Healthiness Journey

I borrowed that title from Jen over at Prior Fat Girl .  Have you read her blog?  It's a extremely motivating and an encouraging REAL story.  I love that Jen and her "family" of  Prior Fat Girls/Guys are very positive, and a great inspiration.  If it's a good day or a bad day you can count on their posts covering their individual journeys with honesty and a raw approach that leaves the reader with the inspiration to continue on their own journey!  I've had the pleasure of meeting Jen in "real" life and truth be told she was the one person who really pushed the button in my head that said  - just do it start a blog.  

I have a few others that i have found as inspiration over the last year and I plan on talking about their blogs too, but for now I need to get this show on the road.  So here is my story (get ready, it's long).....

If I had to put a date or an age on it, I would say that my body image struggles started at about 10 years old.  TEN, isn't that sad!?!  It seems a little strange to go back that far, but that was the first time I remember seeing pictures of myself and thinking I was FAT.  I look back now, and yeah I was a bit chunky but In my opinion no little girl should feel that way at that age. 

Fast forward a few years and I started cheering and dancing, I got taller and "grew" into my body.  I remember being 17  5'6" like I am now and around 135 pounds.....looking back I wasn't a stick but I wasn't the fat girl I saw in the mirror either!  Of course the damage was already done.  Years of nasty words from others, being one of the girls with curves and my mind was already made up....I wasn't pretty and I WAS fat...



Bad copy, but this girl doesn't look fat to me now!

 About 12 months after this picture I was in my freshman year of community college, I was in a pretty bad place at that time, I rarely ate a real meal and I was dealing with a lot of emotional baggage.  I don't even know what the scale actually said but I would guess that I got down to about 120 - 125 pounds if not less. 

Fast forward another year and I was getting married!  Yep, you read that right I got married at 19 years old.  Two and a half months before the wedding I weighed in at 135 again, and then I started the pill (TMI?)....in that 2 1/2 months I gained 20 pounds and weighed in at 155 on my wedding day. I was very unhappy to say the least!  Over the next 2 1/2 years I yo-yo dieted and ended up weighing 180 pounds before I turned 22. Another story for another day (maybe) but by 23 I had seen as "low" as 163 and I stayed right around 165 - 170 for a year.....and then I got pregnant.

By the time I gave birth to my daughter (5 weeks early) I hit 213 pounds, but since most of it was water/swelling I lost weight pretty quickly with little to no effort! By the time my daughter was 7 months old I was right around 180 and pregnant  AGAIN!  I tipped the scales at 233 pounds by the time my son was born and I was 2 months shy of my 27th birthday.... I WAS MISERABLE!  With both kids I gained very little in the beginning and a ton of weight in swelling and water at the end.  My son was born 10 days early and with both kids I was days from being on mandatory bed rest when I delivered.   By the time my son was 4 months old I was under 200...barely! 

I spent the next 15 months dieting and never getting anywhere - I always had excuses!  Finally something snapped and my old "friend" emotional stress/motivation was back and by January of 2009 I was down 20 lbs and sitting right around 175. Now this is where I started watching what I ate, counting calories and participating in office weight loss bets and for a year and a half of all of that the scale mocked me and always stayed between 169 - 172.  So in late February of this year when I saw that scale hit 175 again - I freaked and I joined WW online!  (details on that progress in another post!)

Phew - that was long - are you still with me?  My point here is that the journey I'm on is not one of another 50 pounds, now  it's about working out more and obsessing about the number on the scale LESS!  I want to get to a weight where I am happy in my own skin more than not.  I want to get to a place where the number on the scale is just a number and not a definition.  I want to continue to have small victories in the way I am choosing to eat and exercise and finding the mental/emotional balance to be comfortable knowing that those things can happen now AND in 10, 20 or 30 more pounds lost.  I want to be healthy and happy and love myself, I don't want to look at pictures when I'm 45 and think....I really should have loved the me I was at 30!

I like this picture....I want to love them all!