Losing over 20 pounds: What I did and how you can learn from my mistakes
By Marco Milani
An obligatory mirror selfie showing my progress.
Staff Contributor
Marco Milani/The Skyline View
@_marcomilani_
With summer now arriving, we all want to get that body we can to be proud of. We see those people on TV with six-packs, flat stomachs, and just completely toned bodies that make us feel embarrassed when we look at ourselves in the mirror. That last part described me, back in January. However, my situation was just a bit different. During Christmas, a month before, one of the things I most wanted was (weirdly), some new slacks. I only had a few pairs, and they were all one color. I got them, but I struggled to fit into them. Then, my mother graciously bought me a couple more pairs. Those didn’t fit either. Why? Because my belly was prohibiting me from fitting into them. I decided, right then and there, that I was going to start losing weight. I’ll admit, there were times when I was scared, but during the first week of January, I jumped into it headfirst. I am proud to say, after months of hard work and sweat, I lost over 20 lbs. I started at 227 lbs, and I dropped to around 200 lbs in just about four months. I feel incredible — arguably the best I have ever felt in my entire 21 years of life. So, how did I do it? It involved a lot of things, including what I ate, how much water I drank, and, of course, working out. In this piece, I will break everything down, and tell you the specifics of what I did, and even what I did incorrectly, in order to help people learn.
Spring 2021
Food intake Let’s start with food. Coming from an Italian family, I was raised to love to eat. So you could imagine the figurative cliff I jumped off of to cut back on what I eat. To start with, I decreased my portions drastically. Instead of a big breakfast, I only ate something medium and a cup of coffee. For lunch, I only ate a bag of chips. Then, for dinner, I ate the most. As I got further into weight loss, I decided to cut back even more on dinner, limiting myself to one portion of everything. In total, I was trying to eat around 800-900 calories a day, 40% less than the recommended 2,000 calorie a day diet. Then, when the season of Lent came along, I made the drastic decision to completely cut out lunch from my meals for 40 weekdays (or around that — I started late), only eating it during the weekend. I also cut out dessert for five days out of the week, only indulging on Fridays and Saturdays. Now, let’s discuss cutting out meals. Should I even have been doing this, to begin with? Emily Risk, a registered nurse at Skyline College was asked this in an interview.“That does work for some people,” she said. “It isn’t appropriate for everybody ... and what the term is right now is ‘intermittent fasting’.” Intermittent fasting is a term that is heard a lot these days. But according to an article from Harvard Health Publishing, the term had
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