HYC and Biggest Loser Weigh In

I lost 2 POUNDS this week!!! I can’t express how happy I am to finally see the scale moving. For the first month or so of running I was putting in a LOT of work and not getting much result. That month was really hard to take. It is so much easier to put the work in if the results make me happy. I know this will help me stick strictly through the week in terms of food.

I’m noticing lots of inches missing too but I still haven’t done any real measurements or photos. I suppose that I really should. I have joined Thinking Thin Too’s Biggest Loser Challenge (see fancy blog bling at the sidebar). It runs the whole winter from now until the beginning of September and I am really wanting to push myself to see how much progress I can make in that time in terms of fitness and weight loss. I think being part of the challenge will help me. All of this blogging about weight loss is really motivating for me in the sense that it helps to keep me focused and not losing focus is what it is all about. If I’m focused I’ll prioritize planning menus and counting Calories and I’ll prioritize getting my exercise done.

I know that my next mini-goal is to get below 175 and I can see that is now within reach. I’m sure I won’t get there for next week but maybe the week after and probably the week after that for sure. How cool is that! While that goal is important it really just represents me getting back to where I was at the beginning of Feb so there is a bittersweet aspect to it. Until I get there I realize I’m just making up for the recent mess I made and that is never a great feeling. After that it will be all new territory. I’ll be on the open road and it will feel so fine.

I was down as low as 172 for my sister’s wedding back in 2004. Right after that it sprang upwards and I’ve not been back since. I have no recollection of the last time I was below 170 but by my guess it was sometime in 2000. Sometime in 1998 or 1999 I was as low as 120, I gained some but was still quite small when I moved to Canada from Japan at the end of 1999 and then I started eating. I got a depressing job. Eating junk and drinking beer were the ways I dealt with it. I quit my job and went back to school in 2003. I also quit smoking and excessive drinking that year. I was happy as could be about everything except my weight yet I didn’t really do a whole lot about it until I realized I had to wear a bridesmaid’s dress for my sister’s wedding. I dieted down to 172 and did some weight training but the day after the wedding I started binge eating again and never looked back. Good times.

That is my life as a yo-yo. It started much earlier. I was a chubby teen who turned to anorexia and bulimia in high school. In my senior year I weighed as low as 80 pounds. After treatment I started gaining and with a totally shot metabolism it didn’t take a lot of work to gain weight quickly. By the time I met my husband in 1994 I was around 140 and I thought I was ridiculously fat. I remember joining weight watchers then but I didn’t have much success. I moved to Japan at about 160 in 1995 and lost some weight there initially but then started gaining again and by 1997 I was up to 79 kilos (174 pounds). I was mortified and sick and tired. Husband and I went on an adventure to get fit. I lost about 26 kilos in 8 months and got down to about 52 kilos for a brief moment.

One major problem then was that I was still too big to fit into most Japanese clothes. I still felt fat. I know now that they just weren’t cut right for my shape but at the time, after all that success and still never being able to find clothes that fit, it was depressing.  I never successfully switched into a workable maintenance mode and as a result I eventually started gaining again. I think I was between around 130 and 140 by the time I moved to Canada a year later. From there I steadily gained. I passed my earlier, all time high of 175 and soared above it. I bought bigger clothes and then bigger ones again as I edged above 200 pounds for the first time and wedged myself into a size 20. I don’t know exactly what my max weight was. I was 205 for a long time, I reach 210 for sustained periods and if I had to guess I would bet I hit 215 but me and scales weren’t getting along that month. I know I weighed in at 210 in September 2007. At some point along there I stopped even caring what I looked like. I became invisible and forgot what it felt like to feel cute. If I was out and a guy was looking my way or flirting in my general direction I knew it wasn’t meant for me. I got used to the embarrassed looks on the faces of people that last saw me when I was thinner. They didn’t know what to say. They didn’t know where to look. The only thing I could tolerate shopping for was shoes. Clothes shopping ended in devastation and now that I’m starting to fit in “normal” sizes some of the terror is just barely starting to go away. I’ve got a stock pile of clothes down as low as 14s so I won’t need to shop for a little while yet and hopefully by then I’ll be happier with my size.

Sorry for this rant. I realize now it was pretty self indulgent but I think I wanted to review all of that in mind. It has been a pretty big journey and overwhelmingly when I look at this now I’m mostly sad that so much of my energy has gone into concern about my weight. Putting that same energy into fitness would have seen me progress and feel better and I think that is what I’m starting to do now. I hope it is.