Day 43! My 14 Year Weight Gain and Loss Journey of 65 pounds or 30 kg! HD

Hear the story of how today I am finally at a healthy weight after 14 years of ranging between overweight and morbidly obese all while telling myself I was athletic or not as fat as others. You might like hearing what finally worked to break my cycle of trendy diets and huge weight gains followed by a big effort to lose weight that ended it being fatter than ever. The last time in my adult life before recently I was at a healthy weight was when I was 18 years old as a freshman in college. My parents raised me to eat healthy balanced meals and as soon as they opened a Zia juice on my University of South Carolina campus, I did not have a healthy weight again for 14 years. The Oreo elation smoothie I got there on a daily basis helped add 10 pounds to my weight by the end of the year and no matter how much I exercised, I simply ate too many calories to burn it all. When I started drinking alcohol every week as a sophomore, my chances of maintaining a healthy body dropped to nearly zero. Through the next ten years I tried losing weight different ways and benefited often from heartbreaks and living at home with my parents for the best weight loss in my life. By 2014, I was certain that I was going to drink myself to death which motivated me to seek help. In learning to live a sober life, I started to review all of my problems with my extra pounds being one of the first to come up. While I hoped just stopping drinking would do the trick, I ended up plateauing into still obese by the end of 2014. As the holidays approached, I decided counting calories would be the solution. For over a year, every single day I counted all the calories from all the food I ate with most days having used MyFitnessPal to track the actual foods I ate. I was shocked when I started to see I was often eating over 3,000 calories a day. A year later my daily goal was 2,150 plus exercise and I was down 20 more pounds but still overweight. As my calorie counting failed to bring me into a healthy weight, I grew desperate for a solution that would help me keep shrinking. Thankfully I had a fungus which produced a rash over a two year period that showed me how poorly I was managing my eating on my own. I asked my Uncle Joe who is a primary care physician what I should do. He recommended seeing a specialist for the rash and reading the book "How Not To Die" for my health because he recommends that to all of his patients on their first visit. Fortunately for me my first visit was at a family barbecue. While I was considering reading the book, I ate a huge breakfast with my wife at the Detroit Metro airport. Within a few minutes of the meal being digested, my thoughts dropped to nearly suicidal depression. I was so shocked that I suddenly realized what had happened. The meal I ate CAUSED the bad mood! The moment this realization hit me I was overwhelmed with motivation to do whatever it took to learn how to eat better starting with reading that book. As I listened t