#obseitycde #weightloss #successfulweightloss #extended fasting

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So today I bravely removed my cloak of shame and posted a picture of my pre-keto body on Facebook (and beyond) for all the world to see. 🙀

I’ve been struggling lately with trying to love myself, I mean truely really love myself. I know I have been terrible with the negative self-talk and I want to change that. I know I consistantly fail at honouring my success and lifelong struggle with my body image and expressing gratitude to myself for my achievements.

I am willing to change that; to be vulnerable enough to let other people see the me as I was four years ago, a morbidly obese person stuck in a fat suit that I could not unzip for 10 years. (My apologies for the harsh words self).

I have been very successful in my weight loss, having started from a morbidly obese person, to now being a person that is less than 20lbs away from being in a normal BMI.

Damn time to celebrate I’d say!

Starting four years ago..with a total lifestyle change in my eating habits…I have lost to date 164.2 lbs.

I should be damn proud!! But instead I hide those horrible pictures as I never felt like it was not me anyway ..not the me I knew or the me I wanted others to see.

You know it was only recently again that somebody pointed out to me the negative talk that I had been rolling out about my body. And of course I know that I do this all the time, in reflection, but I can’t seem to stop myself.

This person pointed me to a beautiful womans Instagram account for motivation. So upon inspecting this account, the first images I saw were of this flawless beauty , for all intents and purposes what I would tend to be everyone’s dream girl.

Just strikingly beautiful!

However upon further inspection of her account I was shocked and flabbergasted. As what you see on her page upon further inspection, what layed beneath the beauty was there for all the world to get ready for this!!

Imperfections, stretch marks, cellulite..oh my!!😯

Just terrible, terrible angles showing all of her bits and wobblies exposed for all to see… and done in such a way that they could only be purposely unflatterin..certainly the selfies and pictures that I would delete immediately and never look at again..

Yet I was in awe.🙏

Certainly still beautiful , still amazing sexy… yet so normal however also not the norm!

Not what I have been groomed to believe a beautiful body should look like…and certainly not the body that we would ever Post online or allow anyone else to see outside the privacy of our bedroom or bathroom or drinking party.

Instead a real life person with a flawed body, both beautiful and real.

Just this one person’s account has helped me so much in the last couple of weeks with realizing that no matter how perfect we can look on the outside or with our clothes on..nobody is really going to know what our body looks like and every single angle and every single second of the day.. The Good The bad and The ugly..yet we judge ourselves by those angles that we see and furthermore what society tells us beauty is.

I may never be a pin-up cover model, and I may never be the ideal vision of beauty or perfection but I’m willing to be kinder to myself. I am willing to understand that what I say to myself is more important then the images society measures my body against, so much so that I decided to post a picture of me at my heaviest weight perhaps not even my heaviest, but close to my heaviest.. for all the world to see, where I came from to where I am.

And no not just a the recent pic of my recent 64.2lbs lost in the last year, but of the entire 164.2kbs I’ve lost in the last four years.

I still feel that pain of my shamed self screaming loudly…nooooooo!!! As I know somehow it was musta been my own fault that I became that heavy ..but no it wasn’t..my body just happens to metaboliz food differently and the doctors of today are just so brainwashed with the standard diet that there was no room to believe that there are other ways to eat until recently.

So going forward I’m going to instead just accept my wobbly bits, my stretch marks, my cellulite and wrinkles that have come from this weight loss because realistically this is just a road map of my journey with this body in this human form and really it’s nothing more than that.

My human experience and a body that consistently has been met with trauma confusion and despair …has been through a lot.

I am a woman and I want to accept myself as a woman who has accomplished a great deal towards achieving an improvement in health and wellness so that I can continue this journey in life and hopefully inspire and motivate others to do the same.

I love myself I love myself I love myself.. fake it till you make it baby❤️

Written by Corrina Leblond

Aug 09/2020

Images from Google.

Keto Challenge- August- Sept

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Through my recent journeys and numerous Keto re-starts of my “lazy keto lifestyle”, it had become insanely obvious that I was stuck and stalled for a ridiculous amount of time. I thought I tried many variations of my fairly new keto lifestyle and I could not figure out why my scale was not staying down. Each week I watched in frustration as the same weekly 3-4 lbs of weight fell off only to find its way back again over and over. It seemed my tried and true method was no longer giving me results and I was about to lose my marbles.

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I knew the many times over the past year since I plateaued I had not been faithful to myself or to my keto or low carb diet & lifestyle. I began to not pay as much attention to what went in my mouth and stopped tracking my macros allowing my new habits to slip to a mere afterthought.

