I Lost Weight for Less Than $75

I am, or was, Fat. I was by medical terms morbidly obese, another nasty and naughty term to fat people. At my lowest point in life, I weighed 237 pounds and stood 5' 6". The good news is I no longer weigh that much, I took hold of my lifestyle; lost 8 sizes so far and gained a whole new me. No I haven't become a personal trainer or cheerleader, just much happier.

I didn't use any diets or gimmicks either. No pills, specialists, meal plans, gyms, food exchanges, support groups, weight loss clinics, special contraptions, expensive trainers....nothing like any of that. I started small and worked my way down at least in weight. I worked out with everyday items at hand that cost me little or nothing to use.

Everyone that knows me, knows I am an avid reader. No! Don't feel alone....alot of people don't know me.

Things To Know That Helped Me.... Use water to help you lose weight. Drink plenty everyday-but don't over do it! It helps you flush fat and toxins out of your system. Swimming or water jogging for 30 minutes gives more resistance and less impact than putting on your running shoes and running 3 miles. It helped me with embarrassment by hiding the flabby fat bobbing up and down under the water. Being embarrassed when excersizing in front of others is completely normal and a big reason why most obese people do not want to join gyms. I am no longer obese and still don't want to join a gym!

Eating healthier items in smaller amounts more often each day speeds up your metabolism automatically. If you don't particularly care to eat many fruits, vegetables, fish or fowl; this will help you get re-acquainted with the items you don't like, in smaller doses. We all have our favorite foods that help keep us big. Mine just happened to be sugary sweets especially my lover: Chocolate! I found several items to keep my sweet tooth happy without going broke calorie or money wise. Flavored fat free or low calorie gelatins, fat free puddings, flavored weight control oatmeal, popsicles instead of ice cream. Instead of a full-size or king-size candy bar buy the bags of miniatures and ask someone to hide them from you. Limit yourself one time per week to have no more than 2 of the mini's. It's realistic and works well as a reward for hard work reaching your goal losing pounds.

Set goals and try realistically to reach them the best way you can. Don't set foolish goals like: I will lose 250 pounds in 5 weeks. Even surgery won't help you lose that much weight in such a short period of time. Besides, it's not healthy and odds are it won't last. When I finally gave my weight loss goal a number I started small so I wouldn't be disappointed, cry or quit like I had so many times before. I had an ultimate goal in mind but chose realistically 10 to 20 pounds at one time. If you start small with realistic goals and an ultimate goal in the back of your mind, you are more than likely to acheive the realistic goals and set new ones.

Treat your obesity as an addiction much like drugs, gambling, sex, etc. Something made us Fat! For me it was the wrong foods, not caring and being lazy everyday but at work. Yes I said it! I was addicted to fatty fried foods, sugary treats, artery clogging meats, delicious potatoes in any form and empty high caloric sodas. I loved laying around being a couch potato. Not giving a care how much fatter I was getting as well as my daughter every day, month and year. Great! Now I was passing my addiction on.

Change your thinking regarding your addiction, food, excersize, society, what you want from life and your new lifestyle. I live with the philosophy "maximum output for the minimal input"; ie...find a way to make things work for you instead of you working for them. I tend to analyze things before I start to get the best outcome on the first try. Books and the internet help me acheive this most of the time. I had, had friends and family in recovery so I understood the addiction part. I had already decided I was sick and tired of crying, being fat, sick and tired! Face it when you are fat you usually are sick and tired, too. So now I knew I had to set goals. But, how to change my thinking on the rest?

First I got a few books to read by fat authors and former fat people. I will try to save you the hassle and research I went through. One book that made alot of sense to me is titled "The Fat Girls Guide to Life" by Wendy Shanker. I truly laughed my way through the entire book. Everything Ms. Shanker wrote she had lived. There were many times while reading, I would say to myself "OhMyGosh that has happened to me". But I wasn't crying about it, I was laughing. Hmmmmmmm could a different attitude help me change my thinking?

