Lessons from a 100-Pound Weight Loss
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Editor’s note: Sarah Molhan is an employee at Lose It!, which is part of the Everyday Health Group network. She shared her story with Everyday Health writer Jessica Migala.
By the time I was 20 years old, I weighed 315 pounds (lbs). Actually, I don’t know if that was my highest weight. All I know is that that was the weight my scale topped off at.
The day I saw 314.9 lbs register on my scale, I was thrilled. “Oh my gosh, this thing can finally measure me!” I thought. I went on to lose more than 100 lbs.
So when people share their stories of weight loss with me, I know how challenging it is to change your behaviors and mindset. From Everyday Health’s Weight Loss Reframed Survey and Report, released in 2024, it’s clear that these factors play a role in weight loss success. And as a principal product manager at Lose It!, I’ve learned a lot during my decade of working here.
RELATED: Everyday Health’s Survey and Special Report: Weight Loss Reframed
My professional and personal growth has happened concurrently — there is no boundary between work and personal with me. I think that’s made the impact I’ve been able to have at my job more potent. I’ve had so much time to think about this problem of weight loss and work to find solutions that help others.
Here is what I’ve realized — and what might help you as you’re on your weight loss journey.
You Have Value, No Matter What Weight
I grew up defining myself as someone who was overweight, and who shouldn’t be. I believed that if my body was smaller, I’d be a more valuable person. I’d have more friends, be more loved, and my value as a human would increase. This led me toward developing an obsession with weight loss. The many failed weight loss attempts enforced that I had very little value, which just led to me grow up with pretty deep-seated feelings of self-hate.
The problem wasn’t that I was eating too much food and becoming increasingly overweight. The problem was that I used food and eating to comfort myself and manage my emotions, and the more overweight I got, the more I needed to comfort myself, so the more I ate. Every effort to hate myself thin resulted in me comforting myself fatter. I didn’t know any other way.
What I know now is that someone’s value as a person is not at all related to the size of our bodies. We all deserve to be loved, have friends, and be cared for, regardless of the way our bodies are shaped. We have value, no matter what.
Food and Exercise Have No Moral Value
You are not “bad” if you ate cake. You are not “good” if you ate a salad. Health doesn’t come from restriction, and when you stop considering your food choices as moral or immoral, it’s freeing.
We Come Together When We Aren’t Silent About Our Struggles
There was a time when I wrote a blog, and one of the entries was about my struggle with binge eating. I shared this post on my public Facebook page. So many people responded that they also had experienced binge eating. It shocked me. These were people who I didn’t expect to have disordered eating and they still shared these same problems. That was a great learning experience. There are so many things that people keep secret, but we don’t actually have to be silent about it.
Speaking of binge eating, I learned that the best way to overcome it is to stop restricting. Eat the things that you like, but learn to fit them into your diet plan. My recovery from binge eating disorder occurred after my son was born. It wasn’t just me that I had to worry about, I had someone else depending on me. I wanted to model healthy behaviors for him and take good enough care of myself to be able to raise my son.
The Best Tool for Weight Loss Is Therapy
Thinking about my inner voice and how to improve it is so important. Although I’m not in therapy anymore, it’s so important to address your feelings about yourself and your weight. And we have many of them, clearly. In Everyday Health’s Weight Loss Reframed Survey, 75 percent of respondents reported that their weight affects how they feel about themselves, and 69 percent reported that having a “normal” weight does or could make them happier.
I’ve personally been managing so many emotions with food for my entire life. At the same time, I felt emotionally stunted. I had never learned how to recover from being disappointed or angry or bored without food. So, it was a learning process to stop using food as a coping mechanism — and it’s something I’m still working on. A couple of strategies I use that have helped others are:
- Being reminded that all feelings are okay and that they’re temporary
- Creating space between you and the emotion: For me, I imagined looking at myself and the emotions I was experiencing from a third-party perspective. This helps give me the sense that whatever I was feeling would pass.
The Main Purpose of Exercise Is Not to Lose Weight
I lost 120 lbs in a year. During that time, I was really restricting my diet while following WW. I was obsessed with losing at least 2 lbs per week, and I focused my entire life on eating as little as I could. I was also going to the gym for more than an hour every day after work.
In truth, the thinking around exercise and weight loss is outdated. According to Everyday Health’s Weight Loss Reframed Survey, 65 percent of respondents reported that they turned to increasing exercise or physical activity to lose weight (the second most common weight loss tactic reported, after eating fewer indulgent or high-calorie foods).
