I'm about two and a half months into my 2025 keto journey. Just to recap: I started at 265 pounds, my highest weight ever. This is heavy for me. I won't rehash my entire life story here — I've already offloaded most of that into personal audio journals — but growing up, I was always lean. The real weight gain began around age 20, after moving out and sliding into a cycle of drinking and partying. Though I kept the weight off for a few years, the groundwork for a bad lifestyle had already been laid. By 25, it had fully caught up to me. Add in a stressful job, shifting social circles, and brand new living situations, and the habits compounded. The result was a severely overweight body by my early 30s.

A few reflections on life at 250 pounds and above. Having lived on both sides of the line—healthy and obese—I can say two things with certainty: (1) Being overweight is profoundly uncomfortable. Basic things, like putting on socks, feel like small battles. Existing becomes a sweaty, breathless endeavor. And (2) I never once forgot what it felt like to be healthy.

The first point is obvious. I struggle to believe anyone severely overweight is truly "comfortable" in their body, no matter what slogans we tell ourselves. You can love yourself, sure. But physical discomfort isn't something you can love away. And 250 pounds at six feet tall isn't even the extreme; I see people my height pushing 275 or 300 pounds. That cannot be a pleasant experience.

The second point — the memory of a healthy body — is the harder one. I was trapped in a body that felt foreign, but my mind never adjusted. I remain the first-person witness to an ongoing tension between my "skinny mind" and "fat body." I'll use "fat" here not as a pejorative, but as a neutral descriptor—a term that matches the reality of how I looked and felt. Some people feel differently about the word. I don't.

That's the primer. Now to the substance.

I first tried keto from January to around October 2020. I started at about 250 pounds and dropped to 185 pounds—without much exercise, while drinking alcohol, and eating plenty of "dirty keto" foods like burgers and bacon. Up close, it didn't look healthy. But from a distance—month over month—the results were clear. I lost weight steadily.

Eventually, though, I stopped keto without a plan. Between 2021 and late 2024, I put all the weight back on, and then some.

What did I learn from round one? That I was far more comfortable living in a 185-pound body. That discipline matters. That keto worked, but it needed to be a longer-term commitment—or at least have a real exit strategy. And so, four years later, here we are.

By 2025, I felt sick. Not myself. Every day, my weight confronted me—not because I chose to focus on it, but because obesity makes itself impossible to ignore. I knew how to get into ketosis, so I did.

I started again at 265 pounds. As of today, roughly 2.5 months in, I'm sitting around 235 pounds—30 pounds lighter. And this time, I'm locked in.