A West Midlands man, who weighed almost 30 stone, has lost 17 stone by walking.
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00:00So my name is Stephen Duffield and at my heaviest I was 398 pounds and over the
00:10course of a year I'd got down to about 11 and a half stone.
00:15Everything was going my way. I had a great job that I just started, just moved
00:21in with a girlfriend and her family that I loved very much, but in the
00:26background I'd always had kind of depression, kind of anxiety and it just
00:30came to a front with stress and stuff so I had to move out and I had to move back
00:37to mum and dad's. The stress, the anxiety, the depression all came in floods and
00:42sadly as I say as mum and dad took me under the wing my mental health
00:47deteriorated even more. I was put on more and more medication and I had a mental
00:50breakdown and unfortunately I tried to take my own life.
00:54Suddenly overnight mum was taken to hospital and had a brain aneurysm and
01:00within 24 hours she died in my and my sister's arms in hospital bed so that
01:06absolutely shocked me. Dad had started to develop quite aggressive dementia so
01:12despite all my mental health challenges I had to look after him for a couple of
01:16years as well. He was then hospitalized and he died in my and my sister's arms as
01:24well so I'd got very deep grief to deal with as well. I was having takeaways, I
01:30was lying in bed all day drinking beer after beer after beer. I had to go to the
01:38doctors for a blood test or something along those lines, I forget what it was. They
01:43couldn't fit me on the scales, the scales wouldn't go up to how big they
01:47couldn't atone for my weight so I had to go to a different hospital to get weighed.
01:54It was then that the GP said look off the cuff the trajectory that you're on
02:01now you're looking at 10-15 years left. They didn't really register with me at the
02:08time because I didn't care. I think eating and drinking was a way of slowly
02:13killing myself by suicide that way. On reflection. And it wasn't till that
02:21Christmas 2022 that I'd gone to a football match with my two eldest nephews and my
02:30brother-in-law and I got stuck in the turnstiles and like I say it was quite a
02:37poignant moment. One of those tipping points that you have in life that I'd had
02:42enough. It was quite humiliating. So what did I do? I realised I owe it to myself, I owe it to my
02:51mum and dad, I owe it to my sister who's my brother-in-law who'd taken me under the
02:57wing to do something about it. I'd walked before as I say and it had worked to some
03:05degree but I'd gained it all back and doubled up on that. So I thought if I'm
03:11going to do it this time I'm going to do it properly. So the first month I started to
03:16commit to this I only walked six miles in that month but along with that I
03:22started calorie counting and I think by the second month I was doing two or three
03:28miles a day and then it all adds up. As I slimmed down to maintain that level of
03:33weight loss I have to walk further and further sometimes with the weight on my
03:37backpack and I used the time that I was walking to listen to different YouTube
03:42channels and podcasts. I used walking to centre myself and being present in nature
03:51appreciating what I had got not what I hadn't got. On reflection December 2023 I
03:59weighed myself and I was 153 pounds. December 2022 that boxing day I was 398 pounds. What I
04:10would say is just get out there one foot in the front of the other. By walking it actually
04:16triggers things in your brains. It triggers feel good emotions. Even if you're walking a mile
04:24a day. That mile soon becomes two miles. I walked. Those calories I owned from walking
04:34would go into my budget. I then started looking at fasting and then started looking at keto but
04:43before I did all that I counted calories and I walked and I laid it up. That's it.
04:50it's taken care of.
04:55You
04:57and
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