Words of Warning

I'm a bit nervous about speaking on this but after loosing a significant amount of weight over a 7 year period I wish I had heard this at the beginning of my journey.

If you have the means or are able to at all, try and get some professional guidance along with your weight loss journey at some stage.

I started losing weight without any professional help and just did what the internet recommend: restrict calories, do a little bit of exercise but mainly focus on food. I kept up the calorie deficit and as I kept losing weight, made it stricter and stricter to keep up the weight loss. A few years later I hit my 'ideal' weight, but had also along the way developed a severely restrictive eating disorder that I have been trying to work on for over a year.

Losing weight can be a wonderful thing for your health - and this may sound obvious, but it wasn't for me - but please for the love of god stop losing weight before you start to loose your period and hair, have heart palpations, are exhausted all the time, get osteoporosis, constantly cold, and fear enjoying meals with family and friends for the unknown calories. I feel like as I was overweight, I only ever got praise for losing weight and the disordered behaviours I had developed did not show the same red flags to others as it would have in someone in a smaller body.

Losing weight for health is wonderful but centering my entire entire life around it was not good for my mental or physical health in the end. I'm currently actively putting weight back on and fixing my relationship with food but it's been a long process in even recognising I even had an issue as weight loss to me had always been a positive thing.

TLDR: if you can, please try and get professional guidance on your weight loss journey, if not please be careful and be kind to yourself. Eating disorders suck.

Edit: I'm terrible at spelling 🤦🏼‍♀️