Thursday, July 30, 2009

Taking care of me

I've alluded to my weight struggles in prior posts. For me, weight has been an issue since I was 18. I first joined Weight Watchers when I was 20. I am 5' 8" and I weighed 177 lbs. I realize that I wasn't huge, but I was definitely overweight. After about 9 months, I was down to 145 lbs and feeling great. I thought I would be able to keep the weight off forever. I thought I had it all figured out.

It turns out I didn't. I stopped going to meetings and eventually gained all the weight back and more. 20 lbs more. When I went back to Weight Watchers in January, I weighed in at 197 lbs. I was quite dismayed at my weight, but pretty happy that I had stopped myself before the 200 lb mark.

In the thirteen years in between, I was pretty much all over the place. I know that 5 years ago I got down to about 165 lbs. I was exercising like a fanatic and watching what I ate. The main reason I lost the weight was because I was in a very unhappy marriage. I hated to be in the same room as my now ex-husband so I would hide out at the gym...plus I had a crush on my trainer.

In the last 6 months, I have lost 34.4 lbs! I weighed in this morning at 163 lbs. I'm just 3 lbs off my Weight Watchers goal...although I'd like to lose about 10 more. I really couldn't be more thrilled about my progress, but I'm still feeling a bit cautious. I don't want to gain it all back. I really don't. So my focus this time around has been to figure out how to do this forever. To figure out how to make maintenance exciting.

This is what I've figured out so far:

1. I absolutely must continue to attend meetings. I must do this forever. Meetings motivate me. I have the most amazing Leader and I feel so energized when I leave there each week. In fact, in the beginning, the only thing I committed to doing was to attend a meeting each week. I didn't commit to eating less or moving more. I committed to attend meeting each and every week.

2. The WW plan works best for me if I am very careful about what I eat before 5pm. I eat healthy but not a lot of food during the day. This allows me to have a fairly large portion for dinner and even have an evening snack if I need it.

3. I don't need to work out like a fanatic, but I must move more. Luckily, I just happen to have 2 little boys in my life that require alot of chasing around. They also really enjoy walks. And these walks let Mommy have a few minutes to hear herself think. I expect once winter arrives, I will have to cut back on my Points due to the decrease in the amount of exercise I will get.

And that's about it. When I look at it, it certainly doesn't seem like rocket science to me. It almost makes me wonder why the hell I didn't do this earlier?

I don't really have any good full-body before and after pics but here's what I could find.



Before (September 2008) - check the belly!



Not quite after (May 2009) - down about 25 lbs.












1 comment:

  1. Way to go! That is awesome.

    I can relate to your weight woes completely - only I need to get motivated to actually do something about it!

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