7 Things No One Tells You About Losing 100 Pounds

There are some things you should know about losing significant amounts of weight

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1. You need new clothes every 3 months

Overall, I lost about nine inches off my waist over about 18 months. So that’s averaging an inch every two months. In reality, it was more like a couple months of no discernible change and then I’d drop two pants sizes in the same month. It’s unpredictable. It’s cool and exciting and encouraging, sure, but it’s also expensive.

Pro Tip: Women’s jeans tend to be about 2% spandex. Buy them a little small and they’ll stretch out by the end of the first day. Wash them as rarely as you can stand. Once you lose some fat around the thighs and waist, they’ll fit looser. Sometimes, it’s hard to find them long enough if you’re tall.

2. You’re going to get cold more easily

I suspect that my reduced caloric intake (before my running mileage increased) is mostly to blame, but I was cold a lot. Before losing weight, I rarely got cold. But as the pounds fell away, I found that I was cold all the time. Well, not all the time— at the time, I was living in central Alabama, but I was definitely getting cold more easily.

3. Dudes don’t want to fight anymore

When I was 275 lbs and bench pressed 315 lbs, dudes grew aggressive quickly. Setting didn’t matter much, either— a bar, a classroom, a Waffle House parking lot. Disagreements and debates devolved into macho chest pounding. If I were debating something like politics with a guy, he would inevitably get out of his chair and stand over me. Or if I, say, bumped into a guy in a crowded bar, I would say something like, “My bad, dude” and continue on. Normally, I could see the wheels turning in his head, trying to decide if he were going to be pissed off about this or not. The feeling that a fight would break out at any moment hung over many of my interactions with guys I didn’t know.

Now, I don’t feel that. Guys have become much more civil to me. Now that my arms shake while carrying grocery bags, these dudes have nothing to prove.

4. There’s such a thing as the female gaze

I was conditioned to believe a few things about male/female interactions. Many people are lead to believe similar lies. Men are visual and women are not. Men pursue and women do not. These are all lies. I mean, they’re true for some men and some women, but as generalizations generally are, they’re pretty useless.

Fairly unreliable personal anecdote: I’ve lived in central Alabama and southeastern Louisiana. Therefore, I’m not fond of running with a shirt on. The result of this is leering, honking, and catcalling— mostly from women. Every time I get dressed for running, I have to choose between street harassment and possible dehydration. Lately, I’ve been choosing dehydration; it’s not as uncomfortable.

5. Everyone’s an expert

Oftentimes, when I tell people that I lost a significant amount of weight while in college, or if they saw me somewhere along they way, they would offer unsolicited advice. The conversation usually went something like this:

Unsolicited Advice Guy: Wow. You’ve lost weight.
Me: Yeh, a little.
Unsolicited Advice Guy: How’d you do it?
Me: Mostly running. Lots of running.
Unsolicited Advice Guy: What you should do is this new thing I saw. You only eat on even-numbered days. It causes the body to release an enzyme, and you lose like twelve pounds a day. That dude in that movie did it to play that vampire with the six-pack. It works.

This kind of unsolicited advice is usually asinine and is usually meant to make the process of getting in shape or losing weight intensely complex. Why would someone want to complicate the process further? Well, that leads directly to #6.

6. You will hear lots of unsolicited excuses

These conversations were often similar to Unsolicited Advice Guy. They looked something like this.

Unsolicited Excuse Guy: Wow. You’ve lost weight.
Me: Yeh, a little.
Unsolicited Excuse Guy: How’d you do it?
Me: Mostly running. Lots of running.
Unsolicited Excuse Guy: Oh, I would run, but I have low cartilage in my knee.
Me: Bummer.
Unsolicited Excuse Guy: Running is pretty bad for your knees. I used to do some swimming, but I’m just so busy at work. I just don’t have the time.

I usually feel a little sorry for Unsolicited Excuse Guy; he’s so insecure about himself that anytime someone mentions what he/she is doing positively, this guy has to make an excuse why he’s not doing that thing as well.

7. People will think you’re “lucky”

These are the people who say things like, “You’re so lucky you can lose weight easily.” Now, there are some places where luck was a big factor: I’m able-bodied and do not have a condition or medication that impedes weight loss. However, I can’t help but think back to throwing up last night’s spaghetti on mile 12 of 15 and feeling that luck didn’t play as big a role as some people would like to believe. I was in undergrad at the time and working a part-time job, so I had plenty of free time in the mornings. That was lucky, I guess.

Surely, I can’t be the only one. Have you lost weight and found that it’s not quite what you thought it would be? Let me know in the comments.

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