Do People Still Write Blogs?

    Hello again. I used to write a pretty popular weight loss/health blog, This is Not a Diet, It's My Life, in the 2010s. I also ran an associated FB page, This is Not a Diet, It's Your Life, which had about 30,000 followers at its peak. That was back when Facebook was still not public, there were no ads, and independent interest pages like mine could get views and followers organically. If people liked it, they would like it, and they would see it in their timeline because the timeline was chronological. The good old days. 

    Now, I don't know what Facebook is like because I deleted mine in 2017 and never looked back. By then, it had become something else entirely, and even though I no longer enjoyed it, I was addicted to it. I was unable to moderate my consumption of Facebook, so I had to abstain entirely. They say an alcoholic is always an alcoholic. Maybe I am still addicted to Facebook, but since it sucks now, I have no desire to find out.

    Lately I have missed the writing. After the end of my blog, I sometimes continued living my life in a similar fashion, with periods of exercise, diet, and general concern for healthy living, interspersed with periods of not doing those things so much. Life things happened. I moved to another state. I changed jobs. There was that whole Covid thing. And I lost my best friend, who I met on Facebook back when Facebook was cool, to cancer in 2022. Maybe I will write more about some of these things if I keep this up.

    Losing my best friend got me thinking about getting back into the whole healthy living thing. Since I met her when I was a person who was into that, maybe if I became that person again, I could meet another friend like her. Of course, there will never be anyone like her, and I realize this is a kind of unhinged thought process, but still, it continued to nag at me.

    Not that I had ever gone back to the way I was before. At my highest known weight of 287 lb, I would sometimes eat whole bags of chips, I drank a lot of caloric things, drank a lot of beer, ate out whenever I wanted to, ate pizza, pasta, fast food, and whatever else I felt like eating without a second thought. If anyone is reading this who remembers me, you may remember that I had lost 100 lb at some point in my early 20s by following a very unhealthy diet of one meal a day and walking everywhere. Gained that all back. During my blogging years, I documented my "lifestyle change" and I guess in retrospect, it did actually change my habits permanently. I went from 287 to 165, and was finally "healthy" according to the dread BMI chart. That weight turned out to be impossible to maintain, and I fluctuated my way back up even before I stopped blogging. 

    I never totally went back to my old ways. The truth is that I had enjoyed my "new lifestyle" and was always thinking I was about to get back into it seriously. I lost and regained the same 20 lb for the last however many years it's been... maybe 10? Bouncing around between 260 and 240ish. And by the definition of a "weight loss success" I guess that means I am one. I think most people don't realize this, but a "weight loss success" is not defined as getting to your goal weight and staying there. It's defined as losing 10% of your bodyweight and maintaining it. So when you see those statistics about how many people succeed at long term weight loss, it doesn't mean what you think it means. But by the definition, I am a "success".

    Do I feel like a success when my weight hovers around 250, at 5'9", when I am alternately trying to shave off a few pounds and then gaining it back for years on end? Not really, to be honest. But I don't feel like a failure either. There's really so little emotion even tied up in this anymore, it just is what it is. I explored all my feelings about my size on that old blog, and I let it go. I am who I am, and as someone who was overweight as a child, the odds will always be stacked against me. Neither do I completely buy into the current iteration of body positivity where no matter how high your weight goes, you're discouraged from trying to lose it. 

    A couple of months ago, I started having some knee pain. One day, I just woke up and my knee felt sore. I had never had knee pain, so this was a bit concerning but I ignored it and went on about my life. A friend was visiting from out of town and we went on a 7 mile hike with lots of elevation changes and stairs. That was probably a mistake. My knee continued getting worse after that. Walking, my primary form of exercise for the previous decade, was clearly exacerbating it. So I went to doctors.

    Long story short: one doctor said I have a bakers cyst, it will go away in a few weeks. In a few weeks it got worse. They sent me to physical therapy, but the PT didn't know what was causing the pain so the exercises she prescribed for me to do were clearly not right, and again it got worse. Now I stopped taking walks. I cried in the PT office and they finally referred me for an MRI. Then I had to wait for insurance approval. Then once I had approval, I had to wait for scheduling. Finally I got the MRI and it confirmed I had a bakers cyst, a sprained MCL, and the beginning stages of arthritis. What can I do about that? Exercise and lose weight, says the orthopedist.

    But while I was waiting for the MRI, I had noticed that the stationary bike at the PT office did not bother my knee the way walking did. So, I joined a gym. I had not belonged to a gym since 2019, and hadn't gone regularly since well before that. While I was waiting to find out more, I started going to the gym at 6 am every day to ride the bike. My knee started to feel better. Being in the gym made me remember "the good old days" of the OG This is Not a Diet, and I got back on My Fitness Pal and started getting serious about my diet. More serious than I had gotten in many years. Then I put my age into one of those calorie calculators and realized why my half-assed dieting attempts didn't really work. I'm not 30 anymore, I'm 45. My caloric needs have dropped. So I put in a lower calorie goal in MFP.

    And lo and behold, I lost weight. I've lost about 15 lb in 2 months, and am currently hovering around 235, finally broke past the 240 barrier I had been stuck at all those years prior. And now I feel I am "back on track" and maybe I'm going to get a little more successful with this weight loss thing.

    Because I do not want to be a person with a bad knee. If I can possibly help it out by losing weight and exercising, I'm going to try it. Even if that does not fix it, being at a lower weight will help me convince them to do a knee replacement when/if the time comes. And the bonus is, I get to lose weight and I feel great. I have graduated from the bike to the elliptical and I'm doing strength training too. And maybe, I will meet a new friend. Someone who is into being healthy and wants to talk about it. Maybe, I can make that void in my life since my friend died, just a little smaller.

    So, that's a lot of little snippets about what's going on now. Hopefully I will continue writing and I can elaborate on some of these things. I started looking for blogs written by people like me, sort-of-successful at weight loss, life long yo-yo dieters, etc. I didn't really find anything. If you know of some, please let me know. But otherwise, I guess I will be the thing I am looking for in the world, or at least try it out. It feels good. I always liked writing, even before anyone ever read it. Maybe nobody will ever read this either, and that's ok. I don't know how you get your writing out into the world without social media, and I'm not willing to go that route right now. So maybe I am just writing this for myself. However, if you are reading this and you remember me or you don't, feel free to say hi! I'd love to know what's been going on with you.

Kate