So, I now have the confidence in myself to share my before/present photos. This picture was taken in India in March of '08 and I was pretty much around this size give or take a few pounds most my my 20's. After my postings at the end of '09 and all though 2010 and up to the present I have continued to work on losing weight and get to a healthy place in my life.
I am now at least 40 lbs lighter than I was in this photo and still working on getting healthier. My profile photo is a bit deceptive, in that it hides the areas I am still working on, but overall I feel so much better about myself than I did 3 years ago.
(I'm the curly haired chick, second from the right.)
My weight loss journey began starting with the small things. Adding a few more vegetables to my repertoire and actually exercising on a more regular basis. I joined a small women's gym-similar to Curves in September of 2009 and then switched gyms to Gold's Gym in October of 2010. While I have had months of more activity than other months, I have stayed consistent and have not let myself completely stop moving. As for the dieting I have done a couple of things that have been a definite help, but still have their flaws. I started following the Belly Fat Cure plan and was able to lose about 10 lbs before hearing about a form of the HCG diet. There are definitely pros and cons to both and both do work (at least they did for me- to some degree). The HcG diet I followed did work, but it was not without it's struggles and my sister and I found that we seemed to be the exception to the rule for people that had issues after the fact. The long explainaiton of the program is that you go in 4 phases of the diet. The first two phases you take HCG every day. The first 2 days you stock up on extra fat to allow your body to have easy access to freshly stored fat from a high fat binge, then you go on a highly restrictive diet (described in Dr. Simeon's Pounds and Inches book) for a minimum of 21 days but up to 40 days. Then in phase three you begin adding foods back (everything but starches and sugar) for 6 weeks. Phase four is where you begin eating "normally" again, but you pay attention to your body and figure out what foods are your triggers that either cause you to crave the unhealthy foods or cause you to gain weight. Overall you are supposed to be able to eat a normal amount of food and enjoy most foods and as long as you don't go back to eating all refined starches and boxed foods you should be able to maintain your weight loss. This has been true for me to some extent, but it was not nearly has easy as it is supposed to be. I did three rounds of phases 1-3 and lost about 20 lbs each time, unfortunately the time inbetween the rounds I gained some back so my total loss from the beginning of my 2009 weight loss adventure has leveled off at 40 lbs. There is a part of me that wants to try it one more time and see if I can lose that last 20-25 lbs I think I need to lose, but all the struggles I've had trying to eat normally and not gain causes me to hesitate. My plan right now is to try to follow more of the Belly Fat Cure principle which is limiting refined carbs and sugar, but allowing for some of both. The problem with this is that the sugar count doesn't matter whether it comes from fruit, veg or an actual sugar substance, so it limits the amount of fruit and some veggies you can eat. Somehow I believe there has to be a way you can eat the fruits and veggies God created for us to eat and limit other foods and be able to lose weight without having to live on 1500 calories a day. I would rather live at a slightly larger size and enjoy life than live in a perpetually hungry state in order to maintain my ultimate dream size. I have also kind of teamed up with a friend to be an accountability partner to help encourage me to continue to work out regularly and eat right!
So, this picture was taken around the middle of the journey and I'm consistently gone up and down a bit from this point, but for the most part look about this weight now, but this was taken September 2010.
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