180 Baby!
Starting around summer of 2004, I went to working nights. When I’d get off work in the morning, I’d drive past my house by about 6 miles and head to a grease diner downtown. They made some of the best food in the world, but it was horribly unhealthy. I’d almost always have “The Grump” which is basically 2 eggs, bacon/sausage/ham (I’d go with sausage), cheese, a potato worth of hash browns, a ladle of country gravy, and more cheese… all piled together.
Can anyone say cholesterol? I knew you could.
In my defense, I would only eat 3-4 of them a week… Only? Ouch.
This went on for almost a year before I changed jobs. By then the damage was done, and I was getting pretty fat. Worse than that, my eating habits were all sorts of messed up. In the end, I tipped the scales at 245 pounds at age 32. To give you a frame of reference; when I was 17 and fresh out of high school, I was a solid 120 pounds. I was over twice as heavy as I was when I was half my current age.
I lived with the weight (about 230-240 pounds) for a year or so, and then my weight started to creep up again, and that’s when I hit the 245 mark. I knew that things had to change, so I started doing some things to help me out. This was around the spring of 2006 that I started making changes.
I started drinking Slim Fast for breakfast. I know their commercials tell you one for breakfast, one for lunch, and a reasonable dinner. Yeah right. Maybe some people can do that, but I was almost passed out by the time I got home if I didn’t do lunch. One thing the Slim Fast helped with was that I was not as hungry as normal when lunch time rolled around, so I didn’t eat quite as much at lunch as I used to.
After a month or two of this, I jumped into Weight Watchers as well. I used their online program to track my points and eating and what-not. It was rough at first to try to control my eating, eat smarter, and pay attention to what I was putting in my mouth. After about two months of it, I got the hang of things, and wasn’t having much trouble doing the dance.
Another two more months went by, and I stopped tracking my points. I was eating right and doing the right things out of habit by this time. Another two more months passed, and I canceled my membership with WW, but I continued to eat right.
Last week I had several people comment on my weight and how much better I look. That’s what inspired this post. I didn’t realize that change in myself until other people pointed it out. I’m down to 180 pounds as of last week. My doctor wants me down to 175, and I never thought I would get close. For a while I told myself to be happy with 195, but when I got there, I realized that I was in sight of 190. I kept dropping my goal weight by 5 pounds each time I reached the previous goal. It somehow made it easier mentally to do this.
Now that I’m at 180, I’m shooting for 175 to make my doctor happy. When I get to 175, I’m going to try to stop losing weight there. If I keep losing it, then I’ll start worrying about my genetics and my family history of diabetes and such. Until then, I’m going to be happy with the weight loss.
All told, I’ve lost 65 pounds over the course of almost 2 years. Seems like a very long time to lose that weight, but it’s gone, and I’ve changed my eating habits to the point that I think it will stay off. Sure, I’ll put on a few pounds at the holidays like everyone else, but it’ll come off once those months pass.
I probably could have lost the weight faster had I exercised. I didn’t exercise hardly at all during the two years. I did have a spurt at the YMCA for 8 weeks (or was it 12?) that I worked out 2-3 times a week. That was very close to the start of my weight loss, so I didn’t see much impact there. If I had done it in the middle of my weight loss, I think it would have helped more. Just a guess, though.
One thing that really helped was when Kiernan was born. The first five days that he was around, he was very happy with being in my arms while I bounced on an exercise ball. All that baby holding and bouncing on the ball really did wonders. In those five days, I dropped from 205 pounds to 190. Heck. Maybe I’d be around the 195 mark now if it wasn’t for those days of bouncing the baby around. I’m just glad (for more reasons than just the weight loss) than Kiernan is around.
What’s the whole point of this? Well, I’m thinking that you’ve heard this before, but…. If I can do it, so can you. I’m very stubborn about many things, but when it comes to my creature comforts (like food) I’m pretty weak willed. I just had to decide that I was more stubborn about losing the weight than I was about adding pleasure to my life via food. It was a long trip, but at no point was it a bad journey. I had expected to suffer, starve, and be weak all the time. There were moments like that, but they were brief. In the end, I’m glad I did it.
Maybe I’ll be posting about hitting 175 in a few weeks!
