Thank you for letting me share my WildFit story!
I am almost 50. I have not had any major health challenges with the exception of my weight and chronic fatigue (although nothing has ever been diagnosed.) I have been larger than I would like since I was 15 with a few exceptions when I was able to really release weight. In the last 10 years, my health really started to go down hill. It started as I stopped exercising as regularly, because I was working, and I did not gain any weight or see any health changes, so I got lazy. Then 5 years ago I started to pack on the pounds. I gained 50 pounds in 4 years and an additional 20 pounds this past year. I also found that I was in a deep state of exhaustion. In 2014 I decided that I would honor my body, cut back on all the things that I was trying to do and take care of myself. I started to sleep when I was tired and spent almost 4 months sleeping 16-18 hours every day. When I finally started to feel normal, I started to go and walk on the beach every day. Some days all I could do was to walk from my car to the water's edge and do some tai chi. After a year of that, I could walk on the beach for about 40 minutes.
I moved to a new location and started to walk daily at a park. The track was .7 miles. The first day, it took me a whole hour to walk one lap. When I moved 8 month's later, I was walked 3 miles in an hour and 9 minutes. When I moved to this new location, I also decided that I was going to stop stressing about loosing weight, doing cleanses and eating programs, which were not effective. I was going to just start eating foods in their natural form which my body would recognize as food and assimilate into parts which would heal my body. I have been doing that since 2015 and have found that I felt no better, nor no worse. That was disappointing to me because I felt that I should be doing markedly better.
I also started to notice that no matter what I did, eating wise, I could not release weight down past a certain point. I would weigh myself at the end of the day, because I wanted to have a "worst-case" weigh-in. I would find that if my weight was under 208, I would jump up 5-8 pounds overnight. It does not take a rocket scientist to recognize that there is a mind/body connection as well as a "using weight for protection" issue. I am an energy worker and health coach, so I worked on these issues for the better part of 4 years by myself and with every colleague I worked with. I was seeing no changes and was starting to get really discouraged about rather or not I could get over this and get healthy.
While my eating had cleaned up quite a bit, I still had real issues with food. I had a cookie addiction which was fueled by my body's need for energy. I would graze on cookies or have to sleep multiple times a day. I would have to eat cookies before my clients would come to make it through my sessions. I joined WildFit because I was not seeing success in eating real food, but I knew that that was what I needed to be doing. I liked the idea of playing games to keep me going. I liked the idea of an online support that I could plug into at my convenience. I was intrigued by all of that.
Fast forward 90 days. Here are the changes in my life:
- I often go all day without a nap.
- I have gone from waking at about 2.2 miles/hour to 2.7-3.0.
- My fingernails are finally long enough that I have to cut them.
- I have had to change my hair cuts to every 4 weeks and not every 6.
- Liver spots on my hands have gone from a medium brown to a light brown
- My monthly cycle has come back (Not so sure about that one!)
- I have released 28 pounds on the scale
- I am more hydrated and have more lean muscle
- I have gone from the obese category to the over-weight category
- My visceral fat number has gone from 9 to 6 (on a 1-10 scale)
- I have lost 28 inches total. I hold most of my weight in the torso, so most of areas of my body saw 2.5 - 3 inch losses.
- I went from a US size 16 to size 14. (I think that I was pouring myself into size 16 stretch pants and now am comfortably in a 14.)
- I went on a two week vacation and released 10 pounds
- I routinely pass up candies and pastries which I normally would have eaten - chose to eat my favorite fun-sized candy bar on Halloween and was shocked to see that it really tasted like plastic. Glad that I did it because now I realize that it is not worth the calories.
- I have found that my biggest emotional trigger is Fear Of Missing Out...
Thank you to all who have worked hard and been so amazing through this process. Eric and Vishen for making this happen. May, Amanda, Petra, Siranush, Ariel....