While looking through the photos stored on my phone the other day, I came across the picture that sparked my weight loss journey back in June of 2024. I spent a few minutes looking at the person on my screen, the girl frozen in time in front of Buckingham Fountain in Chicago’s Grant Park on a sunny day in June. She didn’t know it then, but her life was about to change.

In the days after we got home from Chicago, that picture in front of Buckingham Fountain was like a magnet for my attention. After a youth and much of my adulthood spent comparing my own size to that of others, I had at least learned the toxicity in that practice, but what about comparing myself to myself? The girl in the picture was a size I had never before associated with me. Still, I took the image at its face value. That’s what I look like now, I thought, that’s me.

Oddly enough, as someone who struggled constantly with weight and body image, I didn’t dislike the picture. The fountain was beautiful and I was happy to have documented my being there and to reflect on my memories of our trip to Chicago. Now, was I over the moon about how I looked in the picture? I was not, my friends, but what’s the use in worrying too much over something you can’t change, right? Hmm…

I don’t know at what point after that the mysterious magic began to sparkle in my brain, but begin it did.

How do skinny people do it?

Why am I always hungry?

Am I actually always hungry?

These were the new questions in my head that day in June that sparked the experiment that has led to my fifty pound weight loss and many successful, comfortable months of maintenance.

I was convinced before starting this journey that there was something different about my brain that prevented me from being able to lose weight and to maintain weight loss. I had tried Weight Watchers multiple times in the past with success while on the program, only to have no idea what I was doing when it came to understanding healthy eating, portion sizes, hydration, and proper nutrition balance as soon as I stopped paying for the subscription. That’s how they getcha, I guess. I even wondered if I had a food addiction that resulted in me eating too much at every meal, causing me to experience discomfort and even physical pain for a majority of the days of each week. I was afraid I couldn’t change. I was afraid any changes I made wouldn’t last long. I was afraid. Period.

From where I am now, reflecting on my start in all this, I recognize the damage that inflating your fears can have on starting out on a weight loss journey or any monumental task, for that matter. If you’re too afraid to start, you won’t start. If you’re dismissive of your own ability to learn, you won’t learn. I pretended my fears were facts at the time. I blamed my brain for always “making me feel hungry”, not taking the time to figure out why that was. I decided that day, looking at that picture, that I didn’t care if it would be hard or uncomfortable. In fact, I knew it would be. I just wanted to understand the answers to my questions and I wanted to be able to get to the bottom of them myself.

Getting started was uncomfortable and confusing; I won’t sugar coat it. It was anything but easy. Still, the discomfort and the sensation of being out of my depth when it came to understanding my hunger cues and adjusting my eating habits was well worth the learning process. If understanding your own body’s nutritional needs is something you strive for and have struggled with, I urge you not to let your fear of failure and discomfort stop you from starting on your own journey, even if you have started it many times before.

In the first few days, as I was just getting started, I really focused on trying to listen to my body, whatever that means, I told myself. I ate meals without distraction of my phone or the television. I searched the internet to learn more about how hunger pangs can manifest. I learned that thirst can present similarly to hunger pangs and found that to be a revelation in and of itself. I learned that my hunger pangs don’t usually present with a growling stomach as some people’s do, but rather with irritability, a headache, fatigue, or some combination of those.

Those first few days of the process, I worried that in order to keep up my new healthy habits long term, I would have to feel uncomfortable and hungry for forever. As the week wore on, however, the discomfort subsided gradually and the constant food noise quieted down to the point where I could ignore it by finding my dopamine hits in writing, watching a YouTube Video, reading a book, or having a glass of water, seltzer, or some tea.

After a couple of weeks, I was surprised at how little food my body actually needed to function comfortably versus the enormous amounts I had been consuming prior to getting started. I wondered if I was eating too little even, at one point, but reminded myself that I would be able to tell that by listening to my body and my brain- by paying attention to my food as I ate- the texture of it, the taste, the smell, the colors, by recognizing when I had satisfied my hunger pangs to the point where I could get through the next three to four hours comfortably. Through trial and error, I learned the magic of portion control, Goldilocksing my way to the sweet spot for my own satiety.

I took comfort in the fact that I didn’t have to count calories or track what I was consuming. I just used smaller plates and bowls that I already had that made it easier to eyeball portions that were the right size for me. I weighed myself on Thursday mornings every other week. It felt different from dieting I had done in the past, in that I was still eating pretty much all the foods that I regularly enjoyed. In the first month, I did my best to pay attention to which of those foods did a good job of satiating my hunger and which ones did not, which ones induced cravings that weren’t real hunger, and which ones actually made me hungrier, surprisingly enough. Cereal and chicken nuggets had to go for a while there, though I can eat them mindfully now.

