A man who struggled with his weight for most of his life has opened up about how he lost 125 pounds and kept it off without counting calories or restricting foods.
Chris Terrell, 38, from Jonesboro, Arkansas, overhauled his lifestyle and went from ‘Every single time I lost weight, I would always gain it back plus more because I never addressed the real problem,’ he said. ‘I always put the weight back on because I was the same person as when I started.’
Terrell, who weighed more than 200 pounds by the time he was 15, explained that he had developed a number of healthy habits over the years. A self-described ‘workaholic,’ he filled up on junk food and lived a mostly sedentary lifestyle. Instead of prioritizing sleep, he would watch TV or play video games until two or three in the morning.
After years of waiting for motivation to strike, his father’s death was a wake-up call. Terrell started swimming three times a week a built up his endurance and changed how he approached eating, focusing on losing one pound at a time.
Instead of restricting foods or counting calories, he ate only when he was hungry and weighed himself just once a month. ‘As long as the scale wasn’t going up, I was moving in the right direction,’ he said of his weight loss approach.
Terrell also realized his unrewarding job and unhappy relationship were added stressors in his life that he did need, and he moved on. He lost 30 pounds in the first six months and nearly 100 pounds more in the two years that followed. He has maintained his weight loss for the past year and a half.
290 pounds to 165 pounds in two and a half years after the sudden death of his father in 2019. In an interview with Insider, he recalled how he used to be stuck in a cycle of gaining weight and crash dieting. It wasn’t until he changed his mindset that he was able to change his body.
Terrell, who is now a weight loss coach, has been sharing his journey and the strategies that have helped him change his mindset on TikTok, where he has more than 287,000 followers.
In a recent video, he shared the three character traits he had to adopt to lose weight and keep it off. ‘The first thing I had to improve was patience,’ he explained. ‘I had to become far more patient than I ever could have imagined.’
It helped him to realize that his actions are what make him a patient person — not his thoughts. He may want to rush and do everything at once, but he knows that by staying the course, he is practising patience.
Terrell also had to learn how to show himself forgiveness when he makes mistakes. ‘On a weight loss journey, you’re gonna f**k it up a lot — like a lot a lot,’ he noted. ‘You’ve gotta have the ability to have sympathy for yourself at the moment and to forgive yourself.’
Finally, he had to teach himself to be sceptical of his own negative thoughts. ‘Sometimes I can have an incredibly intense thought with so much emotion behind it, and I can be 100 per cent convinced I’m right, and I can be wrong,’ he said.
Terrell recalled times he became convinced he had gained weight only to find out that he had lost it. Other times he was sure he had lost weight, and he didn’t.
‘My feelings and my thoughts are not capable of predicting the future, and yours aren’t’ either,’ he said. ‘I must be sceptical of thoughts, especially when they’re s****y thoughts, especially when they’re doomsday thoughts.’
He added that learning to help him be more sceptical of his thoughts has also helped him become a more patient and forgiving person.
