I have no before and after pics. Or rather, I have no real before pic, because I shied away from the camera – except for face only selfies or photos where I’m bundled up in winter gear like an eskimo – for the most part when I was overweight. A couple of on-the-way pics are available, but for the before pic, the one from September of 2020 will have to do (I don’t know exactly, but I think last autumn I even had 6-8kg more than in the autumn of 2020). So here, before – getting there – there (or so, for I’d still like to go down 1 more kilo, but it’s a very inconsequential kilo, really, just the last bit of flab to be rid of).

I have now lost gotten rid of thirty-fucking-five kilos in these past 10 months. 35kg. That’s damn near 80lbs (77,2) for you non-metric peeps on the other side of the Atlantic. And I feel good. My overall health is good. My liver values are not hovering on the border anymore, my energy levels are back to my “normal”, I feel like myself again. Sure, there’s a bunch of mental shit bundled into the equation of me, too, but getting some of that resolved was the key to getting my body back in shape too.

I’m all for body positivity. I mean, the most important thing is to be able accept yourself, to embrace your body as yours and be healthy. Needless to say, while I maintained my style (though changing things to hide the fat as well as possible), I was not positive about my obese torso, nor will I ever be, or even aspire to be, My body, my positivity. I decide when and in what shape my body is good. Isn’t that what body positivity is all about?

Sometimes it feels like it means that you shouldn’t strive to do anything about your body because you’re good as you are. But it’s not always true! However, it IS up to each person to decide. To love yourself, to love your body, is to want what’s best for it. And for me, it’s keeping my weight and my size here where I am again. Where I was for a decade, until shit hit the fan in our lives and stuff got out of hand, and for some years, I lacked the mental capacity to do anything about my weight gain. All I could do was to accept that it was happening and mourn the slim me until it was time to turn around again.

I was never a skinny kid, nor a skinny teen, nor will I ever be a skinny adult. I wasn’t overweight either, just average, with natural muscle. But when you’re not a skinny kid/teen, you’re automatically fat. Because kids are idiots. Some of them grow out of it, some don’t. So anyway, I was called fat my entire school life. I guess it was the easiest hate-word those idiots around me could come up with, for a bit strange neurodivergent not-skinny kid in their midst.

So I started to think myself fat. And became ashamed of my perfectly normal size body. At twelve, I stopped eating pasta and pancakes and white bread to lose some weight. Interestingly intuitive for a 12yo, since (fast) carbs are my worst enemy, as I came to understand as an adult. I did lose some, but not a whole lot. Not that I needed to, and I guess I had sense enough to understand that I never would be skinny like the others and didn’t need to be.

It is true, that I gain weight super-easy – I call my genes the survivor genes, because my body tries to hold on to every calory I eat. Those damned carbs are the bane of my existance, because they pretty much suffocate my ability to understand when I’m hungry, or when I’ve had enough, and so I just keep on eating too much to feel full and my portions get bigger and bigger and my sugar addiction ramps up and… It just slips. Thus, it’s better for me to keep away from medium to high glycemic index foods, which is what I really mean when I say carbs.

Just a few links for you, to understand what I’m talking about:

• What Is the Glycaemic Index (GI)?
• Glycemic Index Chart for Common Foods
• In Finnish: Hyvinvointia ruuasta eli mitä syö ihminen joka ei syö perunaa, pastaa, puuroa…

For weightloss, there’s multiple factors and it’s not so simple – medications and medical conditions included – nor is there one way that suits all. To me, it’s always been more intuition than science; I found the science behind my “system” only after I was already there.

My weight-loss system put simply: I don’t eat carbs (see above), my daily intake of calories is less than I use (I have never really counted calories, so it’s purely instinct), and I only eat once or twice a day. Because in the end, I’m really not even hungry more often than that. I don’t really force anything – though the beginning is a rather slow and decisive process to ramp down from the carbs and overeating – I simply guide myself to what I know is healthy for me, and then start listening to my body again when the carbs aren’t there to lie to me anymore. And the thing is, when I get those carbs out of my system, I really don’t crave them anymore. In fact, they don’t taste good to me anymore, even.

Upkeep? More of the same except I eat a bit more. Still not more than I need in general, but obviously not less either. Carby stuff can be eaten sometimes, just not on a regular basis. Though, that’s the case even now. I have no forbidden foods, I eat what I want. It’s just that I’ve molded my want to what my body wants in order to stay healthy. If it makes sense. Point being that weight loss or weight upkeep has never been a struggle for me. Not when I’ve been ready for it. When I wasn’t, it didn’t happen. And as much as I’d like to swear that I won’t ever gain weight again, there’s no guarantee.

Getting back to being happy with one’s body. I can easily promise I will never be happy being overweight. To me it represents the slippery slope to major obesity, to health issues that are just incredulous, to something I can never let myself slide into. So even when I do gain some, even a lot, there will always come the point of turning back before I’m too far gone. I watched my mom eat herself to death, even though in the end that’s not what she died of. To me, obesity is the ultimate form of unhappiness with one’s self and there is nothing positive – body or otherwise – to me about it.

So what’s my point? Be happy in your body. If you’re not, do something about it. If you can’t do without help, ask for it, be it medical or some other form of help. What works for me, may or may not work for you, we are all different. I’m lucky that my husband is actually similar in this weight loss/control as me (as well as tastes in food), which makes it easy for us to help each other, while also easy for us to slip and slide together.

As an end note of sorts. The one cool thing about this getting back to slim after years of weight gain is that I (well, we, both of us really) got to renew my wardrobe practically entirely. Maybe 10% (not counting shoes) of my current wardrobe is old – some dresses even from my former slim years – but everything else is new. Expensive? Sure. Rewarding? Oh, hell yeah 😂 I’m loving it! I love to be back to the size I, in my mind, should be and feel best in.