Four years and change. That is the honest timeline, and if you had caught me somewhere in the middle of year two and asked whether any of it was working, I would have told you no.
The scale said 320.6 when this started. It says 220.2 today.
Forty of those hundred pounds have come off since April.
Which means sixty pounds took me about three and a half years and the other forty took a few months, same body, same person, and I do not have a tidy story that explains the gap between those two stretches.
The First Sixty Pounds Were Mostly Invisible
That is the part I would tell anyone still sitting in it.
Sixty pounds sounds enormous written down. Spread across three and a half years it is a little over a pound a month, which is slow enough that you can genuinely lose that much weight and have nobody in your life say a word about it. No one comments. Your clothes get vaguely looser and then you buy the same size again anyway because the difference is not obvious enough to trust. There is no moment.
And a pound a month is easy to talk yourself out of. I did, several times. Went up, came back down, went up again, and the graph over those years looks less like a slope and more like a bad heart rate reading that happens to be trending in the right direction if you squint.
The slow part still counted, though. It just did not feel like it was counting while it happened.
What Changed In April, As Far As I Can Tell
Honestly? Not much that I can isolate.
I keep getting asked this and I keep giving an unsatisfying answer, because the truthful version is that something clicked and I cannot point to the thing that clicked. The habits were not new. They were the same ones I had been doing badly for three years, done slightly less badly, and consistently, for four months in a row.
That is a terrible answer if you want a system. I know that. It is also the only one I have.
The one thing I will say is that the back half moved faster than the front half, and I had assumed the opposite would be true.
The Numbers, Since People Always Ask For Them
- Starting weight: 320.6 lbs.
- Current weight: 220.2 lbs.
- Total down: 100.4 lbs.
- Since April: 40 lbs.
- Goal: around 170.
Notice that four of those five are precise to the decimal and the last one is a shrug.
That is not an accident, and it took me a while to work out why. I weigh in the same way every time, same morning, same scale, and the tenths of a pound matter to me because on a bad week the tenths are all the evidence you get that anything is moving. 220.2 is not the same as 221 to me. It has never been the same.
But 170 is a number I picked years ago for no defensible reason and have never revised. I do not know what I look like at 170. I have not been there since I was a teenager and I have no idea whether it is the right target for the person I actually am now, at this age, with this frame. It sits there as a placeholder. Fifty pounds is still fifty pounds and I will probably rewrite that number somewhere around 190 when I can finally see what the shape of it is.
I Joined The Group After The Hundred, Not Before It
This is the bit that I have been turning over.
Most people find their way into a weight loss community at the beginning, when they need the accountability, the meal ideas, the reassurance from people who are further along. I did it backwards. I did four years alone and then walked in the door on the day the counter hit triple digits, which is either the healthiest possible use of a support group or a small confession that I did not want witnesses while it was going badly.
Probably the second one, if I am being straight about it.
There is something a little cowardly in only showing up with the good news. I am aware. But there is also a version of this where doing the first four years quietly is exactly why they happened at all, because there was nobody to disappoint but me, and I disappointed me plenty and it did not end anything.
Do I recommend that? No. The people who post their 3-pound weeks in front of strangers are braver than I was and they probably got there faster for it.
Fifty Pounds Left, And A Different Problem
Everything I know how to do, I learned at a weight I no longer am.
The version of me at 320 could lose weight by fixing obvious things. There were a lot of obvious things. At 220 the obvious things are gone and what is left is the fine work, which I have never done and am not sure I am good at. Losing weight when you have a hundred to lose and losing it when you have fifty are not really the same activity, and I think a lot of people quit at exactly this point without ever saying so out loud.
Ask me again in a year whether I got to 170. I would put money on the answer being that I got to 185 and stopped caring about the last fifteen, which would be a completely fine outcome that I am currently not ready to admit is the likely one.