If you are a man reading this article you are asking "why does this matter to me?" Well something got you here. To be honest I don't know if there is a "A Fat Guys Guide to LIfe", but if not--there should be! I would suggest men read the Fat Girls Guide anyway. It might give you better understanding and sensitivity of a woman being overweight or that nasty expression - obese. Thereby, helping both genders in the long run should you lose weight and change your attitude or thinking. At the very least, hopefully, less discrimination toward us women.

I read another book titled "Passing For Thin: Losing Half My Weight & Finding Myself" by Frances Kuffel. This book is more passionate and insightful of society, attitudes, the struggles of obesity, losing weight and becoming someone new. I will admit there were quite a few times I empathized with the author over discrimination, depression and the fight to alter my thinking, my body and my lifestyle. Hmmmmmm not laughing quite as much, but more thinking going on here.

I visited my family doctor, discussed everything with her including undertaking weight loss, depression and life altering changes sure to come in the future. Doctors are always enthusiastic when you announce you want to lose weight. I got anti-depressants, a calorie counting list, some tips on weight loss....yada yada yada as Jerry Seinfeld says. *Two things to note here. One...Always see your doctor before beginning any weight loss especially if you are attempting to lose drastic amounts! You should always be monitored by a professional for obvious health reasons. Two....I, personally, must live on anti-depressants or some form of medication because I am manic depressive. Like most with this disease, I have lived in denial many times in life. I have tried to erase the stigma by ignoring my brain or excuse myself that I don't need to take medication for life; bottom line - I do. There is no way around it. But that is my stiuation. I am not advocating taking anti-depressants or medication of any kind for anyone; that is up to you and your doctor together. Only take medication if you are under a doctors care and have been prescribed medication by them. Just to clarify further, I am not a doctor or medical professional - but I do have intelligence and common sense.

Next, believe it or not, television helped my attitude, will power and soon resolve too. NBC started a reality show called The Biggest Loser. Like alot of Americans, I began watching every week from the first episode. I got hooked on a TV show! Who would have thought that TV producers would put fat people on the air? People who appeared to be bigger than me! Not only TV showing America that the stars are obese, ordinary and unlike anything else on, but helping them change their lives! Television helping those contestants helped me, help myself.

How could it not? Free training tips from professionals; recipes I would actually cook, eat and stick to for once in my life; watching what each contestant went through every week made me enjoy my walks, swims, and workouts much more. At least I knew someone else besides me was angry, depressed and crying when it was tough! Moral support, even from a show, is important to being successful.

If I learned anything from books and The Biggest Loser it is this: To be successful at losing weight and remaining successful, one must change their lifestyle. That means having faith in yourself, adopting goals and learning new attitudes/thinking toward food, fat, society, excersize, calories and the new person emerging.

Soon I gave up drinking soda pop and eating from fast food restaurants. It not only helped me save money, but also with less sugar, calories, fried foods and temptation. It wasn't easy but I started dropping a few pounds. I was addicted like millions. I love colas, french fries, big sandwiches, potato chips, fried cheeseburgers, gooey yummy desserts just as much as the next person. How can you not be addicted to something that tastes so darn good? But to lose weight I had to let go of those comforting delights, change my eating habits slowly and remove them from my weekly diet.

Yes, I said that horrible word. But I am only using it as a word. "Diet" as in nutrition and not a method. Simply put: dieting is a "method" to lose weight. But methods never last! I know because I have tried tons of them over the years probably just like you. If you don't live that diet for the rest of your life you become a Yo-Yo dieter. You lose weight like a Yo-Yo goes down the string. Then you gain weight, MORE weight when you stop dieting like a Yo-Yo coming back up the string. It wreaks havoc on your body and your mind. It is very unhealthy to your vital organs and in my case, depression can usually come along for the ride. So to break the cycle, you must change your lifestyle.

After dropping a few more pounds, I started walking the parking lot of the gated community I live in. With 400+ units, the parking lot is pretty large and is free to walk. I put on my sweat clothes and walked 3 - 4 times a week starting at 20 minutes and increasing. I would play a game with myself to see if I could improve my lap times around the complex each time I walked. Having someone to walk with can help to relieve the boredom and monotony. Not only do you get excersize but you will also find yourself keeping up with friends or family members. Most fitness experts suggest you vary workout routines. This also helps other parts of the body as well as relieving boredom and monotony, two things that make most people quit excersizing.

