Great weigh in!

Weighed in this morning after all my nerves and such last night -- and was down 3/4 of a pound! woohoo!

I was the biggest loser for August also, which is very exciting...

Now I have 2.75 pounds to my next big goal -time to pour on the verve!

Ever notice... its always something!?

Tuesday is d-day in my house - the scale day... the day I weigh in at TOPS. I wait all week for this day because it is the milestone. I have been doing great lately - a nice down trend in the weight loss... until last Sunday....

I went to the Train Park with my family where we rode trains (yes, I fit!) and then had a picnic lunch. Well, I was helping someone refill their drink, when through a weird comedy of errors... I swallowed a yellow jacket... that proceeded to sting me twice before I could disengage it...

VERY LONG STORY SHORT... I am allergic -and ended up hospitalized and now on steroids...

Did you know steroids cause weight gain!? Yeah, finally jump started the weight loss and am going down on the scale and now I am terrorized by this little pilll...

*sigh*

Its always something....

Confessions of a hoping to be thin girl... And does anyone care?

OK, so I have struggled for a long time with how to learn to be a healthier, better version of myself. I have done a bit of counseling, a lot of reading and even more talking to try and find out what broke down in my thought processes that let me hit more than 450 pounds.





Yes, I said 450 pounds... I am not a small woman in height or build. About 5'9.5", I have a large frame and broad shoulders. There was never a chance I would be miscontrued as petite.





When I was younger, elementary school aged, I was "normal" but not tiny....





In high school, I filled out early (um, yeah-in Elementary School!) and had loads of curves. I look at pictures from high school and do not see a "fat" girl, though you would not know it from the way I was taunted by mean kids. In the picture above at Disneyland, I am about 16 years old and a size 18/20. I was active in school, marching in parades and football games as part of a tall flag team, I worked at 16 and was active in the drama program. But I was different. And kids noticed that -and I did not have the strength for it to be ok that I was different. I weighed about 220 pounds in this picture. I do remember being told once by our band director that his tall flag team were "whales" and he threatened to bench us (I was a sophomore at the time) if we did not lose weight. Yep, way to create food issues for a whole bunch of girls... The majority of us skipped breakfast and dinner the night before for weigh in -and we were cleared. By the next week he was busted for weight discrimination.... Thank goodness! I might be even more messed up than I am now!

I did not start really packing on the weight for a while...



By the time I left college, I was about 250 pounds... and then for a long time, I hovered right around 300 pounds. My weight creeped up just a bit more to about 320 pounds -and there I stayed for several years. I tried diets, diet pills, tons of exercise and while I certainly got more fit, I did not drop any weight.

I found out later I had something called "Polycystic Ovary Syndrome with severe insulin resistance" and all that rice and pasta I was eating was pretty toxic for me. Who knew?

I got married and after some chemical assistance, we had two kids in three years and then an unexpected bonus round.... I got diabetes and continued to gain weight. The last pregnancy...well, it was hard on my body and I gained weight -then I had pneumonia for a long time and then a hysterectomy to stop the hemoraghing... Not my finest two years. I decided I had to stop the madness and my road to weight loss began again in earnest.

There is a lot of stuff in the middle of the then and now. Lots of good stuff and lots of bad stuff and I am a strong believer in the fact that God does not give you what you cannot handle but that we often have to find the strength and fortitude inside of us to handle it. I am a sum of all my parts -and I am the only one responsible for my outcome.

So now I own the body I am in wholeheartedly. When I started trying to lose weight, I worked with a nutritionist and lost a lot of weight and then joined TOPS (a non-profit weight loss group). TOPS saved my life. I get the accountability I need and the companionship of people in a similiar situation -but there is also the reminder that it is ME that has to do this -no one can do it for me...

My official weight once I got into TOPS -403.5 pounds in February 2006 -but that weight only came after almost a month -they could not weigh me at first because I was too heavy for the scale and they had to find a way to weigh me -and it took four meetings to do this. My first goal was to drop below 400 pounds.... then to get below 350 pounds so I could stop using the fishing lure on the scale... and now, after three years, I am a hairsbreath away from the 300 pound mark -I am 306 pounds -lower than I have seen since I was 25 years old... And I just turned 41 years old in July 2009. To me, kind of amazing....

An incidentally, I am about a size away from where I was in the picture above -I am a 22 now.... Nope, things are not in the same place and I still have 80 pounds to go until my goal weight, but I have already lost 150 pounds. I am not the 16 year old in the picture (and my body can certainly attest to the years and the three kids) but its a landmark, that picture. Its where I was -not where I am headed.

I am hoping that blogging makes it easier for me, and maybe for someone else, to understand that they are not alone in their struggles to be thinner and healthier. That sometimes, thinking out loud makes the thought process make a bit more sense. And clarifies why so many of us in this world continue to hold on to our weight -and why.....

Thanks for reading....