for 16 hours a day and eating in an 8-hour window. So, I would go from 8 pm to 12 pm the next day. This is a way of eating for many cultures. Some only eat one meal a day. The more I started to read about this way of eating, the more it made sense to me – the 16 hours give your organs a chance to rest and can help control blood sugar (as long as you are cutting back on sugars). I started eating more salads realising that what I was doing before had my organs constantly working.
I started in August 2019. The first month was a struggle, it was hard getting used to the new way of eating. I lowered my sugar intake drastically and ate more greens. I started to watch more videos about our diet and learnt that most people lack vitamin D, Vitamin K, potassium, good fats, good cholesterol, certain B vitamins, etc. I even started to learn that not all meats/proteins are good for you, partly because of all the chemicals and hormones in them. I started to try and eat as many organic items as possible. If not organic, anything that was less processed, such as farm-raised eggs, grass-fed cows, almond milk, etc. I started to eat out less and cook more.
There is so much more to losing weight than just eating less. It is also about eating correctly and getting the correct nutrients in your diet to help with your overall health. When I started to focus on health and not just weight loss that was the trick. Doing it for the right reason, my health, made me more disciplined and the pounds started to come off. I was not stressing if I did not lose the pounds, I was focused on just being healthier. Also measuring myself helped because you can gain muscle mass, which can mean your weight can remain the same, but your measurements can decrease.
At the end of the day for parents, it is key you teach your kids from a young age to eat properly, and exercise. You may want to exercise with them because that is where the habits will grow. It has taken me a lifetime to figure this out.
We would like to say a big thank you to Deji for sharing is weight loss story with us. We hope that through his experience, you can get a little bit of inspiration to help you achieve your weight loss goals. Have a question for Deji? Want to give him some encouragement? Then please do leave these in the comments section below.