I also began having regular weekly cheat (High Carb) meals which I looked forward too as I knew in my mind that within a couple days of low carb eating I would be back on track. Each week, as I clearly predicted, the scale balanced as long as I followed a couple strict low carb days before my weekend hit; and then I would do the same thing all over again. I lied to myself that I was trying really hard (especially through May-July when I hunkered down with an occasional one meal a day and several 18:6 fasts. Looking back I can now see “the tried really hard part” was not necessarily true. What I could see is that my weight had more or less stabilized and did not want to budge , seemingly comfortable with my lifestyle. My body had adjusted to a new set weight which was in no way ideal for me as I had not reached my goal weight. I knew something had changed from when I started a low carb lifestyle when 3lbs would literally fall off my body every week. I tried so hard to get back on the band wagon of loss however defeat faced me each day when I stepped on the cruel reality of my bathroom scale. The frustration I faced after strictly following three weeks of strict keto and Intermediate fasting (daily 18:6 & the few 24hr fasts) was truly getting me into a rut and the fear that I could not , would not lose anymore weight, which truly haunted me. I really didn’t know what was happening as I staggered around hungry, confused and bewildered!!!

I knew I had to do something different from the Keto & Intermediate fasting diet I had been doing but to me this lifestyle had been the only lifestyle that resulted in weight loss and maintenance, so my bigger fear was that there was NOTHING else! All along I kept telling myself “I got this, it will happen”, yet it didn’t, nothing happened except despair! I watched week after week the scale going up – down, up – down. Was there really anything else I could do, had the keto magic disappeared? How was this possible?

So I thought let me go back to the beginning before I learned the bad habits I developed since I began keto and started back with the basics. I ran over to the local book store Chapters and invested in myself and bought Dr Fung’s initial book “The Obesity Code”. Had it not been for an article promoting Dr. Fungs book more than 2 years ago I may never has heard or known about the low carb lifestyle which eventually led me down the road to my weight loss. for the past 2.5 years I had been following many low carb , keto websites and blogs however never read the book. I’ve sworn myself to at least starting to read the book for if not for Dr. Fung, these amazing, significant changes to my life would never had occurred.

I still remember that first day when I learned that there is another way to eat. The news came in the form of a newspaper article I read stated ” Toronto Doctor finds cure for Obesity”. Being skeptical and having tried “everything else” I though I would read on and learn more. That article led me to many other links about this lifestyle/diet and then to the excitement that I could in fact be referred to the Doctor who wrote the article, Dr. Fung , for weight loss, wow!

I found and began to follow the guidelines of low carb diet and excitedly pursued a referral to Dr. Fung’s clinic in Toronto, eventually meeting Dr. Fungs Dietary Clinician, Megan Ramos. I was so ready to get started yet the to Dr. Fung took approx. 6-8mths or so and I had decided to begin the low carb diet with what information I could find online as I did not want to wait to begin my journey. Eventually I met with Megan at Dr. Fungs clinic and Megan gave me the bones of what the clinic could do for me and an outline of the low carb/keto / Fasting lifestyle which she advised would definitely benefit me. Part of the plan was weekly support group sorta meetings which I opted out of as I wanted to continue trying on my own as my work hours made the clinic group meetings difficult for me to attend. Armed with additional information, support and bounties of enthusiasm I began my journey.

After deciding to buy Dr. Fungs book I had a perfectly timed pop up on Facebook about a Fan Group for Dr. Fung. When I joined this group I then learned the group is actually a group to support those who follow the a fasting lifestyle and that’s when I realized where my path needed to go. Until this point I had practiced extended fasting once for 96hrs which did not end pleasantly, however I was willing to give it a try.

Having practiced lazy keto and intermediate fasting many times I didn’t realize at the start that this group would have such a powerful effect on my journey. One of the first posts I read was about a 42 hour fasting challenge whereas you fasted from 7pm Sunday till – 1pm Tuesday’s. I really wanted to end my August with something special as I knew I had been doing ok however I also felt not much has changed so I decided my last week of August would be 3 x 42 hr fasts. Once again I jumped in with both feet and decided to kick it up a notch and started my first ever 42hr fast which terrified me, the hunger, yikes!!

So feeling scared, excited and hopeful I weighed in on August 31st after my one week of 3 x 42 hr fasts and a fair effort of staying in keto all month and taaa daaaaa…I had drop of 8.4lbs since the beginning of the month, or I should say since the beginning of this year!!!

WOOT WOOT WOW! My first weight loss in 10mths!! I finally broke my plateau, I was so happy!

This month, Sept, I decided I’d do it again, except this time I committed myself to the full month of September, 3 x 42hr fasts week after week, no weigh ins and also to increase my exercise by adding in strength training and 4-5 flights of stairs at work every Mon, Wed & Friday.

With this being my last week of the month I cant wait to see where my scale finds me on Friday this week.

I began taking pictures since week 1 and I can definitely see changes, so I am very excited to see where I am in numbers. Id love to see an 8lbs loss again, but 5lbs will made me very happy! Cross your toes for me!

Written by : Corrina Leblond

Images by : https://www.cartnstock.com; https://www.amazon.ca/Complete-Guide-Fasting-Intermittent-Alternate-Day/dp/1628600012