Since I’m going to be posting about my weight loss journey occasionally, I thought it might be a good idea to start from the beginning.  I was pretty much a normal sized kid until somewhere around the fourth grade.  I don’t have a lot of photos from my childhood (yet – my mom is scanning them, but she’s still working on the early years right now), but there are a couple.  Here’s one from when I was about 8.  Pretty much normal.

(Isn’t my mom pretty???)

Here’s where I started to put on a little weight, but still not too bad.  I was 11:

I had a really, really awesome home life and would never even think to blame my weight problems on my parents or the way I was raised.  However, my childhood was pretty unhappy outside of the home.  I LOVED school until I was about 10.  Coincidentally, that’s when I started to put on weight.   I grew up in Hawaii, in a neighborhood where the vast majority of people were Chinese and Filipino.  I loved my Asian friends, but they were all SO MUCH smaller than me.  One word you could not use to describe me was small!  I got teased a lot about my size (and my color, being one of the only white kids in the entire school, but that’s a different post altogether) and was called a lot of really mean things.  Looking back on it all now I realize I wasn’t actually as huge as I thought I was, but in my mind I was enormous!  One day during PE in the sixth grade we had to be weighed and measured.  All three classes were in the gym and they did us one by one, calling out the numbers to be recorded.  When it was my turn the PE teacher yelled out, “Five-foot-seven, 164 pounds!”  I swear, the entire gym burst out laughing.  That has stuck with me throughout the years and I have never quite been able to shake the humiliation of the moment.  My best friend was 4’11” and weighed 90 lbs, so you can imagine what we looked like together.  No one in the entire school weighed as much as I did, but I never stopped to think that no one in the entire school was as tall as me either.  I DREAMED of being 5 feet tall and under a hundred pounds!!!

That was the point where I decided something had to be done and I embarked on what would be the first of MANY fad diets.  Through my teen years I fluctuated between 150 and 180 lbs.  My height topped off around 5’11” so my weight was almost normal for most of those years, but my mind was so messed up when it came to my weight that I couldn’t see that.  All I could see was that I was so much heavier than all of my friends and therefore I was fat and ugly.

When I started college I was 170 lbs, but by the end of my freshman year I had gained 30 more.  I went up and down through my 20’s and after I met my husband (Chris) I put on even more weight.  Chris was the first person outside of my family who I really and truly felt accepted me the way I was.  He has NEVER cared what I weighed and has always told me that I was beautiful no matter what.  So I got lazy.  And I ate.  And I got even heavier.  But I was stilled loved… except by me.

I won’t discuss numbers anymore, since they got so high that I can’t think about it without shuddering, but after I had my twins in 2006 I was at my highest weight so far and I was miserable!  But you know what having a baby is like, right?  And having twins was harder than I had expected.  I was tired all the time, a complete zombie until they were about 9 months old.  When they were about a year old I started trying to lose weight again.  I’d lose 5 pounds, gain 10 pounds.  Lose 10 pounds, gain 15 pounds, and I was getting unhealthier and unhealthier by the day!  I don’t have any pictures of myself during this time (except that one above from 2007) because I wouldn’t let anyone take my picture, I was just too embarrassed!

Here I am last year, at my absolute heaviest.

I cannot look at that picture without wanting to cry.  That was the picture that caused me to break, to really take a look at my life and try to make changes.  Since then (Nov 2011) I’ve lost 18 pounds, which isn’t much considering what I need to lose, but the holidays really slowed my losses down.  January got me back on track and my goal is to back at 170 pounds by June 2013.  It’s a long time, but the time is going to pass one way or another, I may as well put it to good use!  lol

So now I’m basically following Bill Phillip’s Eating-for-Life and it’s going good.  I feel a lot more balanced than I have in a long time and am finally starting to get some energy back.  I’ve been walking on the treadmill for exercise and want to add some weight training soon.  Chris has been supportive, as always, but it’s been my parents who have really helped me along with this.  My dad is a health nut (and will probably outlive me by decades), and he’s been great about checking in with me every week, letting me talk about my progress and my failures.  My mom has been awesome, too!  My husband goes to school in the evenings, so the boys and I always go to my parents’ for dinner and my mom is just amazing about cooking healthy and making sure there are appropriate things for me to eat.  I really feel like I can’t fail this time!

I’m hoping that in a few months I’ll be able to take some comparison pictures to post here to help motivate me, but for now I have this stuck on my bathroom mirror and I read it every morning before I start the day:

I’m looking forward to sharing my progress with you and I hope that you’ll share your thoughts with me, too – on this and anything else!