There I Am!

This may seem foreign to any of you who have never struggled with your weight, but I suspect even people who spend most of their life one size, then had a gain for... say babies... might find this a little familiar... You know something is happening, and somewhere deep in your subconscious, you know it's BAD. You stop weighing yourself, you pretend not to like certain pants anymore... you even stop really looking at yourself in the mirror... I mean SURE, you LOOK, but you don't really LOOK. It is denial that something has gotten out of control.

Then one day something will happen to wake you up... For me, this time, I was bending to tie my shoes and realized I had stomach rolls that were squishing into each other—ICK! Now that may gross you out, or you may think, big freaking deal, I have those even at a good weight—it all depends on how we carry it, but I'm a pear. My legs and butt are big, even when my rib bones begin to show (I'm serious-I've been there). But until I had babies, even at 185 pounds (about what I weighed when I finished high school—keep in mind I'm 5'11”--so this is overweight but not OBESE) my stomach was FLAT—COMPLETELY. Twenty-five to thirty pounds too heavy and not a speck of evidence on my waist.



Babies changed that a little—never again will my hip bones stick out when I lay down, but it STILL was not where I carried the worst of it—so rolls... ICK.



It made me look in the mirror. It made me look at the scale. And do you know what I saw? A big, fat person that I didn't recognize. My weight had crept higher than it was at the END of my second pregnancy. It was time to do something.



Those of you that have read for a while know it took me a little while to psych myself up, and there was another 10 pounds on before I REALLY got to it, but since New Years I've been a diligent girl... following weight watchers points (except Friday, when I have a few glasses of wine above points—works for me, probably because I get a lot more activity in than the plan calls for—they say do 30 minutes a day—most days I get closer to 90). Any OTHER day, anything I do is within points.



And this morning, naked in front of the mirror, I saw myself for the first time in AGES. It isn't ideal me, but at least it is recognizable me. It's a good feeling. For the 3rd week in a row I am down 2.5 pounds, which feels painfully slow, but at least it is steady, and I crossed the 'half stone'--I've lost more than a stone and a half, which makes the Anglophile in me happy...



Oh, sure, I'm only a third of the way there, but I feel pretty darned good to at least know who I'm looking at.

The facts:



Weight down 22.5 pounds

Waist down 2.5 inches

Hips down 3 inches

Butt down 4 inches

EACH thigh, 2 inches smaller.

Even my arms are an inch smaller



Can you see how that matters to what I look like? I'm happy dancing today in honor...