Hello, fellow WW-ers of the boards!
My name is Tracy, I'm 27, and on the boards I post as "cheezey", and I'm a member of WW online that has reached goal and lost 150 pounds. I don't go to meetings because they're just not my thing. I've found the 100+ and 200+ Pounds to lose boards to be plenty of motivation, and my husband who has been doing the Points system along with me is also very supportive. He has lost 75 pounds himself.
In August of 2002, about a year before the date of my wedding, I decided to get in gear and lose the weight that I packed on from 1997-2002. It's still hard for me to believe that I managed to gain so much in such a short time after graduating college, but never underestimate the ability of a total lack of exercise, sitting on one's duff online, and eating snacks, take-out, and restaurant food because it's so much easier than cooking to pile on the weight in record time. Add constantly playing EverQuest from the end of 2000 to about halfway through 2002 to that mix and you have a really lethal combination, one that resulted in the last 80 or so pounds in a rather short time span.
Now however is a different story. My lifestyle is very different now. I went from being extremely sedentary and debilitated by horrible asthma attacks in humid and/or cold weather just from simple things like having to take an extra flight of stairs unexpectedly to being able to shovel right alongside DH (then DF) in the President's Day 26-inch snowstorm of 2003 with no asthma attacks. Instead of eating take out or processed junk all the time and drinking primarily diet soda and coffee, I now cook with DH and get healthy meals when I go out for the most part. I eat vegetables and fruits every day and drink water, something I never could manage to do in the past. As a result, I also gave up coffee during the week and drink herbal tea instead. Admittedly it's because it helps with the water requirement, but I also don't need all that caffeine! I drink at least 75% less diet soda daily than I used to. Activity wise, as opposed to sitting on my rear I do almost an hour of cardio exercise almost every day and lift weights 4 times a week.
Overall I am stronger than I have ever been
and my confidence has grown in leaps and bounds. The most noticeable
change is with my increased confidence I am standing up for myself far more than
I ever did in the past, something that has never come easily to me.
Some quick pictures!
If you want to browse a more detailed set of pictures, check out my progress page.
Before and After
To the left is my starting picture, me at 280 pounds. EEK!
I don't have one of me standing, because I avoided the camera like the plague.
This is one my fiancé (now my husband) snapped of me while I was sitting at the computer
sometime in the summer of 2002, before WW. Oh boy, and I'm even holding a Dunkin'
Donuts cup. This must have been on a Saturday morning, because I liked
to go on EQ early on Saturdays and almost always had either that or McDonald's
for breakfast. This photo is also one of the things that finalized my decision.
I simply couldn't believe I let myself get to this point. I seriously wanted
to strangle DH when he took that pic, as one might have guessed by the look on
my face! The funny thing is, I never saw that when I looked in the mirror.
Sure, I knew I was fat and should drop quite a bit of weight, but I just didn't
see myself as that big. Never underestimate the power of denial, either!
To the right is my goal picture, taken 11/22/03 and just after I made WW goal, down 141.4 pounds.
After a series of pictures in that men's XXL Old Navy shirt from the beginning
picture, it just got too ridiculous to keep wearing it for these pictures.
The thing has gone from baggy to really baggy to just plain ridiculous on me
now. So I switched to wearing the same clothes as in the standing shot.
My favorite
difference in these two pictures however is the chair arm. Namely, that
there is a chair arm now and it was nowhere in sight thanks to my stomach in the
first. Yep, it's the same chair! Different desk though. I
upgraded that in Christmas of 2002.
Before and After Standing Shots
The one on the far left is one of me standing up at about 243 pounds. I
didn't have any prior to that so there's not as large a difference in the sitting
pictures, although
you can see the difference of well over 100 pounds in the comparison shots quite
clearly.
The ones on the right of that one are me at 129.6, about 10lbs lower than
my goal and where my weight seems to have settled a couple months into
maintenance. That dress is a size 6, smaller than I have ever worn in a
dress in my life. When I wear jeans and pants I can wear size 2s and even
some 0s amazingly, but my dress size has always been a couple sizes larger than
pants due to how I'm built with a large rib cage and chest. By the way,
that half a dog head you see in the first picture is my hammy puppy that always
tries to get in front of the camera when it's out.
As it stands I'm very happy with how far I've come. Physically I am the smallest I've ever been in my adult life. Although my WW goal was 140, I consider 135 my new maximum, and I've found I can maintain where I am now pretty comfortably with exercising 5 days a week and eating moderately around the low 30s in points a day and the occasional flex splurge.
In the before-ish picture on the left the blue shirt was a stretchy 22-24 and the pants were baggy size 20 leggings, both from Lane Bryant, where I will never ever ever shop or set foot in again! It is such a great feeling to breeze by them in the mall and head into a store like NY & Co., The Gap, or Express and know that something in there will fit me if I feel like trying it on. Buh-bye Lane Bryant! And stop sending me flyers in the mail, for crying out loud!
Last but not least you can see me holding up a pair of my original jeans, a size 26W from Lane Bryant. These were tight in the waist (though still loose in the legs and butt) when I started WW.
After Making Goal
I managed to maintain between 125-130 pretty easily for several months. Then DH and I decided to have a baby, and in June I found out that I was pregnant, due at the end of February.
To make a long story short, as happens to a lot of women when they have a baby, I gained a bit more weight than I wanted to and I'm now well over goal again to the tune of 32 pounds after delivering my delightful 9-lb 22-inch son Ryan on March 5, 2005.
If you're interested in hearing the whole story with how my pregnancy went as far as WW goes and see a couple of other pictures, you can go here.
I fully recommitted to WW on March 11, and thus I've updated my stats. Below on the left was the picture of me taken shortly having the baby on March 13. (He wasn't being cooperative for the picture.) On the right is me on August 20, 2005, about five months after recommitting to WW. I am back to 134.4 lbs as of my last weigh in, below my original WW goal of 140 and 9 pounds above my lowest pre-pregnancy weight of 125.4. As you can see, my son has gotten a lot bigger while I've gotten a lot smaller! You can probably also see that I like red shirts. The jacket I'm wearing in the current picture is a size 8 suede jacket DH got me as an early anniversary present, and the jeans are my size 2 pre-pregnancy jeans. Yeah!
As of 8/20/05 I have 4.4 pounds to lose to get back to my pre-pregnancy goal!
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