How someone in Guild Wars 2 led me to a healthier life.

Over the course of the last year I went from a morbidly obese young woman of 22 years to a healthy one. I lost 40 kilo’s (about 6 stone), stopped taking blood pressure medicine and was able to cease my course of treatment. During this process I learned a lot of things. This blog isn’t going to be about the best way to lose weight however, I just want to share my experience and the things I have learned about health, the things I’ve done and what has been important to me on the mental side of things.

Before taken in August 2014 – after taken in June 2015 Unfortunately this is the best comparison I can provide as pictures of me are not a common thing. I still intend to lose more weight (10 kilo or so) however loads of progress has been made.

Now before I’ll move into more in depth posts about what I’ve done and experienced to get to this point I first want to share with you a bit about my worst days before I lost the weight and what has been my turning point. I’ve been obese since I was a kid. All my life people have been trying to get me to lose weight without much success. I simply didn’t have the mentality to hang on and go through with it at the time. Like many kids I was bullied about my weight throughout my life all the way to the first year of college. It didn’t help me if anything it made things worse. I would just start eating more out of depression. At the start of 2012 I went to see my doctor. I don’t even remember what it was about but she took my blood pressure and it was extremely high. I don’t remember the exact numbers all I know is that my doctor was shocked. She urged me to lose weight so I might have had a chance to avoid having to take medicine. So I found my motivation and went to see a dietitian and acquired a diet plan. I kept to that for a while and tried to do a half hour of exercise each day and not much later started following boxing classes. Slowly but surely I lost weight. I managed to lose 20 kilo’s back then, far from a healthy weight, but still I was improving. When it was finally time to get back to the doctor to get my blood pressure checked, to my horror it wasn’t lower than before… it was higher. To this day I still don’t know exactly why this was but I’m assuming it was because of stress. Safe to say I wasn’t in the best of mental states. I left the appointment depressed with all my hard work feeling like it had been for nothing. Now I had to go through hospital visits to check my health and most likely start taking medicine which I wanted to avoid. I stopped caring about my weight at this point and gained everything back plus a little more, junk food had become the thing that would make me feel better. Sometimes my mom would urge me to start losing weight again but I stopped caring. I kept telling myself I was fine the way I was and that there was no point to trying to change it.

I didn’t start losing weight seriously till last year November, but the thing that would eventually lead me up to this point already occurred in August 2012. Gaming has always been one my favourite activities and in 2012 Guild Wars 2 released, I absolutely loved this game and played it for a long time. On an evening in November 2013 while doing stuff in game I met a person. A person who eventually would mean the world to me and saved me from an early death and many health problems to come with being obese. His name is Kal and I’m proud to say that this amazing person is now my beloved. It didn’t take long before we grew close and would talk about things that made us happy but also things that bothered us. In June 2014 I had another attempt at losing the weight, went to the dietitian yet again for help and signed up at the gym. Around this time I moved back in with my parents due to circumstances. This didn’t make the whole thing a lot easier and my motivation faded again bit by bit. Living with my parents was a stressful time, my dad had gotten a heart attack and 5 strokes which left permanent brain damage in October 2013, thing have never been the same since. However, moving back with my parents allowed for me to be closer to Kal than I’d ever been. He has always been there for me and supporting me, making sure I wouldn’t go into a massive depression. At the end of October I was able to move out again. The whole diet plan had failed and I couldn’t bring myself to go the gym anymore. Kal always had extensive knowledge about nutrients, the human body and vitamins and minerals. I asked him for help, we started off sorting out a diet plan that I would be happy with. It was pretty much your standard kind of diet except I’d stop eating bread and for lunch I took a lunchbox of cold rice, chicken and broccoli with me to school. Next to that I started taking supplements next to my food to make sure I’d gotten enough vitamins. Kal took the time to educate me about nutrition – why things were bad and how the body dealt with the nutrients you’d get from food.

Eventually the food schedule became a pain as it was hard to keep making food for lunch the day before and I like to sleep in so most of the time I wouldn’t even bother with breakfast. When I told Kal that I was having a hard time keeping it up, he told me about intermittent fasting. Yes the first week was tough but after that things have never been easier. I didn’t have to worry about having breakfast or having lunch. I’d eat when I’d get home from school, it made things a lot easier and more enjoyable. I didn’t really restrict calories I just made sure I ate healthy foods.

Kal has always been a great support to me ever since I met him he has helped me through a lot of things and I’m forever grateful.   In all honesty I wouldn’t have achieved anything without him. Some might think of it as weird, developing a relationship on a videogame and long distance at that. But we see each other a lot and he makes me very happy. To me he’s worth more than anything and our relationship is the most beautiful thing in the world.

This was a brief summary of my life for the past few years, obviously I didn’t go into much detail at this point. However expect some blogposts about different things like food, intermittent fasting, nutrients, supplements, mental aspects and possibly some personal opinions on the food industry.

Our characters in Guild Wars 2

Sera