Successful Weight Loss?

How sustainable can weight loss be?

What would one consider a success in regard to weight loss? Well, it depends.

Back in July – August 2014 when I was still trying to cut all ties to my 3rd ex (hence the name of the blog) he got on a meal replacement shakes protocol to get rid of a considerable amount of weight. He was very enthusiastic about it but did not impress me.

In 2010 when we were dating he lost about 110 lb in short 4 months, only to gain it all back shortly after we got married that year. He encouraged me to contact his cousin who was doing direct selling of the product for this meal replacement protocol in one of those MLM businesses, where majority of distributors lose money.

I was not interested in selling anything but decided to give this protocol a go just for the heck of it. Even though I could not imagine drinking shakes instead of cooking and eating meals, the idea played well into my absence of desire to cook. I lived alone at that time, so no one but me depended on me cooking or not.

Obviously, I won that argument with myself, and after 30 days of doing shakes twice a day and having one regular healthy meal within 600 calories I lost 14 lb!!! This never happened to me before.

Needless to say, I was convinced and carried on for about a year, until a lot of circumstances in my life changed, including my son moving back in with me. Here are my results – pictures are worth a thousand words. Even though I was 18 lb away from my ideal healthy weight, I considered what I’d achieved a success in releasing my menopausal weight gain!

The changes in circumstances in my life which I mentioned earlier were super good ones, as well as super bad ones, also those that looked like a catastrophe at the first glance but later turned out to be really good ones. 

They lead to 'let’s eat some Russian candy to celebrate'! Or 'let’s drink some Merlot with chocolate covered fruit from Walmart and watch Netflix to relax after a very stressful work day and to cope with loss and grief from shocking decisions my loved ones make'!

How do you think this turned out? Yep, slowly but surely, though not all of those 53 lb, but 75% came back – here are my pictures at 212 lb on January 1, 2019.

Did I mention that even when I started with meal replacement shakes I knew that way of eating was not sustainable? Well, I quit the shakes altogether finally in December 2019, when after losing about 12 lb in a year through combining shakes and whatever knowledge about keto diet I could master from the internet and Facebook, I got almost all of it back again.

My weight on January 1, 2020 was 207.7 lb.

You guessed it right – new year, and new resolutions. Then on January 5th father of my children died at 59 years of age from heart failure. I did not know that he had heart problems, so this was completely out of the blue for me. I am not a blood relative obviously, but he was two months younger than me…

I divorced him almost 30 years ago (read he was not any part of my life for that long), and his passing caused a lot of fresh pain and sorrow on top of old pain and sorrow. A couple more deaths happened around me in December and January, and my colonoscopy was scheduled for January 31st 2020. All of this put me into very reflective state of mind.

That is when I noticed a post on Facebook from my dear friend who had spent two years as a missionary in my city of origin back in Russia. I know her to be an honest and trustworthy person, so I clicked on the link to a video and could not stop watching till the end – about 40 minutes or so.

The woman with an accent I did not know was talking about insulin resistance and other health problems caused by excess weight, due to menopausal weight gain. At the end she invited any woman who wanted to change her health and life for the better to join her in '30 days one dress size challenge' – and I did!

She offers this program twice a year, so if you clicked on the picture above, you will get to her main program – 8 weeks program to beat menopausal weight gain. But here’s that video that I watched and was completely sold on.

* Disclaimer: If you click on any of the links in my post and go on a shopping spree, I will get commission. Just thought it would be fair if you knew. :-)