Weight, Weight, I’ll Tell You: How I Lost 140 Pounds and Kept It Off

My recent contribution to Long Leaf Law about losing weight and keeping it off left one reader hungry for more:

“I just thought it could be very valuable to dig into the specifics of how you lost weight and kept it off over the long term. I presume that you have come to enjoy and value your lifestyle, and some concrete examples of what you did and the mindset that you brought to it might inspire others.”

Such kind and insightful words merit a thoughtful response. Over the years, others who have heard my story about losing 140 pounds during my senior year of college have also asked how I lost the weight and how I’ve managed to keep it off.

Some have even stuck around long enough to hear my response. Most, however, have scattered like bowling pins in the aftermath of a perfectly rolled strike. Some look at me as if I were speaking a foreign language. Others think I’m from Mars.

How I lost the weight, in and of itself, could fill an entire book, and perhaps one day it will. For the purposes of this blog post, though, I will stick with the keywords and save the stories – oh my God the stories! – for another day.

Step one, I stopped gaining weight. More specifically, I stopped overeating. Combined with a modest dose of activity, which increased as my weight decreased, I lost a lot of “easy weight” in a hurry. Big people will know what I’m talking about.

Step two, in which I broke through the proverbial wall, I said goodbye to cheeseburgers and pizza, the staple diet of any college student, and made new “friends.”

There wasn’t a wealth of nutritional information on package labels back then, much less in fast food restaurants, but I discovered one food that I really liked, mushrooms, didn’t have a lot of calories. Some even referred to my diet as the “mushroom diet.” Lord only knows how many cases of Green Giant mushrooms I went through, straight out of the jar.

Russell Rawlings serves as director of communications for the North Carolina Bar Association and welcomes every opportunity to write and talk about wellness, weight and walking.