In March of 2020, when the whole world closed, we like all other non-essential companies started working from home during the pandemic. By May, I was going incredibly stir crazy. I was also starting to see my weight creep back up. I hit 309.7, my highest weight. It was .7 pounds higher than where I was three months after my dad passed away in 2016.
I couldn’t do it anymore.
I had watched Crossfit documentaries for years and loved the intensity of the sport, though I was also too intimidated to start. I had known the whole world to judge me my entire life for my size. The last thing I wanted to do was go into a gym and be judged by ripped beautiful people.
But in May, I decided I didn’t care anymore.
I was going to go and try CrossFit and if I didn’t like it I would allow myself to not go back. I started doing research on box gyms around me and close to my work (I thought the pandemic would only be a few weeks…) I visited websites, social media, and watched videos to figure out where I might somewhat fit in.
It wasn’t until I watched videos of my current box owner lifting insane weight and just being super blunt in the description posts that I knew this is the place I wanted to try. I went to a walk through with him and he was just as blunt in real life as he is on social media. In the end, he told me, “Alright, it’s 30 days for $30. You like it you stay, if you don’t you go.” He’s not big on the sales game that most gyms are and that made me even more interested in starting.
I had nothing to lose.
I started May 20, 2020, and I was going three times a week. My first day though, I will never forget. We were doing single-arm dumbbell snatches and I couldn’t bend down to reach the dumbbell on the ground. JB, the coach, had to put a 45lb plate on the ground so I could put the dumbbell on top of it and actually reach it. I stood in the back because I was trying to hide. I didn’t want anyone to see me struggle. I didn’t want to seem weak or be vulnerable. But I was all of those things.
After about a month, I started going five days a week and fell in love with it. I couldn’t wait for Saturday classes to open back up so I could go six days a week. I started seeing results, but I wanted more and I knew that my nutrition habits weren’t good. I was still eating poorly, including fast food. When I started cleaning up my food, more results started coming my way.
By November I had lost 40 pounds.
I couldn’t believe that I was almost 50 pounds being gone and I got a message from JB. He wanted to offer me a month free of working with our new nutritionist Sam. I had been thinking about how I needed to bring someone in to help me but I was so (again) intimidated. So of course, I said yes. Sam got me started on macros, he made me responsible for meal planning around the numbers that he gave me.
The weight kept coming off. I decided I wanted to kick it up a little. I had lost a total of 50 pounds by the end of November and I was six months into my CrossFit journey. I decided (crazily) that I was going to try and lose 100 pounds in six months. That would be four pounds a week, every week, for six months.
December came and I just went balls to the wall. I focused on my workouts and my nutrition. I cut out any and all bullshit and I lost 16 pounds in December. I finally started being able to do workouts at Rx.
I’m now 78 pounds down.
