I lost 25 kg in 7 months
By: Mahoor Khalid
Tags: Hope, Strength, Confidence, Weight Loss, Individuality

I lost 25 kg in 7 months

No, this isn’t an ‘inspirational’ story on how to lose weight, full of the common intermediates which you already know contribute to weight loss and a healthy lifestyle. It’s a story of confidence. A period of losing yourself over years, and deteriorating your health in all forms.

From the womb I exited as a 10 pound ‘healthy’ baby and all through my life I have been chubby, and then slowly, but surely growing fat. I have never cared about my weight though: my mind was all that mattered, and so, when I was called out for being fat, hurled shallow remarks at disguised in jokes by acquaintances, or subtly judged by close family members, it did not matter. I was not traumatized because I was raised to believe in who I was inside, and therefore, not conforming to the social setup of being at a certain number on a scale was a decision that came too easily.

Near the beginning of my college life, leaving home and joining the highly stressful field of medicine especially in a country like Pakistan where med schools distinguish you on scores rather than your ability and passion, I became stressed. I was over working, living alone in a hostel for the first time with a roommate and strict rules where you weren’t allowed to even go get groceries without permission, and on top of everything, I was lost as a nobody in a highly competitive environment of over 150 students. Coming from the top of my class, from an environment where your value as a person was heavier on the scale, and then leaving my city to just be a doctor, hit me harder than I imagined even though I was well aware of the system of medical colleges in Pakistan. I got depressed and although, on the surface I was still studying, still smiling, still going forward, my mind and body gave up on me. They moved backwards, everything was toxic. I slept for days, or not at all. If I went out, I came back anxious, and if I didn’t I was still anxious. My family and friends were supportive, their opinion and faith in me helped me move forward, and the space I needed, everyone was more than willing to give. Naturally during this period I gained more weight because I was stress eating, and I knew I should do something about it, I just wasn’t ready to yet.

I was slowly losing confidence and my weight was never the factor. I never cared about being skinny, hot or attractive as people broadly use the terms. The stress was already making me sick to the point where getting out of bed was hard because loneliness consumed me whole.

And then at the end of 2018, a friend who knew where I stood, who knew I was fighting to be better, who knew that despite everything I didn’t give up, fat shamed me. That was it. I reached a breaking point because for the first time in my life, I felt bullied. It hurt. For lack of any complex way to say it, it simply hurt because my already stressed mind perceived this as the last thing on a list of things wrong in my life. And for the first time in my life, it mattered. For the first time in my life, someone used words that to this day sometimes ring in my head. But I will not say them out loud, neither will I hate on this person or call them out because I will not give their words any life. I will however, say that I felt shame in that moment: I was ashamed of how I looked, and of my mind for being so weak to let someone’s words have so much power over my own mentality.

And it began, the crippling anxiety of feeling like I was trapped in my myself, and from that day I remembered every word a bully uttered for me: I remembered how my classmates still bully me subtly, and I remembered how people actually associated my looks with my capabilities. It broke me. I went into a stage where I over ate even more, gaining over 8 kg in a period of 2 months. The obesity became a defining moment for me. It shook me.

Learning I was hyperglycemic and full on diabetes will be knocking any time soon, was when I decided that I need to work on myself. On 7th February 2019, I decided to work on myself. I decided I needed to do what I needed to do to exercise patience, to be healthy. I needed to feel like myself and to not give someone power over my mind. So I completely changed my diet, I forced myself to workout, I started saying no to hangouts, but I also became sicker. I over exercised once I realised I enjoyed it. I stopped eating to speed up the process, and I started purging what little I did eat. I was losing myself in the process of trying to better myself.

Over time it became difficult still. I purged at times even though I realised fully well that it did nothing for my weight loss because I was eating healthy already. I would be leaning against a wall in the washroom after forceful vomiting, shaking, my face full of petechial hemorrhages, crying because my stress was struggling with the little sanity left in my mind, arguing to not let the stress win, and when it did, the sanity stood there disappointed and I felt defeated because I lost to the wrong side of the argument, again. But still, I kept going. I worked out in a 5x5 ft space with no equipment, no help from anyone, and in front of a roommate whose space I was consuming in those few feet as my college had no gym of its own.

I stopped purging soon with my bouts of stress reducing slowly, yet surely. I didn’t stop. I didn’t give up. I didn’t do it for anyone. I didn’t do it for myself to be skinny. I didn’t do it to prove the bullies wrong. I started doing it because I needed to learn. I needed to learn patience. I needed to learn hope. I needed to learn to love myself again. Most of all I needed to find balance and space to fill the holes created by loneliness and by the lack of confidence over time.

As time passed, the pain of it vanished. I learned to heal. I learned that no matter what you need, you always have to need it for you. I lost myself to myself. I didn’t lose to the words uttered by someone to truly reflect their character and their lack of understanding of the right way to help me. I lost myself because losing seemed easier. Achieving is strenuous. It requires you to give yourself to yourself, to throw the pain of lost words, targeted insults and demeaning actions out of yourself.

I channeled my negative energy into hard work. I channeled the need to over do and enhance the progress by wrong means of throwing up. I channeled myself out of myself to become who I am.

Repairing my health physically was a consequence of the need to be me. We all do things to rise above ourselves and be the better version of ourselves.

I’m putting this out because I want the world to know that nothing can break you except you yourself. Pain and hurt may break you, they may make you, but there is also a third option, they may become fragments of both and then simply recede to figments of imagination, of past experiences. Do what needs to be done, so that you may learn to choose yourself over and over again, until you learn to be patient with yourself, to allow yourself to suffer, but more than that, to allow yourself to be the version of you that gives yourself space.

I cried. I broke down. I made excuses that 5x5 ft is not enough to workout. But I also kept going. I also kept eating healthy. I also kept my head held high until I became patient enough to learn that laying in bed with stress didn’t help, that comparing myself to others didn’t help, that there are ways out of situations I didn’t like, and that most of all, I can beat the negativity consuming me if I don’t give up and keep going.

I’m not saying that I don’t have bad days anymore, but today I’m a channel. All energies flow through me, but I direct their direction, and this direction led to the formation of a pool where the only reflection now visible is the one I choose.

And today I see me. I see the reflection of achievement, of strength, of someone who knows that they are bigger than the negativity trying to consume them, that they are smarter and patient enough to beat it.