Guest Post - Amie's Weight Loss Journey

Please welcome to autonomous eats the story of my friend Amie, of who I am so proud!  

      Recently broken up with my fiancé, just quit the most horrendous job as a cashier at Walmart and just moved back in with my parents. And I weighed 360 pounds. I wanted to die. In fact, if I didn’t do something about my weight I was going kill myself. My parents realized how serious I was about getting help to lose weight and we met with surgeons about doing the LapBand surgery. That was four years ago.

      My insurance company, being the wonderful entity they are, paid for none of it so I got a loan through my bank for $16,000. The way I looked at it was surgery or a new car. I had to have a psychiatric evaluation pre-op (I’m sure I barely passed that). One month before I also had to follow an extremely low sugar diet so my liver would shrink so they could maneuver their tools easily inside of me. I lost 10 pounds that month alone. The day of the surgery I wasn’t nervous at all. All I could feel was excitement. It was a fairly easy surgery. I only had to stay overnight. I felt pretty good after the first week, and after about four weeks I was back to normal. Remember I wasn’t working, so it may have taken longer to get back to work. 

I had to eat liquids for three months. Talk about getting sick of something quickly. To this day sometimes I have a hard time stomaching liquids. But the best liquid meal I had was some homemade gravy that my Granny made me. Haha. Not the healthiest. I dropped my first 50 pounds pretty quickly. Without exercising. Then I realized I had to start hitting the gym for the weight to keep coming off. My doctors warned me that my band was not a magic band, it was a tool to help me lose weight and that I would still need to exercise and eat healthy. They were right.

My portions are small. Each meal is about cup. I’m not supposed to drink when I eat, but it’s really hard not to. I challenge you to go a whole meal without drinking. I drink a protein shake for breakfast every morning. It took me forever to find a protein that wasn’t disgusting. I use BSN Syntha-6 powder and mix it with vitamin D milk. 30 grams of protein in one meal baby!

So now I’m down to 226 pounds. I’ve lost 134 pounds! I’ve lost a whole freaking person. 

I’m currently exercising every day. I just completed Jillian Michaels 30 Day Shred and now I’m doing her Ripped in 30. Sometimes I add a run because I feel her workouts don’t have enough cardio. I can run a mile in 15:30. It may not be the fastest time ever, but how many people do you know that can’t run a mile? Can you run a mile? I used to not even be able to run for a straight minute. I have these beautiful collarbones that I can see now. Oh, and my hip bones, I can see those too. 

Check out that awesome bum curve ;)

Now I’m dealing with the issues of excess skin. Tummy tuck and thigh lift are planned for January!!! I’m so excited! I also have a goal of losing 35 more pounds before then. I think my final goal would be a weight of around 175 or so. Final surgeries would be a breast lift and arm lift. I cannot wait until that scale shows me a weight under 200. Only 26 pounds to go!