My weight loss journey

I was zigzagging our bedroom as I put myself together for work. Koffi Olomide was belting out one of the hit songs from his 2017 album on the red portable speakers; my friend Francis had picked up for me from one of those backstreet shops in Dubai’s busy Naif road. I stopped from time to time, allowing the music and my body to become one. Flowing in fluid, slow, circular girations of the lower torso as dictated by the sacred lingala choreographic rule book.

He looked at me rather strangely. It was an uncharacteristic look of dissaproval. I felt uncomfortable for a moment. I stopped dancing and stared back at my audience of one, through the mirror on our bedroom wall. His eyes were crawling all over my skin, literally licking off my epidermis by the flare of his glare.

I thought he would approve, but…

“How far do you plan to go?” His words cut through the room in his deep baritone that never failed to give me good bumps even many years later.

I turned to look at him without as much as a word, but with corked eye brows.

“With this weight loss journey?” He explained further.

It was neither a question nor a statement. It sounded more like an order from a man who was not very pleased; he wanted me to stop losing any more weight. Immediately! This was his very own kind of disaproval. Passive. Aggressive. Protecting his territory. His very own toys… teasers. His “amuse bouche” (I just had to throw in that word for pun’s sake)

“I must have taken it too far…” I thought to myself.

I was one of the girls who would swear to stay fit and maintain a perfect body frame postpartum. I have always been a large frame person. Even when I looked skinny, I still weighed a lot more. I added the most weight during my mothering period. I wasn’t able to live up to my romantic expectations of toning down back into my pre motherhood body.

Much changed when i become a mother. For one, there was a major demand on my time and i was not able to achieve as much as i would normally be able to. Secondly, fatigue levels soared up due to the high hours of nursing and disrupted sleep patterns. There was a probability that my body had not healed enough to withstand the physical exertion brought about by exercise. Especially true, for those who went under the knife.

I ate and exercised a lot. I tried different exercises yet, my weight stuck stubbornly to my hips and threatened to increase with each meal I took. I couldn’t diet because that would affect my breast milk production. I was stressed. I wanted to do something about it but, I just didn’t know what. I seriously hated the unneccessary attention my huge hips drew to me. Men ooohhhed and aaahhhed whenever I passed by, while women claimed I finished all of God’s clay for them.

I tried a few detox diets that had worked for others:

The GM diet, also known as the General Motors diet, is a plan that promises to help you lose up to 15 pounds (6.8 kg) in just one week.

Each day of the GM diet permits you to eat different foods or food groups. It’s a relatively workable diet that doesn’t demand for major discipline.

Proponents of the diet claim this technique stimulates weight loss and helps burn fat faster than other diets. I lost 5kgs in one week. I wasn’t satisfied.

Later, I tried the master cleanse diet also called the lemonade diet, which is the most extreme diet I have ever been on.

You’re only allowed a yucky concentrated seasalt-water drink, which acts as a colon cleanser. This is the first thing you take in the morning. Guarantees about 14 bowel movements in about 2 hrs. During the day you take a “lemonade,” which is spiced with cayenne pepper and a dash of maple syrup for energy. At bedtime, an herbal laxative tea is taken. The diet is supposed to run for a minimum of 10 days and maximum 14 days. You can’t have any solid food, and you can’t drink alcohol.

After 10 days, you can gradually add back foods, but only a few at first, starting with juice and soup, and leading to rawfruits and vegetables. After this, the plan calls for eating very little meat and no dairy. I remember giving up at day nine when I had terrible stomach pains. My husband bought me a light meal, must have been a salad. My system couldn’t handle it. My tummy hurt so bad I took a cab and went home.

Here is the thing that never worked for me with all these diets. Whenever I would be through with the diet, I would experience an urgent need to restock my body for all the days it was deprived. That always led to me putting back the very same weight I had tried to lose. The weight loss wasn’t sustainable. These were not diets that i could carry on living with on a day to day basis. I was stuck.

I had read a while back about intermittent fasting and it’s benefits. IF as we call it amongst ourselves is an ancient secret where you eat for a select period of time and fast for the rest. Example is when you have your dinner at 6pm and fast until break ‘fast’ at 9am. You would have fasted a total of 15 hours before eating. IF has been in practice since the beginning of time. It is a secret because it was long forgotten and rarely practiced nowadays.

It was an almost accidental discovery for me. I wanted to try it but lacked the courage to go for many hours without a meal, each day for the rest of my life. IF is not a diet, but a lifestyle choice. It’s not the same as starvation because you have the controls. You choose when to eat and when to fast daily. So I went back and researched a bit more on it and decided to put it to the test. I will share some in depth information about IF in a different article. Right about when I started fasting in December 2017, I was a size 18 about 89kgs. Right now I am a size 12 at 68 kgs. I have lost 20kgs in 7 months. Which is a healthy rate of weight loss and sustainable.

Chubby me…

The first month was very difficult. I craved food and had major mood swings. My sense of smell was heightened and I could guess what each of our neighbors were cooking. I could sniff out the garlic, ginger, coconut, or whatever other ingredients they used. I had constant headaches and I just wanted to eat. I really just wanted to eat something. Anything. But… I stayed put. It took the will power of a rocket. There was no visible weight loss in the first month. Even though, I felt lighter, more active and slept better. Infact, my insomnia disappeared. I exercised very little if at all. My job demands that I walk a lot, and therefore I didn’t see the need to exercise regularly. Still, I lost weight rapidly.

When I finally saw the results of my fasting, i was encouraged. I started by fasting for 16 hours, then soon I deleted breakfast from my eating schedule and moved on to fasting 18 hours daily then 20 hrs, 24hrs and eventually 48hrs. Every time I dropped a size, I wanted more weight loss. With much enthusiasm, I fasted on some days for longer; even going for 48 hours straight. The first few times that I tried the 48 hour fast were difficult to the power of ten. I was working on some of those days and I felt so weak. Almost incapable of physical labour. I decided to carry out the 48hr fasts only on my off days, meaning that I slept for the most part of my extreme weakness.

Intermittent fasting is not for the faint hearted. It takes a lot of discipline and commitment, but the results are wholistic and healing to the body, mind and spirit. It was the beginning of April and I was more than impressed… I was finally back into a size 14. That has been and will always be my best size. I wanted to maintain that weight but I couldn’t. It wasn’t proportional to my height in the body mass index (BMI). As I continued my fasting and losing weight, I realized that I had to stabilize my fasting into a pattern so as to avoid losing weight beyond the desired amount. I stopped taking the 48 hour fasts so as to allow my body to tone down gradually and settle at a certain threshold. My target weight is 68kgs. I currently fast for 18 to 20 hours daily. My next goal is to adopt a 5:2 fasting ratio. Which means, that for two days in a week, I limit my food to vegetables and fruits.