I had an inspiring glow-up – I lost 30lbs after finally learning to love my body, people say I’m their motivation
THIS woman lost 30lbs after focusing less on weight loss and more on adapting to a healthy lifestyle.
The fitness lover shared her story on YouTube, inspiring her viewers to lose weight in a healthy and sustainable way.
Zoe, known as zoeunlimited on the social media platform, revealed the hard truth about weight loss in her video.
“It’s really not that hard to lose weight,” she said. “Anyone who really wants to do it can achieve this in various ways, maybe just not the healthiest or most sustainable ways.”
“For me, I successfully lost a sustainable amount of weight multiple times, but only in 2019 did I finally make the results stay instead of bouncing back to another peak in my weight,” Zoe admitted.
The YouTuber explained that you need to find your purpose for your fitness journey, and that purpose cannot be to simply lose weight.
“Whatever your weight loss goal might be, if your sole purpose is to lose weight you’d be lost like me on this journey,” she said.
Zoe admitted that “for me, my purpose has been quite shallow for the longest time. Being a skinny kid all my life until gaining more than 15 pounds during my freshman year at UCLA.
“My drive for going on a diet came straight from self-repulsion,” she said.
“I hated the way I looked so puffy, the way my jeans were so tight that it hurt to breathe, the way that no one compliments me anymore about how slim I look.”
However, Zoe explained that when her end goal was to just lose weight she “overlooked the methods of achieving this and the consequences of some concerning methods such as starving myself.”
“I lost a ton of weight drastically, but soon after I thought I reached my goal of losing that weight I immediately gained it back because my lifestyle was unchanging and my body was not well,” she said.
Zoe added: “Something I realized during this journey is that weight loss is only the byproduct of adopting a healthy lifestyle.
“When the goal or the purpose is not to lose weight but to be healthy when that’s set, everything else comes along.”
EXCERCISE
Zoe said that when she used to exercise with the goal of losing weight, she would “only view it as a mundane task to burn more calories.”
“I obsessed over the number of calories I could burn each time I got on a treadmill or elliptical,” she admitted. “To be honest, it was tiring.”
However, when her purposed shifted to having a healthy lifestyle, “I no longer stress about the number of calories that an exercise burns and more so, focused on doing the workouts that are fun for me and are therefore easy to keep doing as a habit,” she said.
She started doing resistance training to build lean muscles, ab workouts, and swimming and walking for cardio.
Zoe said she also stopped worrying so much about the number on her bathroom scale. She admitted that she used to weigh herself multiple times a day.
“When I stopped caring about my weight and just focused on gaining more lean muscles, the nice thing about gaining lean muscles was that I was burning fat at the same time,” she explained.
Zoe added: “Your weight is determined by so, so many things like your water intake, how much you ate the night before, etc.”
DIET
The YouTuber shared her transition from an unhealthy relationship with food to a healthy one.
“When the main purpose of your journey is to lose weight it’s hard to not be scared of eating,” she admitted.
Zoe said that she has experienced both binge eating and starving herself, saying that “neither end is healthy nor sustainable.”
“Being overly obsessed with calorie counting skewed my attention away from nutrition and harmed my body,” she said.
“Trying to build a good relationship with food isn’t the easiest but when I reshifted my focus from weight loss to just living healthier, now I just try to see food as an essential fuel for my body to stay healthy and nourished,” Zoe added.
She explained: “I tried to listen to my body’s needs and listen for the signals that tell me when I’m hungry versus when I’m just craving because of boredom.”
“Eating healthy no longer feels like a chore or a temporary punishment to lose several pounds, but it became my preference because I just loved how much more energized and good my body felt.”
Zoe also mentioned that her acne was “significantly reduced” after switching her diet to whole foods and she “felt less tired during the day.”
The YouTuber’s viewers flooded her comment section with support.
“Girl this is like my third time watching it cause it’s so inspiring,” one YouTube user said.
“Diabetes runs in my family so this video helps me stay motivated so I can cut down sugars and junk in my diet.”
Another viewer was motivated as well saying: “This sounds really hard, especially after thinking that my purpose was to lose weight all my life. But I can do this.”