So to mix it up, some evenings I went to a heated pool and water jogged or swam laps to get excersize. Swimming or excersizing in water has lots of benefits including better resistance for muscle training and less impact to joints and muscles. It also helps keep you cool when you get hot and sweaty; unlike doing other forms of excersize or impact training. This also makes it possible to excersize longer. I would find myself in the pool after 45 minutes some evenings still ready for more.

When I started losing weight, I used canned food items equally weighted around the house as cheap "free weights" to tone my arms. Unfortunately, canned food only weighs so much. Pretty soon it was no longer a challenge to the muscles being built up in my arms. No, I wasn't bodybuilding rather just trying to keep the flabbly arms from looking like a turkey waddle swinging in the breeze.

Living in an arid climate forced me to find alternate ways to keep active indoors, while adopting this new lifestyle, when temperatures soared. Coupled with the fact that I am not a rich person, I had to find my new excersize program cheaply. With these two constraints in mind, I went to my local Borders Books. They always have bargain tables, which for avid readers and consumers like me are heaven sent. For those of you not familiar with and/or have a Borders near you - they are available online, but I do not know about bargains there. For $20, I got an excersize ball/DVD kit normally selling for more. I had to blow up the ball and actually watch the DVD to understand the excersizes which wasn't too rough. I also got a couple of bargain books ($6 and under) to aid me using my new ball that the DVD didn't cover and using free weights to tone. Once I had my books, ball, and DVD I was almost ready. But I still needed a couple of small free weights.

Lucky, for me, a discount sporting goods store is located across the street from where I live. The store was having a sale, lucky once again, because I had no idea discount stores had sales! A clerk had to help me pick from a large array of weights, colors, sizes, textures, etc... who knew? Finally, I walked away happy with a nice set (they are sold individually-believe it or not) for under $25 including state tax. It was probably the easiest part, at that point, to the whole notion of losing weight. Now, I was ready to proceed further. Guess what, I was still laughing.

I won't bore you with all the sweaty details, suffice it to say I moved more....ate less-more often, ate healthier and lost weight.

At first it seemed to me like I was losing weight but was unsure. I would weigh myself once a week but the scale lies. My clothes felt different even after meals. Pretty soon those few pounds I had lost turned into 20, then 30. People I saw everyday started asking me if I had changed something? Did I get a new haircut, new clothes, etc? I hadn't done anything except lose FAT. Hmmmmmmm, I was on to something here! I must have been, because the weight was coming off and I was still laughing.

It finally hit me when a vendors rep that hadn't visited in many months came into our offices one day. I greeted him like always and received a strange response. I was busy and didn't think much about it. A co-worker mentioned casually a few days later that "I must be doing something right because our recent visitor had to ask if I was new to the company". He hadn't recognized me. Yes, my hair had grown a bit and I had now lost somewhere near 50 pounds but the same person still starred back at me in the mirror each day. That wasn't the only time that happened as my body changed. I started noticing men looking my way again as I walked by them. No man had looked when I was size 22!

Buying size 22 clothes at 237 pounds was the topping on my fat cake! Size 22 had started my life altering journey to begin with. I had never bought, let alone worn, size 22 at any other time in my life.

One of the goals I had set for myself in the beginning: I wouldn't buy new clothes until I had lost X number of pounds. When that goal came, instead I set another to keep going another XX number of pounds before I bought those new clothes. I kept upping that goal until I literally had to buy new clothes because I no longer fit or could wear my fat ones anymore. The size 22's and triple XL's were falling off me.

I wore those clothes for just under a year while losing weight . When it came time to donate my suits, dresses, skirts, blouses, shorts, jeans, etc to a rescue shelter they were still in great shape. Just not mine! Not only was it a reward to me to buy new clothes it was a reward to others too.

Even though I have not reached my ultimate goal yet, I am still a happier and healthier individual. I keep working at it and remember I am better off today than I was nearly 3 years ago. Today, I would prefer to share or donate my time and tricks helping others live healthier, happier lives than donate my fat clothes.