How I Lost 40 Pounds in 4 Months

so I always used to be a pretty skinny kid like I was known for being skinny I'd always be teased for how small and skinny and underweight I was and that just makes everything that happened afterwards all the more surprising and and you know and you can still see this a few years ago if you go back and look at my videos from like 3 years ago 4 years ago like I was pretty skinny you know especially when you compare with what happened afterwards I weighed 140 lb or less you know most of my 20s and that was generally the case until like 2 3 years ago when I started gaining weight a lot of weight and I've gone back and fact checked this with my wife and she says that I started putting on the pounds right around the pandemic which um you know I assume is probably similar to a lot of you and I indeed was gaining uh a lot of weight I peaked probably around 190 lb maybe more which uh you know given my height of 55 is uh a BMI of almost 30 which is the uh technical definition of obese so I was literally obese and I know people say Okay BMI is actually kind of like an abstract it's not really representative like Arnold Schwarzenegger had a BMI of 32 okay but I didn't look like Arnold Schwarzenegger right and most people with a BMI of 30 don't look like Arnold Schwarzenegger like I looked fat frankly like I look back at my wedding pictures right and I was just fat there's no real sugar coating my wife would rib me she would say like hey you're looking kind of chubby you know I get comments from relatives and stuff like you know you're looking kind of chunky you know people in my videos would comment on it I would kind of dismiss them because while I was gaining all this weight I was actually working out more than ever like I was exercising really vigorously you know daily Crossfit workouts and I felt like I was pretty healthy you know I was lifting a lot of Weights you know like my squat peaked at 350 lb which you know is a lot of weight and I I was thinking like okay well actually all this weight is just muscle you know if there's a little bit of extra fat like who cares it's fine I'm I'm very healthy anyway it's you know fat but fit as it were but I just kept ballooning um you know I may have even reached 200 lb at one point I don't I wasn't really tracking my weight too closely but it happened so slowly and stealthily that I barely even noticed you know I just kind of dis missed it as like all right well it's it's whatever I'm just getting stronger fine it's like who cares if I weigh a little bit extra and also I'd become convinced by these uh pseudo scientific articles that it's actually impossible to lose weight because of the way your hormones work it's scientifically impossible so why even bother trying and also I just didn't want to lose the weight I felt like you know I just want to be big and strong right I had I had this kind of complex from when I was younger and so thin and scrawny hey again I'm I'm gaining weight like you know I'm getting bigger muscles just getting physically bigger a little extra fat like who cares right that all changed when a few months ago I hung out with some professional sumo wrestlers now most of you probably didn't see this video um it didn't do particularly well on my channel but the impact on my life personally was actually tremendous because I really enjoyed that experience but I found their lifestyle to be frankly incredibly unhealthy I mean I just looked at all the food they were eating all the soda that they were drinking they were smoking too I just saw like their excess body weight and it just it to me it was really gross and um it just to me it just felt unhealthy because yes they were constantly active and working out but at the same time you know like you know I remember we were training with them they would like move for five minutes and be profusely sweating their entire body just dripping with sweat you know from like a couple lunges you know they had like knee injuries and it just seemed to me like that excess weight was really unhealthy and I started seeing some of that in myself as well I just noticed how over the years my I myself had become more slow and quicker to sweat and also more prone to injury my joints would get hurt more easily I just reflect on the sum wrestlers and I looked at myself and I and I said well I'm not there yet but on the path that I'm going like I'm going to end up 250 lb 300 lb especially because like frankly at the time I had somewhat of a problematic relationship to food the reason that I got to where I was was all diet again like I was working out like crazy but um after I came home from working out you know I'd just be super hungry and I would just let myself eat essentially whatever I want like as much as I could eat before getting full and I would just stuff it all in my mouth in 10 minutes and uh like I was just so hungry frankly I just couldn't stop myself so I just stuffed myself to the Limit and like if you look back at pictures of my old breakfast it's like I'd be stuffing myself with like multiple pieces of toasts slathered in butter plus cheese plus kimchi and like meat or fish it just was a lot of food that I was eating every single day I mean this is what I would eat in the morning and I had absolutely no restriction on what I ate I just let myself eat whatever I wanted and I just kind of naturally ballooned outwards and I started doing some research into sumo wrestler life expectancy because I was very curious to see like where it ends up with these guys this is like a scientific experiment of the idea that fat but fit is okay and so I looked into it and what I found was that it does not end well for sumo wrestlers you know they die very young like in their 60s you know relative to a Japanese population overall that you know lives quite long like 80 plus years so for me it was just a perfect reputation of the idea that fat but fit is actually healthy and look like I don't want to put this as a normative judgment on you if you feel like it's okay to be fat because I I frankly don't care like you can do what you want with your life but for me I felt very strongly about this especially after having two kids I wanted to try and live as long as possible uh like that became very important for me I just felt like longterm the path that I was going down was not very healthy and so I decided like seriously to start losing weight uh this was maybe about 4 months ago when I decided to seriously start losing weight you know my weight at that time I remember was 187 lbs as of this morning I'm under 150 lb so I've lost good 40 lb and for many people the first thing that comes to mind when they think about losing weight is exercise but I had already learned that exercise was not a stepping stone to losing weight in fact for me it was the opposite like the more I exercised the more weight I gained because the hungrier I got and the more that I allowed myself to eat so my big realization was that it was 100% diet the stuff that I was