I had a conversation with a neighbor about weight loss. She’s been trying to lose weight through a lot of running (and I mean A LOT of running). She asked me how I had lost my weight, and when I told her that I did it mainly through adopting a healthier lifestyle and managing my diet by avoiding sugar, grains, dairy, alcohol, legumes, and soy, she told me that there was no way she could give up grains. She doubled down: she said that she would be able to lose all the weight she needed to through running. I (sincerely) wished her the best of luck, and told her that I’m always here to help with advice on how to get healthy and lose weight.

She had known me at this point for seven years, and when she met me, I was morbidly obese. She saw me go through the transition from unhealthy to healthy, from morbidly obese to average size. The results I had achieved didn’t lie, and neither did I when I told her that I accomplished all of this through the use of diet alone.

I am not saying (nor did I say to her) that my way is the only way. There are many successful people out there who have lost weight and become healthier through the use of different lifestyles, many of which include insane amounts of physical exercise. I get it; it’s possible. If you put in enough work, you can achieve results. My point is, was, and will always be that I lost all the weight (150 lbs) with LITTLE/MINOR/TINY AMOUNT physical effort. I felt as if I’d found a cheat code to life with as easy as the weight was coming off me (in relation to the amount of physical exercise a lot of people I knew went through to lose weight).

Maybe (and I just thought of this) it comes down to the kind of hardship you are willing to accept. Some people (like me) are more able to deal with utilizing discipline, self control, motivation, and perseverance to lose weight while others are better suited for using extreme, hard, and difficult physical exercise and conditioning to create a caloric deficit required to lose weight. Again, to each his/her own.

I took the way that was easiest for me to not only wrap my head around, but allowed me the greatest chance of success. I chose changing my diet and my lifestyle, and over three years later, I don’t feel like I’m missing out on anything. In fact, I feel the opposite; my new lifestyle has allowed me to achieve things that I thought were well past my ability to achieve at this point in my life. I’m also in much better shape, and definitely much healthier. For me, I believe I made the right decisions. After all, the results don’t lie.