I started off at 245lbs and I'm now down to 183.
In my whole time dieting, I didn't count my calories once. I kept my macros in their proper ratio and if I was hungry, I ate.
Variety of food was very important to me. I like enjoying food. I'm still passionate about food, so variety really helped me to keep going. That said, having some staples always on hand really helped too.
For the first bit, I would come to /r/keto a lot. After a bit, I got tired of some of the all-or-nothing thinkers giving me shit for not doing things totally by their book. Please understand, this is the vast minority of this sub, but it became massively discouraging to me because it seemed like every time I would post something that helped me, others would give me shit saying I'm doing it wrong, blah blah blah, so I stayed away from here and that helped me out a lot. Others will have the opposite reaction I'm sure.
The sidebar helped me a ton and so did keto recipes.
Very early on, I would meditate when I would get a craving. I would analyze if I actually was hungry, or just addicted to carbs. 9/10 it was just a pang of my addictions and I would realize that I had just ate (for instance) a huge salad and half a chicken, so there's no way I'm actually hungry or malnourished.
I've done keto twice now. The first time, I lost 30 lbs, but I gained it all back within a year. This time, I lost about 40 lbs on keto and then I came off because I wasn't feeling great and at that point, I was actually happy with my progress. I still kept an eye on what I was eating and focused a lot on meditation and was able to drop the last 20 fairly easily. It seemed that after I lost the big chunk of weight, my metabolism was then able to keep up with what I was eating.
Block therapy also really made a change in my body. There's no science behind it (that I know of), so this is all purely anecdotal, but I saw definite changes in my wife as well as myself. It's very meditative and my hypothesis is that the block gets stagnant fat moving (albeit very slowly) so it can be easily metabolized.
Recently, I've had to work on increasing my appetite because I just didn't have any and I was losing weight too fast in my opinion. I don't believe this was due to keto per se, because it could also be due to several things going on in my life and I haven't actually been on keto for a while.
Having a friend do the diet with me was really helpful because we could share recipes. My friends were also very supportive and would never try and get me to eat something that I shouldn't.
One thing that would keep me in the past and make me want to quit was mimicking recipes I would eat before keto. Making keto pancakes or keto cheesecake would always disappoint and just keep me in the mindframe that I'm missing out. I'm a creative person and I love to cook, so what really helped was making new recipes that tasted really good. There is zero reason to be eating gross food on this diet.
For the first time now, I'm genuinely proud of my body. I don't have a gut sticking out and my face has completely changed. My wife took me shopping for a bathing suit this weekend and had me pick up this. I've never even considered wearing something like that, but I was actually really stoked with how good it looked. Before my diet, my wife took a picture of my face to very gently explain to me that I had blotchiness and didn't look healthy. My wife was extremely supportive and balanced while I was on the diet.
I'm very grateful for keto because it's the only diet I would ever stick to. It's however not how I plan on living the rest of my life, but I definitely have my diet under better control and I've learned a ton about my prior dependence on food and especially sugar.
I hope there's something in here that can help some people.
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