eating before was you know I already talked about the breakfast I was eating you know full of like multiple pieces of toast or bagels or lots of butter and cheese and multiple eggs fried in butter of course that would be my breakfast and then for dinner again I would just let myself eat whatever I wanted and it usually ended up being like big bowls of cheesy pasta you know or like the most delicious pizza I get my get my hands on just like really rich fatty foods which I somehow convinced myself was okay because saturated fat is all keto and good for you these days and so the first thing that I did was I had a call with my uh nutritionist aunt she was basically like dude first thing you got to do is eat more vegetables it didn't really make sense to me at first cuz I was like what do vegetables have to do with losing weight like I just I didn't really get it but I was like okay so I'll humor you I'll eat some more vegetables and so I started like with every meal a half of the meal was vegetables to begin with and that would be the first thing that I ate so I started kind of like pounding vegetables B basically and what I realized pretty quickly was that it actually is a great way to lose weight because what you're doing is you're filling your body with like nutritious fiber and you're crowding out room for all the other like Rich fatty foods you're kind of filling yourself up in advance cuz I realized what the root of my problem was is that I would just let myself eat as much rich and fatty food as possible and I would be absolutely stuffed with every meal and so my goal became to like be more comfortable with hunger and so the vegetables turned into a critical part of that because you know I'd start off my meal with like a plate full of vegetables or spinach peppers and it wouldn't exactly fill me up but it would at least like take the edge off my crazy Hunger and then for the rest of the meal like I experimented with a lot of stuff but what I ultimately ended up on was this is kind of an extreme diet but it worked for me most of my carbs rather than coming from grains came from Whole recognizable beans or legumes I eliminated all processed carbs from my diet so no more bread I just completely stopped eating bread no more cookies no cakes nothing like that no soda obviously no no candy any processed foods of any kind that wasn't a huge problem for me before but bread was a big problem and so what I replaced it with was just essentially these sort of like slow carbs like chickpeas I had a lot of chickpeas lentils a typical meal for me would look like a bowl of spinach lentils which also have protein by the way Plant Source fat I liked olive oil so I A A lot of olive oil sometimes peanut butter I tried to have less animal protein but I did I did eat lean protein so that would usually either be fish or chicken no sauces of any kind so like I mean apart from the olive oil no hot sauce no oil no other oil no vinegar nothing just like plain boiled spinach and chickpeas and sometimes potatoes and this started to become my diet day in and day out this also totally exploded for me the myth that healthy food is more expensive Andor takes longer to prepare because all of these meals took under 5 minutes to make with stuff that comes straight out of a can over time I did start to become more experimental with what I ate so I wasn't just eating chickpeas and lentils every single day I throw in some corn I throw in some peas but the core and still to this day the core principle for what I was to eat just became Whole Foods like as minimally processed as possible calorically dense foods I tried to eliminate to the maximum extent possible less fatty meat more whole grain carbs like oatmeal and when you think about processed foods you often think about things like soda or packaged snacks and cookies and things like that but the reality is like processed foods includes a includes a wide variety of things like bread like if you go into a supermarket and look at bread on the Shelf all these Supermarket breads will have ingredients like you know xanthan gum and all kinds of emulsifiers and fillers and things which I subsequently learned actually promote overc consumption uh of the food and that that was a huge problem for me was overc consumption some of these meals like if you look at them they seem frankly a little bit unappetizing but uh that was actually the point I wanted to eat food that was as kind of unappetizing but nevertheless still healthy um as possible Jack Lan the famous bodybuilder from from decades ago had this great phrase if it tastes good spit it out and that sort of became a motto I felt like it was a pretty easy way to lose weight if the food became much less appetizing cuz I always really enjoyed to eat you know it it was a problem for me because I enjoyed eating so much that I would stuff myself with every meal and so I tried to make the food deliberately less appetizing I mean not gross just you know like basic healthy food I feel like one problem with our modern society is how good our food has become frankly the range and and quality of things you can eat has expanded so much but if you look at you know hunter gatherer societies even today what do the hods eat you know they eat tubers and like occasionally poorly cooked animal meat I mean it's like their their diet is not very appetizing you don't want the food to be too good because if it's too good you overeat and so that became that became a core part of my EOS I started weighing myself every single day I mean I started losing weight immediately but you know like the first week I lost like several pounds here I am having lost 40 lb 4 months later and it honestly it it feels really good you know I do miss being able to stuff myself with incredibly delicious food on on a regular basis but I also recognize that that's sort of an unhealthy way to live and um you know I feel way better frankly not weighing as much like I can move easier you know I sweat less I sleep better and hopefully I'll live longer as well you know and occasionally here and there now I will eat the delicious foods that I like you know I will eat a slice of pizza but um but it's much more rare that I do these things and when I do I also now I know when to stop as well like if I'm eating something incredibly delicious I know to stop before it becomes too much if I've eaten a little bit and I still feel an immense urge to keep eating I will force myself to stop even when I'm eating that you know delicious bowl of pasta and then you know surpris surprise 20 minutes later I'm feeling full so I've gotten more comfortable with being hungry or to put it in another way being not completely stuffed all the time oh and no alcohol candy snacks any pro ultr processed foods ever I think that should go without saying if you're really serious about losing weight though

Channel: Xiaomanyc 小马在纽约

Views: 989,384

Keywords: xiaomanyc

Id: ZoUcilVuhP4

Length: 14min 53sec (893 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 22 2024