I'm more of a 7 person myself, 7/28/70, seven years part-time, seven years full time as a teacher at Blinn, moved here and started my weight loss journey in 2007... which gets me on topic for today and away from the expectation that I'm blogging about numerology.
As many of you know, I'm closer to a third less of the person I was back in Texas. It's been a long journey already, but part of the process is being accountable for my body, so here's a (relatively) short history and update for me to look back on in the coming months to track my new goal.
I was an 8.5 pound baby to a very petite 90 pound mom. (That alone might explain why I'm an only child, although I'm told it was because after 6 months of terrible colic, mom decided she couldn't risk going through homicidal mania again.)
I was a skinny kid though, after outgrowing the baby sumo wrestler thighs of toddlerhood and I stayed around 110 as a teenager, 120 in college. Like lots of women, it wasn't until I was pregnant that I experienced any real weight gain. I got to 183 at the end of my first pregnancy but shrunk back into the 140s pretty quickly thanks to breastfeeding. The body wasn't quite the same after that though and the metabolism was on the highway to hell. A couple of years later and one much more traumatic pregnancy with bedrest and a frantic attempt to get Sammi to gain weight in-utero, coupled with depression in the years that followed that landed me on Zoloft, and I ballooned to almost 230 pounds at my heaviest.
It's still taboo for a lot of women to be open with the numbers of their weight and when they do share, it's usually followed by "but I do have big bones..." Well, I don't. My wrists are tiny. My thighs are not. And at 230, not much else was either. My rotund German ancestry and shorter frame didn't help, but let's be honest, neither did sitting on my butt eating on the couch. I'm convinced the self-loathing and wasted energy that goes into hating your body should burn more calories than it actually does.
After getting off the Zoloft, about 20 of those pounds shed easily. I joined Curves for a year, but while the place may work for some women in real weight loss, it wasn't intense enough for me.
My friend Joan and I started trying to meet at the track and walk, and we'd take the girls and go play very bad games of tennis, which actually does burn more calories because you are running all over the place trying to reach the out of bounds balls. But I had deluded myself into believing I really didn't need to worry about calorie intake too much since I was exercising. (Still rolling my eyes here.)
There were lots of reasons, I told myself anyway, that this was a good as I could do. It was miserably hot and humid most of the time, there weren't sidewalks in most of our small town, there was no gym, I worked out of town and full-time, so there just wasn't enough time in the day.
So when we moved to Colorado I was still around 210 pounds and desperately out of shape.
Our homeowners association dues includes access to hundreds of miles of open trails as well as four very nicely furnished recreation centers with indoor tennis courts, rock climbing walls, indoor and outdoor pools, indoor tracks, dozens of ellipticals, treadmills, stair-steppers, and weight rooms bursting with equipment. That summer I hemmed and hawed and couldn't bring myself to show up in the midst of all the hard-bodies. In the fall, at lunch one day with some of the freshman football moms, I was sitting next to Marsha who mentioned being sore from her workout at the gym.
Life is really made up of those small moments that turn out to be gigantic steps. Have you noticed?
I got up the courage to ask if I could come with her so she could show me her workout and how to use the machines. The main thing was, I wouldn't be walking in alone for the first time.
From that conversation sprang the beginning of getting my body back. Those first workouts were so brutal I would have to literally sit my butt on my stairs and inch down. And it wasn't that the workouts were that hard. It was my utter lack of muscle strength. At the start of 2008 I had Bob take some pictures of me in my undies for me to track my progress. Yes, I wore the black ones in hopes it would look more slimming. I cringe now as I did then when I looked at myself objectively from all angles and admitted there was nothing any color was going to do for me.
Over the next 18 months we would recreate the same poses and I would put them side by side. The first few months, there wasn't a lot of change. I felt better, stronger, but I wasn't getting noticeably slimmer. My inspiration, Courtney, who'd lost her weight back in the heat of Texas and was competing in triathlons now, kept telling me to keep going and track my calories. I'd started eating more salads and whole grain cereals and was stubbornly refusing to "count" because it took so much time.
Let me stop here and say I still have this stubborn mentality about dieting. I will not go on a diet that restricts the types of food I can eat because I know this much to be true: if you are not willing to give up these restricted foods for the rest of your life, there is no point. You will start eating them again and you will gain the weight back. I knew I had to find a real life, whole life, balance to eating -- and this included pie and Mexican food.
But like balancing the checkbook, I needed an accounting of what calories were coming in, good and bad, and how much I was really expending at the gym. So after about 6 months of digging my heels in, I started using the sparkpeople food calculator for each meal. Here's a hint: the whole grain cereal is only the amount of calories on the box if you are only consuming the little 3/4 cup that is the serving amount. The banana and almonds and blueberries are healthy, yes, but piled on top of the double amount of cereal each morning, those calories add up quickly. Portion size, moderation, and staying away from creamy dressings were much easier when I saw how quickly they added up. And, once again, little changes turn into big ones.
By the end of the summer, those undie pictures started to show some changes. By the end of the fall, people were saying, "You've really lost a lot of weight." And it was true. A year of continuing to work out and eat right got me down another 50 pounds, to 160 in January of 2009. I've been there now, fluctuating between 160-165, for more than a year and I'm thinking it's about time to jumpstart out of the plateau and finish what I started. My dream goal back when I was over 200 pounds was 145, although I wouldn't even say that number aloud because it sounded so insanely impossible. Now I'm publishing it for the world wide web, because keeping the weight off has hinged on people's encouragement and losing the last 15-20 pounds will be tougher than the preceding 70 because this almost 40 year old body is getting slower in its metabolism and seems quite happy to sit here at 160 instead of shedding anything else.
So I'm considering this 55th post on 5/5 an open challenge to myself to move it, lose it, and get there by my 40th birthday. I've got 84 days and 20 pounds. Let's go.
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