Have you ever tried to lose weight, or maybe even tried to gain some weight? Well you are not alone my friends! As a young adult, I have been experimenting with different diets, workout routines, supplements, and so on and so forth in my efforts to lose weight and gain muscle. Right now I want to share with you my personal journey with weight loss and my strive to live a healthier life.

In The Beginning

Ever since I was baby, I have enjoyed food. Obviously most people would agree that food is essential and amazing, but when I say I enjoyed food, well I mean like I absolutely loved it. I have always enjoyed trying new things and I tend to not be very picky with my food choices. With that being said, as an infant I was also diagnosed with asthma soon after I was born. My love for food and my inability to breathe properly became contributing factors that would push me to lead an unhealthy lifestyle.

Faster Forward Twelve Or So Years

I was in either seventh or eighth grade when I began to face really challenging obstacles with my health. I had always struggled with asthma and I was very prone to getting sick, but weight had not always been a major concern until then. I had reached a point where I was considered overweight by a large margin according to my BMI, a formula based off of your height and weight, that determines whether you are underweight, at weight or overweight. After a few visits to the doctor that year, I was tested for various different health conditions due to my high blood pressure, high cholesterol and elevated triglyceride levels. Having my parents and healthcare physician worrying about me and not really knowing what to do lead me into a depression where I developed this " I do not care" kind of mentality. Eventually my doctor and my parents took action, they decided to take me to a food therapist. I don't exactly remember much, but I do remember working with a group of health professionals ranging from a dietitian to a physical exercise specialist, all the way down to an actual food therapist. All of my life up until then I had always believe that I would never need a therapist and I thought that only people with serious problems need a therapist, and I believe I definitely wasn't one of them. I was a mess at the time and looking back I truly believe that those sessions really did help me in the long run.

The Start Of High School

Jumping ahead about a year or two, it was my freshman year of high school. Between now and then I had lost about 25 lbs. thanks to my family and my grandpa that offered me my own personal netbook laptop. Sadly, it did not take long for me to go back to my old ways, starting freshman year I weighed 190 lbs. but I knew I wanted to lose some weight so I signed up to do wrestling. Even with wrestling, I was not able to truly embrace the whole being healthy mentality. By summer of freshman year, I came to weight 220 lbs., the most I would ever come to weigh in my life time.

The Summer That Would Change Everything

At the end of the summer my freshman year, my mother introduced me to a weight loss system that she had been trying, known as Stimulock, and it consisted of some natural drops, that help reset the hormones produced by your glands, and a rather strict diet. Despite all of the other issues I had been facing leading up to that very moment, the one thing I did have going for me was my strong will and persistence. I saw that it was doing wonders for my mother and I had reached a point in my life where I was tired of being fat and I wanted to actually do something about it. I started the program at the beginning of July and followed it all the way until I reached my weight loss goal back in November of that year. It took me about six months to lose 60 lbs. and weigh 160 lbs., which was considered a healthy weight according to my BMI. I had reached my goal and I felt extremely confident in my new body, but I also knew that the journey was not over. Now that I had completed my objective, I set new goals to keep myself from ever going back to that unhealthy lifestyle. With the new body I had worked for, I decided it was time to start toning it out and building muscle. During my dieting phase I did work out a bit, mostly cardio with some lifting, but now that I was done I shifted my focus to properly sculpting my body.

Present Day

Now it is my senior year of high school and a lot has happened since I reached my weight goal. A year had gone by where I had not gained any weight, and I was so thankful for that. I had spent a lot of time in the gym building on the new foundation I had set and all looked swell. Unfortunately, in December of my junior year I dislocated my ankle and broke my fibula during a wrestling tournament. All my hard work had gone down the drain by the time I was able to walk again. It has been a year since my incident and currently weigh about 186 lbs., I gained about 26 lbs. over the course of a year due to my unhealthy food habits which I picked up again and also my lack of exercise which obviously could not be avoided. At the beginning of January in 2017, I decided it was time I went back to the gym and started living a healthy life now that I could exercise and at least make the effort to strengthen myself again. In order to make this a personal commitment I decided to invest my own money into a personal trainer. Using my own money motivates me to go to every session because if I don't I will be wasting a valuable resource. My experience with losing weight and trying to live a healthy lifestyle has taught me so many life lessons. It has taught me to have patience, to not be afraid to try other things, to work harder then ever before, to motivate myself and just how much better it feels to live a healthy life. Everyone's journey is different and unique, but no matter what, what counts is whether or not you truly put all your efforts to accomplish your goals and even after that, work even harder to make sure you maintian what you have achieved so you can strive to accomplish even greater things.