This year, it has been clear to me that my way of doing things is sometimes not the right way and I have some valuable insights to share with you in that regard.
In 2021, I moved to another city for two months, lost around 7 kilograms and ended up having around 75-76 kilograms. But then I moved back and in less than two months I put all the weight back.
Since that moment and until recently this year, I struggled to lose weight and go lower than 82 kilograms. Since the end of 2021 and the summer of 2023, I weighed from 82 to 85 kilograms. And I tried so much to lose weight.
I was talking to friends about losing weight trying to understand what I was doing wrong. I was active, running, and dancing. I was having days where I was eating only one meal per day. As soon as something seemed to improve, I was going into an emotional unbalance and all the progress vanished in a heartbeat.
Eventually, I realized that I was consuming more carbohydrates than I should have and decided to do something stupid. I replaced all the carbohydrates I was eating with Pepsi Max. It has zero sugar (so no carbs) but has the same taste as normal Pepsi. This was the strategy that helped me lose 4 kilograms in May 2023, going from 82 to 78 kilograms.
Therefore, you may say that eating too many carbs was the problem. I don’t know what to say about that and you’ll understand in a second why.
As a side note, this year I wanted to travel to 10 different countries. After I went to Budapest in February, I was supposed to go to Zurich in March but a few days before my flight something happened and couldn’t go anymore.
I had to take care of some personal problems and couldn’t stick to the travel plan anymore. Time passed by and sometime during April I decided to do again Camino de Santiago.
In 2022, I did my first Camino de Santiago from Porto to Santiago de Compostela and, since I gave up on my initial plan, I wanted to keep traveling. Therefore, I decided to do another Camino de Santiago, this time from Lisbon.
It took me 26 days to walk around 800 kilometers and, after finishing the entire journey and going back home, I was weighting 72 kilograms.
But that wasn’t part of my plan.
I had no plan of losing weight on Camino. But it happened.
At that moment I realized that my way of losing weight was not working for me and I got to lose weight in a way that, for me, had nothing to do with losing weight.
Even more, considering that before and during my Camino I was spending time on Facebook groups about Camino and most people were saying that they didn’t lose any weight. I lost 6 kilograms in 26 days.
Before moving on with the article, I have something else to mention.
I don’t believe eating too many carbs was the problem. Right now, 5 months after Camino de Santiago, I manage to stay in the interval of 72-74 kilograms and there are moments when I’m eating even more carbs than before.
There’s something else happening that’s out of my control and while I may have some cues, I don’t know for sure what’s going on.
Some things happen without your involvement
After spending my last two years reading about and practicing spirituality, I believe there’s more than just our goals, actions, and results.
Just as it happened to me that I got to lose weight in a way that had nothing in common with my way of doing things, I bet you had experiences in your life where:
- You got amazing things without investing any effort;
- You worked and struggled toward something and eventually you got (almost) no results.
If that’s the case, then it means that your goal or your actions are not the main ingredient that brings your results.
If not, what is it?
Again, I may have some cues, but I’m not really sure.
In a way, it seems like The Universe, God’s will, or however you want to call it, saw that I was struggling with losing weight and put in front of me a way of doing it.
But then, if that’s what happened, why did it take me so much to get to a point where I can receive the new path for losing weight?
After all, if you look at my story, I struggled to lose weight from the end of 2021 till the summer of 2023. Almost two years.
To give up your way of doing means to let a part of you die
From my point of view and what I’m able to understand right now, I needed two years to let go of my ways of losing weight.
I was so attached to the way I believed I could lose weight that, even though I had no results, I kept doing it. Only if I knew that simply going for a one-month hike would remove all the struggle…
My ways of losing weight were connected to some strong beliefs that I needed almost two years to be able to let them go.
And it makes me think… maybe during this period, The Universe tried to show me different ways of losing weight but I refused them all. I needed something as big as a Camino de Santiago, where I had to walk 800 kilometers and go through an emotional journey so I could eventually change something at my core.
During and after my Camino de Santiago journey many things changed and the way I look at losing weight is one of them.
This brings me to a moment of consciousness: our lives are made of countless beliefs that we’re not aware of and are governing our lives. We have some beliefs that are so strong and, because of these beliefs, we are who we are. And the difficult (and almost impossible) task is to identify the beliefs that are holding us back.
With love and optimism,
David