Just 10 more pounds….that’s all I’m asking for. But, my body doesn’t want to give it to me. I have lost 240 pounds! YES! 240!! My highest weight, that I can recall stepping onto a special made scale when I was starting a Medifast program, I don’t really remember when it was, but I’m thinking it was around 1985 and was 389 lbs. I know, in my heart, without a doubt, that at some point in my life I was well over 400 lbs. The Medifast program didn’t do it for me and I was not able to maintain such a strict liquid routine. I don’t know if I wasn’t in the right headspace for it or what, but regardless of what it was, it wasn’t a healthy way to lose weight anyway.
This 240 lbs that I’ve lost and maintained for 5 years, I did the right way. Conscious change of my mental attitude, conscious change of the way I eat, even down to the times of day that I eat and the combinations of foods and a vigorous work-out routine and more.
In 1995, I was in the upper 270′s and I started losing weight by hardly eating anything and I survived mostly on soup and lost over 100 pounds. By the end of 1996 I weighed about 180 lbs. I maintained that weight, and was still trying to lose, although I was unsuccessful and slowly started to climb back up the scale. In 1997 I left an unhappy marriage, that I should never have been in, in the first place. I was working on getting my head together, I was working on me and discovering a lot about myself, who I was and the choices I made. I thought I was doing a good job of it.
But, I ended up gaining that weight back and then some. By the beginning of 2001, I was over 300lbs. I had spent the previous New Years Eve in Texas with a friend I had met through work and I didn’t like the way I felt, I didn’t like being uncomfortable and I was certainly tired of the way people judged me because of my weight. I knew I had done it before and I had faith that I could do it again and I wanted to do it the right way, so I signed up with LA Weight Loss and started over. By October, I had lost 75 lbs and felt I was on my way to success. Unfortunately, I met someone who sidelined me and it took me another 6 months just to lose another 25 lbs and then my weight loss and in a way my life, came to a screeching halt. I was involved with, who I would later learn, was a very abusive man and because of his own insecurities and need to control, would drag me down to one of my deepest depressions in my life. That, will be another story, for another time…for now, I’ll just say that I gained that 100 lbs back and as the last time, “and then some.”
In 2004, I escaped that relationship, but not without physical, emotional and mental harm. Despite him, or is that in-spite of him, I came out on the other side a much stronger person. I may have let him get me down, but I never let him inside my head deep enough to believe that I was at fault for his behavior and that I made him do any of the things he did. I did however, allow him to stop me from my goal and I stopped focusing on myself and my goals and focused on the horror that I was living in rather than focusing on what I needed to do for myself.
Fast forward to January 5, 2005….I was now living in Florida, a survivor of the abusive relationship with Mr. Rage-Aholic, and I knew that I HAD to change my life. I searched out a local LA Weight Loss, knowing it had worked before and knowing I could make it work again. This time however, things were different for me. This time, for the first time in my life I put myself first and put everything else after my priority to work on me. I hadn’t done that my entire life….I was never a priority. I worked hard, I learned about my body, I learned about food, I learned that I needed to eat to lose weight and that if I didn’t eat, I wouldn’t lose. Who would have ever thought that I’d have to eat more food than I had been used to eating…that was a struggle, but I did it and did it in a BIG way! I worked out 6 days a week, first joining Curves because I didn’t feel comfortable going to a bigger gym. By June 2006, I had lost the majority of my weight and was well on my way to my new life.
Fast forward again, to the present day, a little over 6 years after that day in January 2005. I am smaller than I can ever remember being. Everyone who knew me before and sees me now is shocked and in awe. 240 lbs gone, but I want more. I just want 10 more pounds, just 10 more. I count every single calorie that I consume, every gram of food that goes into my body is logged. I exercise 5 days a week, 3 days of intense weight and circuit training combined with cardio and 2 days of intense cardio. I am doing everything that I know I can possibly do and my body just doesn’t want to give up the weight. In October I had 30 lbs to lose, now I have 10 left, but I have to tell you that each and every ounce that I have lost since October, I have worked hard for. And that is how I am losing it now, ounce, by miserable ounce. It’s no longer POUNDS lost, it’s OUNCES. And it’s frustrating to work so damn hard and see the scale moving so damn slowly.
I wake up at 6am religiously to go to the gym and quite honestly, there are days that I don’t want to go, but I know that I must in order to reach my goal. Some days I just want to throw the diet out the window and eat any damn thing I please, but I know I can’t. I have to stick to my guns and keep on track, I need to stay focused and reach my goal. Everyone tells me I look amazing, everyone tells me I’m thin, my mom says I’m getting too skinny, some friends see me and say “hey skinny,” but I don’t see what they see. Funny, how all of my life I was made fun of for being the fat girl, now they say I am skinny. I still see that fat girl in my head…when I am not looking in the mirror and seeing some form of that image that others see, (I’m not sure I even see what they see, even when it IS staring back at me in the mirror), but I do know that when I’m not standing in front of that mirror, she’s there…the fat girl is there in my head.
Please, please….just give me 10 more pounds. That’s all I ask for is 10 more pounds. Then maybe, the fat girl will go away. Do you think??