After the first few days, my new eating habits started to feel more normal and natural. After a few weeks, I was noticing the first of many “non-scale victories”. I relished the fact that some of my common ailments such as heartburn, bloating, and stomachaches hadn’t plagued me since before starting my experiment. I opened my handbag and removed the little bottle of Tums that lived there because all it had been doing for weeks at that point was taking up space.

Was it really this simple this whole time, I thought? If so, why was it so hard to wrap my head around before?

It’s funny how simple some of the hardest things can be, how the littlest changes, when made consistently, can lead to huge differences. Now, don’t get me wrong. When I say “simple”, I don’t mean easy. For many, I have come to learn, learning proper nutrition habits, learning how to identify your true hunger cues, and understanding when you are what people call “full” can be like reading an instruction manual in a language you only understand a few words of.

Let’s talk about that word full for a minute. It is my strong opinion that this word is dangerously ambiguous. For example, my personal interpretation and understanding of the word full before beginning my weight loss journey was identical to the sensation of feeling overstuffed. I have since reframed this thinking to interpret that what, let’s call “naturally thin” people really mean when they say they feel full is that they simply recognize they are no longer hungry; their body has consumed the nutrients and energy it needs to get through the next three to four to however-many hours until their next meal. This was a monumental “light bulb” realization for me and has been really helpful in checking in with myself during both my weight loss and my maintenance stages, to the point where I have only reached that uncomfortable “overstuffed” sensation a handful of times in the past year.

For many months during my weight loss journey, I sought out motivation via a Reddit thread called “r/loseit”. A lot of posters in the thread were working on their goals to reach a healthy weight, to improve their mobility, and / or to reverse the negative health effects that can often accompany obesity. Some posters in the thread had goals of losing 100+ pounds. Some posters had already lost impressive amounts of weight and were successful long term in their maintenance. I found their posts so inspiring that I would pop into the thread and read the new posts daily and it would give me that little extra umph when I needed it from time to time.

In some of my daily visits to the r/loseit thread, I read stories of people who were raised to have a “clean plate mentality”, some posters even having been made to remain at the dinner table for hours as children, until they consumed every scrap of food on their plate, even if they were overstuffed, “Because there are starving children in Africa.” Does this sound familiar to anyone? Are you walking to the fridge right now? Are you opening your snack drawer? Was that a bag of chips I heard? Maybe just stop for a second and have a drink of water instead and know you have a friend in your corner on the other end of this post who wants you to know that you are a miracle. You are good enough. You are loved. Food is meant to nourish your body. It is not meant to be an emotional coping mechanism.

Stories such as the one mentioned above made me realize how much of an influence your learned eating habits from childhood can affect your relationship with food as an adult, not to mention your relationship between your eating habits and your emotions. If “cleaning your plate” prevented punishment as a child, I imagine it can be really hard to reshape your eating habits as an adult. I, thankfully, was not raised with negativity around food like that. Reading through the loseit thread, however, I learned that some people are fighting these really negative emotions and memories as they try to navigate nutrition and reduced portions. Sometimes feelings of sadness, boredom, loneliness, and inadequacy can signal as hunger which can be really confusing if you don’t have a handle on your true physical hunger cues. Despite this, those weight loss champions of Reddit are still losing. They can do it. They are doing it and that’s badass as hell. 🏆

While physical conditions, illness, medication and age can all play roles in how difficult approaching weight loss can be, I am convinced that a lot of what leads to obesity is not these limitations, but rather the lack of understanding when it comes to the basics of nutrition and understanding your physical hunger cues versus your emotional hunger cues. For instance, in my Reddit visits, I learned that it is news to many finding out that drinks such as soda have calories. This always seemed like common sense to me, but I have learned that very few things actually fall under the realm of common sense. So much of our habits are learned. Parents have the job of passing on their habits to the next generation. It’s helpful when those habits are healthy, but unfortunately, that’s not always the case. Sometimes you have to ask yourself the tough questions. You have to pay attention. You have to learn, yourself, and guess what? You can do it.

*If this post resonates with just one person, it will be worth me sharing a picture that I was very hesitant to share here. So much has changed since Chicago, but that really is where this all began and I am so grateful for the whole learning experience for which this picture was the catalyst. Thank you for reading this post and for reading all of my posts that served as little dopamine hits throughout this life-changing ride. You are so appreciated.