In truth, weight loss has a complicated relationship with exercise, because when you move more, you feel more physically hungry. It’s easy to get into the mindset that you deserve to eat XYZ because you exercised that day.
That said, there are other valid reasons to work out for your physical and mental health, such as longevity and confidence. It’s rewarding to see growth and improvements in what I’m able to physically do. For example, thanks to my continued commitment to strength training and managing my weight, I was able to do my first-ever pull-up earlier this year, which was a lifetime goal. Exercise and fitness have changed how I see myself and see what my body can do. I think they were a big part of proving to myself that I have a lot of reasons to love and appreciate my body, which was helpful after decades of hating it and just wanting to be thin.
There Is No ‘Best‘ Diet for Everyone
With so much marketing behind dieting, it’s difficult to come to realize that there is not one best way to eat. People make money convincing you otherwise. The one thing that matters most for weight loss is getting into a calorie deficit. That’s when your body will start to burn your fat stores. There are so many ways you can get into that deficit, and it’s important to find the eating plan that you enjoy and feels sustainable to you — not a trendy diet.
Motivation Alone Isn’t the Key to Weight Loss Success
People think they need to feel motivated to lose weight, and lack of motivation was the most commonly reported barrier among respondents to Everyday Health’s Weight Loss Reframed Survey. Maintaining motivation always is not realistic for most people. Motivation is a great way to kick-start your goal. But if you’re depending on the feeling of motivation all the time, you’ll quickly find out that life happens. You’ll get an unexpected project at work, your child will get sick, it will rain and you won’t take your walk, and so on. It’s all about developing sound habits, coping mechanisms, and the right mindset. Have confidence that you can overcome every obstacle.
Consider what’s maintainable for your schedule — and what you might enjoy. For example, my ideal might be going for a walk and making my breakfast and lunch the night before. If that’s too much, at least I can go for a short walk and have healthy food in my fridge that I can quickly grab or toss together. Motivation might get you going, but once you’re going, you have to figure out the daily habits that help you be the person you want to be.
Regarding mindset, realize that the habits that work for you now won’t necessarily be the things that carry you in the future. Over time, changes are inevitable, so it’s important to be flexible and adaptable with your lifestyle. For me, my child will grow up; I might live somewhere different. For every season of life, it’s up to you to figure out the right combination of healthy habits that work for you.
Realize the ‘Goal Weight’ Is Arbitrary
It’s good to have a goal, but you don’t have to get down to what’s considered a healthy body mass index (BMI) range unless that’s something you and your doctor choose. In my experience, a more doable approach is to get to a weight that you can maintain where you can live a life you enjoy. The other option is to restrict and reduce the fun things in your life to maintain a lower weight. The brilliance of this is you get to choose! You don’t have to get down to a weight that someone else tells you to because you’re the one living your life in your body — not them. You can also choose not to lose any weight at all.
When I was 315 lbs, the idea of reaching a healthy BMI would have required me to drastically change my day-to-day behaviors. At one point, I was down 130 to 140 lbs from my initial weight. That was when I went vegan, and I found I didn’t have many food options to eat, which resulted in extreme calorie restriction and weight loss. Still, I was still swimming in self-hate. My motivation to eat healthy and move my body was still driven by these negative feelings.
Today, I’ve happily maintained a 100-pound weight loss since my heaviest weight. Truthfully, I am working to slowly lose more weight, about 5 lbs at a time. I can see myself maintaining 10 to 15 lbs lower than I am now, but it’s not a high priority. I feel great, my weight and body don’t stop me from living the life I want, and my health biomarkers are all excellent. If I wanted to maintain a lower weight, I’d need to change my lifestyle a bit more than I’d want to.
I’m 37 years old now. Only in the last three years have I found self-love, appreciation, and positive thinking. In the past I was much more focused on being good enough and leaning into perfectionism very hard. I’m focused on enjoying — not changing — who I am and who I can become.
Understand That Weight Loss Is Not Physical
Whoa, I know. So much of weight loss is mental and emotional. My identity was all about being super overweight, and when I lost a lot of weight and I wasn’t anymore, it was also a challenge to figure out who I was again. Going through that identity shift makes this journey complicated. But know that we’re here as a community if you ever need to talk about it.
Everyday Health‘s Weight Loss Reframed Survey queried 3,144 Americans nationwide ages 18 and older who had tried losing weight in the previous six months. The study was fielded between July 10 and August 18, 2023, across demographic groups, genders, and health conditions. Survey recruitment took place via an online portal, in app, and via email. The margin of error for the sample size of 3,144 is +/-1.7 percent at a 95 percent confidence level.
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