Met my first goal, time to continue on my journey (pics included)

ferneyjayde

My entire life I have been overweight. Even when I was participating in sports as a child I was always heavy because I could not stop eating. I ate because I was happy. I ate because I was stressed. I ate because I was bored. In short, I just ate.

Between my freshman and sophomore years of high school I lost a lot of weight in not the most healthiest of ways and not surprisingly I put that weight back on quicker than it melted off. Over the years since this time I have tried to lose weight as I saw the scale slowly climbing north. I would exercise more, but never make changes to the way I thought and felt about food. These attempts ended up being unsuccessful and I would give up.

This past March I stepped on a scale for the first time in a year. I was 191 lbs and I almost cried. No matter how much I knew I had gained weight I never really knew. I knew I had put on weight because I went from a size 10 to a size 14. I knew I had gained weight because I could see it in the mirror, but never in my life could I imagine that I would ever get this close to weighing 200 lbs.

Something clicked in my mind. I am an academic person by nature, so I did what I do best. I researched and researched and researched some more. I read everything I could get my hands on and stumbled across MFP. I read as many forum posts as I could find and I laid out a very carefully constructed plan for myself. I began crunching numbers and even created a dynamic excel spreadsheet to keep track of my weight and other interesting statistics. I finally felt like I had a system in place that could actually work and that I could stick with.

My journey began slow. More often than not I screwed up at the beginning, but I had numbers on my side. Even if it was only by .1 lb I was losing. So I kept at it. It is now 4 months later and I have reached two mini goals this month. I have reached my halfway point and for the first time since I was 16 (6 years ago) I have managed to drop below and maintain a weight below 160 lbs.

I decided this would be a good time to post some progress pictures and share my journey (so far) with the rest of this community who have inspired me to reach my goals.

Height: 5'5
SW: 191 lb
CW: 157 lb
GW: 120-130 lb

dstock80

Keep working, keep moving. You're doing great! Thanks for motivating all of us with your story!

AZnewbie00

Awesome progress. Have you been exercising or just keeping track of your foods?

ferneyjayde

I have been exercising (just so I can fit more food in) and trackingv