Wedding Weight

Another goal met today!!! I set my last goal at 185, the weight I was on my wedding day, and I reached that weight today! I actually reached 184, which means I've lost a total of 40 lbs. Yeeeeah! That's a huge milestone. This last goal took me a little longer than I had hoped... I hit a few plateaus but I kept trucking and got there. I also bought a new fancy scale, which unfortunately revealed to me that my old, cheap scale was running 3 lbs low. My starting weight, which I had thought was 221, was actually 224 lbs, and my old scale had me believing I was only a few pounds from this goal of 185, only to then realize I had to add 3 lbs to my goal. I was annoyed, to say the least. But I was a good girl and decided to accept the extra poundage as reality instead of wishing it away. :) It does explain why my weight at the doctor's office always ran higher than my home scale during my pregnancy. Gee, I was just hoping it was their scale that had the problem. Haha.

This is a really important point in the process for me. Starting at 224, with the goal of reaching a healthy BMI weight of 144, gives me exactly 80 lbs to lose (now that I've added those 3 extra pounds. Grrr.). Hitting 40 lbs today has finally secured me at halfway there, instead of just saying "I'm almost halfway there!" as I have been for the last month. It's real now, and it means that every pound from now on is downhill. But the process feels more uphill than ever, because I've been doing this for a little over 15 weeks and I'm beginning to really miss the choice of eating what I want. I've also been learning a lot more about healthy habits and choices, seeing food as fuel and energy for your body, having "treats" as actual TREATS and not just frequent indulgences... stuff I knew but never really took the time to fully comprehend and consistently apply to my daily life. I'm pretty pumped about it. I want to prove to myself now that I can maintain my weight loss, that this program really made a life change for me, and that it's not just some phase I'm going through. I guess there's a part of me that thinks I'm going to lose the weight, look at a french fry and suddenly gain it back. I need to know that I can make this last, make it work, that I'm not destined to be a fat person forever. And I need to know that I can eat a few Oreos in the process. :)

Also, though I'm only halfway to my goal, this is close to the lowest weight I've ever been as an adult. I reached 180 for about two weeks before my wedding, but by the day of the wedding, 5 pounds had returned because I'd started taking those lovely hormone pills a month prior so they could get into my system. (And, boy, did they ever get into my system! Ugh.) So, really, aside from the couple weeks I gleefully spent at 180, right now I'm once again at my lowest weight. It's something I've kind of always considered my ideal goal, because I've never really thought I could get any lower. So it's tempting to call it good at this point, to say my body has reached its comfort zone, even though I truly do want to keep going and reach my goal. It's just that I'm worried (irrationally so) that I'm just never going to pass this point. It didn't help that I've been hitting plateuas lately, and taking longer than I thought to get to this goal. That really played into my fear that my body is just going to refuse to go any lower, that I'm destined to be 180 forever.

Of course, instead of embracing this fear, I'm going to face it, deal with it, psyche myself up and blow 180 out of the water. :) I'm pretty thrilled about the thought of being in the 170s, and can barely comprehend the idea of 160. I have always had a picture in my mind of my body looking like it is now, and that's been my goal, because it's the best I've ever known of my body to be capable of looking. I'm giddy about reaching lower weights, about seeing what my body is capable of, and how different it can look. I don't have a framework for it. It's almost like wondering what my baby was going to look like as I was waiting for her birth. Of course, she was much more exciting than weight loss, but the concept is similar. It kind of IS like a rebirth. I'm realizing that I have never really been able to view myself in a healthy body. I've always-ALWAYS- said, "I'll always be overweight but I'd like to at least lose SOME weight." And why? Why have I never been able to believe that I could be a healthy weight? I'm ready to ditch that fear and prove that I can do this.

Ok, this has been the most distracted blog I've ever written, as I've had to stop writing at least a half dozen times to change a diaper, get a snack for Ella, clean up the snack, rescue Stephen's camera, put on cartoons, turn off cartoons and about a million other toddler related things. I don't even know if it made sense, or if I made the points I was hoping to make. At any rate, I'm going to post it because I'm happy about reaching this most recent goal of 185, and of reaching the halfway mark of 184. It's all downhill from here, baby. And while I'm talking about goals, I'm setting my new goal at 175. I know that's only 9 lbs away but at this point all new ranges (the 170s, 160s, 150s, etc) are exciting and uncharted territory. Plus, after taking longer than expected to reach my last goal, it'll be nice to have one that I feel I can reach in a fair amount of time. Onward and upward (or downward, in my case)!