21-year-old Texan, Chloe Bingham, ‘avoided dating altogether’ due to her weight, but lost an incredible 81 pounds (5.8 stone) in 20 months and transformed her whole life.
The Texas Lutheran University grad had huge confidence issues, particularly with dating, saying ‘dating did not occur for me until I had lost all the weight, because I had a lot more confidence in the way I looked’.
Taking the right steps to help improve her confidence, Chloe started going to the gym five times a week, as well as eating more healthily – her transformation is impressive.
Speaking to UNILAD, Chloe said:
I have been overweight my entire life, but really gained weight when I started college, gaining forty pounds in my first two years.
So I decided to start losing weight in the fall of 2016. I was 19 years old, 219 pounds, while only standing 5’1, and I was sick of being morbidly obese. I remember telling my mom, “Mom, I am going to lose 100 pounds,” and I really have not looked back ever since.
I began by counting calories, restricting to 1200 calories a day. I later added some gym time to my week while attending school. At this point I was a junior in college and was in the middle of a very busy semester.
Focusing on my diet and nutrition gave me something to think about that did not have anything to do with my stressors at school, which I found to be therapeutic in a way.
In about six months I had lost 40 pounds, finding weight loss to be much more simple than I had originally thought it would be. The greatest struggles that I faced during this time were family gatherings.
It was family holidays that were hardest for Chloe, ‘such as Thanksgiving or Christmas’, because they don’t hold back on the food.
She said ‘attempting to stick to my diet while surrounded by my favourite food was difficult, but my family was supportive of my weight loss’.
Chloe continued:
While I’d hit the ground running when I first began to lose weight, rapidly dropping a good amount of weight in a few months, my weight loss slowed as I ran into stressful times in school.
As a senior in college, I had new problems to stress over, mostly having to do with applying to graduate school to pursue my Master of Counselling degree. Between acquiring recommendation letters to taking the GRE, I was incredibly stressed and often turned to food.
Chloe revealed:
During this time I realised I was an emotional eater, and had many nights where I would come home and eat spoonfuls of peanut butter straight out of the jar. My weight loss slowed during this time, but I had still lost 60 pounds total by the beginning of 2018.
At the beginning of this year I discovered my hard work had paid off and I had been accepted to the school I had been wanting to attend for years.
After I had taken care of that giant weight of stress off my shoulders, I dove right back into weight loss, and dropped another 20 in my last semester of undergrad. I have another 20 to go but am now focusing less on weight loss and more on physical fitness as well.
Talking about the best parts of her weight loss journey, Chloe said it was ‘fitting into clothes that I had not fit into since high school, and then having to get new clothes because my high school clothes soon became too big’.
She explained:
Being able to walk into any clothing store and realise that I could actually fit into clothes that were sold there was also an enormous positive. Being able to share clothes with my sisters who have always been smaller than me has also been a fun new experience.
I also love walking around and not feeling like people are judging my size. Overall I just have more confidence in myself and my ability to accomplish things that I put my mind to.
All it took was a bit of effort and dedication, and my lifestyle completely changed for the better.
She said it was ‘so much easier’ than she thought it would be, though she’s encountered many difficulties.
Congratulations to Chloe on feeling better about herself.
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