730 Days Later

It’s hard to believe it’s been seven hundred and thirty days already.

I honestly didn’t think I’d last seven days, let alone seven hundred and thirty.  When I finally got below 200 lbs, I was scared to death that I wouldn’t be able to keep myself there.  Even when I wrote this post about the first 365 days, I still doubted my ability to carry this on for another year.

When I was at Jenny Craig this weekend, my Jenny Counselor Amalia and I ran across some pictures from two years ago that I wanted to share with you.  Sometimes all it takes is a picture to make us realize how far we’ve come.  If you are on a weight loss journey, I HIGHLY recommend that you take full-length pictures of yourself along the way.  You’ll treasure them later, I promise.

November 1, 2010

I remember the day they took these pictures.  I couldn’t believe that I was having to pose for them.  That smile above was COMPLETELY fake.  I wasn’t happy, and I didn’t want a picture taken, let alone a full length pic.  I wanted to run out of that Jenny Craig center and never come back.

Then my original JCC Sherrie told me to turn to the side, I couldn’t even believe it.  You can sort of see the stun on my face.  I refused to even look at the pictures on the camera when Sherrie asked if I wanted to look at them.  I didn’t care.  I couldn’t stand the sight of myself.  I didn’t want to see the truth.

November 1, 2010

I sent these pics to a few friends on Saturday.  They didn’t recognize this girl either.  One of my friends said I looked tired… like it was hard to carry around all that extra weight.  Little does she know how true that statement was….

I also asked Amalia to take new pictures of me for this post.  Please keep in mind, I stopped wearing makeup to Jenny back in 2010… it’s just how I roll.  Maybe I’m lighter without makeup?? 🙂

October 27, 2012

October 27, 2012

HOLY CRAP, I DID THAT!?

That’s what I think when I look at these pictures.  What seemed SO INCREDIBLY far away and impossible, I did.

Often times, I have people ask me how I did it… and I tell them about Jenny, I tell them about how I’ve incorporated healthy cooking and exercise into my life, but mostly I tell them I WANTED IT SO BAD THAT I FINALLY MADE IT HAPPEN.

Do you want to lose weight?  

Do you think about it every day?  

Does your weight keep you from chasing after your dreams?

Are you unkind to yourself because you have extra weight on your body?

For me, my answer was an EMPHATIC YES!

While I knew the answer to those questions, these were a little more complicated:

Why don’t you do something about it?

Why don’t you choose change?

What do you have to lose?

I held back.  I half-heartedly tried to do it many, many times, but it wasn’t until 2010 that I finally CHOSE CHANGE.

To this day, I still don’t know what took me so long, but I do know that if I could reach that girl 7 years ago when the weight started to creep up again I would have loved to have been able to convince her to do this sooner.  Honestly though, she wouldn’t have listened.  She didn’t believe it was possible.  She unfortunately wasn’t ready.

For so many years, that same girl had resigned herself to the fact that she was going to be overweight for the rest of her life.  She believed that she didn’t deserve much more than that, so why not have that third slice of bread at dinner… it just didn’t matter.

Then seven hundred thirty days ago, she chose change…

After two years of healthy living, I want to ask you to do two things:  1)  Answer the 1st set of questions I list above.  If you answer yes to at least one of the questions, move onto the second set.  Try your hardest not to get distracted.  Find the answers… and consider how you can choose change.

When I finally started to do something about the weight and put my heart and soul into driving the change, the weight started to melt away.  It didn’t stand a chance next to my strong will….

When I finally made the decision to choose change, my life started to change.  I stopped letting food control my life and the  outside of my body slowly transformed to match how I felt on the inside.

When I realized I had nothing to lose, that’s exactly when I lost all of those things that meant nothing to me (the extra pounds, unhealthy habits, etc) and gained so much more.

I recognize how easy I make it sound… and in no way am I intending to simplify what can seem to be an amazingly daunting task.  What I’m hoping to do is show you that it can be done.

I promise you.  You can do it, too.