About Me

Welcome to Get Skinny, Be Happy! – a blog about losing weight, getting healthy and improving your life.

I am a 30-something creative professional from Austin, TX. I started Get Skinny, Be Happy so I would have a place to write about my ongoing adventure of losing weight with Medifast.

Since a very young age, I have struggled with my weight. I don’t think I have been at my ideal weight since elementary school. After going through a financially disastrous divorce, I began to re-prioritize a lot of things in my life. One of my decisions was to lose weight and get into good physical shape. My problem was that I knew very little about how to eat healthy, exercise or even cook food. I’ve spent most of life since high school sitting in front of computers, eating fast food and getting very little exercise.

It was time for a change.

After a lot of research, I found The Hacker’s Diet, which is an awesome (and free) resource. It put a lot of things into perspective and broke the weight loss concept down to it’s most simple foundation = Consume less calories than you use. It also outlines a simple exercise program that anybody can put into action. It worked for me. My weight started to decrease. My energy increased. I started to feel much better overall.

Earlier this year, I found myself back in my hometown for a period of several months. After growing accustomed to the amazing variety of delicious and healthy foods available in Austin, TX. I found myself thrown for a loop. I was working very long and very stressful hours and I lost some control over my diet. I was trying hard and keeping my calories down, but I felt terrible – almost poisoned – from the food I was eating.

Losing weight with Medifast

Despite having lost 30 pounds from my heaviest weight, I still about 50 pounds to go. I was ready to try something more drastic. I read about a movie director who had recently lost a lot of weight on the Optifast diet. I was ready to try anything – even a liquids only diet. The only problem was that Optifast requires medical supervision. Before starting the program, you have to attend one of their clinics, which I would have gladly done, but there wasn’t an Optifast Clinic within driving distance. I looked for other options and found Medifast.

I spent countless hours analyzing the details of the Medifast program. I read all the stories about people who had supposedly had great success losing weight with Medifast. But it all seemed too good to be true. If the food tasted terrible, I would be out $300, which is a significant amount for me these days. Finally, I bit the bullet and ordered a starter pack.

To my pleasant surprise, I really enjoyed the food (except for the scrambled eggs). After the initial 3 day adjustment period (what I like to call Medifast Detox), my energy levels returned and I felt amazing. I lost almost 20 pounds in the first months alone. Now I am gearing up for the final stretch, in which my goal is to get my weight down to 190. This will be the first time I have been under 200 pounds since before college. I am very excited.

Half blog… half therapy session…

This blog is a place to dump my thoughts and hopefully interact with other people who are on the Medifast journey. I am still getting comfortable with the whole idea of blogging and how much information to share. To be honest, I am not very comfortable talking about my weight loss in “real life.” I have always been very self-conscious about my weight and preferred to avoid the situation instead of confronting it. So the blog will be a form of therapy as well.

Thanks for reading Get Skinny, Be Happy. I would love to hear from you in the comments section or via e-mail. I can be reached via getskinnybehappy [at] gmail.com. I’m also on Twitter @christophallen.

C. Allen