This is not going to be short, but I'm going to explain what I was/am going through and what I'm trying to do to change that.
First of all, this is not my first time trying to lose weight and neither is my first time mustering courage to start posting here. But this time it's going to be different.
I'm a 27yo male trying to lose some weight, but I wasn't always overweight. Ever since I was a child I started to have some bad feelings about life. At first it was just boredom but as I grew older the boredom started to spiral into sadness and most things couldn't bring any joy to me.
I had some good experiences, at age 14 I started mountain biking and it was fun, for a while, then i got into a student representation movement, then it got boring. Karate? Fun, then boring. Skydiving? Funboring. Books? Same. And so on.
I live in south Brazil, in a place where depression was downplayed by society as "QQ" so it took a while until I could look for help. I was diagnosed as having a deep case of clinical depression.
Over the last 4 years I think I tried losing weight 3 times. One time I actually got pretty close to my goal and then I got depressed and started eating like crazy and doing no exercize at all.
Where I live eating healthy is not that hard. Fast food and some processed foods are actually more expensive and not as available as "natural" food. My problem always been that to cope with depression I got addicted to chocolate (Well, healthier than doing crack I supose) so I was eating crazy amounts of sugar. Not only that but my family always treated me as the family pig: "Oh look son! Theres still 3 peoples worth of rice portions... EAT IT!" So my portions where always over the top.
Since I'm a little tall (6′2″ or ~187cm) my maximum weight of 275 pounds (~125 kilos) wasn't all that absurd. After a terrible case of depression back in 2012 i got to 158pounds (72kg) and then back to 242 pounds (110kg). Now I'm around 236 pounds (~107 kilos).
I started preparing myself since december to achiev my first goal: 187 pounds (85 kilos). After that I plan to start looking for some muscles again.
To achieve that I already gave up my coping mechanisms: No more soda, almost no refined sugar, no cravings for chocolate and no more oversized portions. And tbh it's not being that hard, my only issue is with some ocasional random hunger spikes during the night. I'm trying to work around that with water and natural tea.
Since december, after years doing no sports at all, I gradually started doing daily walks, now i'm doing brisky (3,5~4mph) walks for 1hours 4~5 times a week. I plan to do it daily again with some running sessions after I buy a proper running shoe (They're really expensive around here.).
I love to count calories and stuff but I found it actually hard to get even a gross estimative of my basal daily needs and stuff like that, since every site appear to use a different formula. I got results ranging from 1900kcal to 3200kcal for my basal needs.
So that's it. I'm finally getting a proper treatment, I decided to lose weight (and gain some muscle afterwards), I started doing some exercises and I'm eating less (Still not sure how much I'm eating, but it's way less. Probably around 1500~1300kcal).
I will post my progression and I hope to reach my goals. Sorry if my english isn't that good (It's the best I could do with my self taught english at 6am).
50 pounds to lose after 8 years of depression
