Hello everyone, and my story so far

bashiera

HI! I've been a member for a while, lurking on the message boards. I used to use Spark People and I've had some success with that site, but MFP is a lot cleaner and easier to use, so here I am. I'm currently an 18 year old female getting my Associates degree in Registered Nursing. I graduated high school a year early in 2010 and went straight into LPN school, so I'm also an LPN at the moment. I was a skinny kid- my brother and I both were active, happy, and thin as rails. When I got into middle school, however, a combination of life changes and other things sent me into depression. I was on different psychotropic medications until I was 16, when I decided to try being med free with therapy. Success! Unfortunately, the medications' side effects included massive weight gain, along with emotional eating, binging, and night eating from taking ritalin in the day, I graduated high school at 180+ pounds.

When I started nursing school, I gained ten more pounds, and by January of this year, I was 195 pounds, my heaviest. I said enough is enough. I look at my family and everyone except my two brothers is overweight or obese. My mother is now on statins for high cholesterol at 39, my aunt has out of control type 2 diabetes, my grandfather had a quad-CABG at 56, and my grandmother has struggled with her weight since I was a child. I wanted to break the cycle. I wanted to be not only lighter, but healthier, for my entire life. I wanted to be able to buy cute clothes at Charlotte Russe, and run a marathon some day, and be active and happy my entire life and hopefully avoid the problems obesity has caused for my family. I used to blame my weight on a lot of things: my family, my genes, my thyroid (which is working quite perfectly), my body type. I was "Oh I'm just thick, I'm built this way. I'll always be the heavy girl." But I'm not. I don't want to be. There's nothing wrong with loving who you are at any size, but I didn't love myself at almost 200 pounds. After I found my weight out, my lab results came back from bloodwork, I had an honest and true moment with myself. It wasn't my genes, it wasn't my thyroid or some other glandular problem. It was me. I ate too much. I never exercised. I ate candy and cookies and drank 3 or 4 sodas a day. I sat on my computer all day and ate late at night when I should have been sleeping and skipped breakfast and just got comfortable wearing big clothes and big scrubs and not looking at myself in the mirror after a shower. I avoided all responsibility for my weight. That stopped about 6 weeks ago.

6 weeks ago, I got a copy of Turbo Fire from a friend who tried it but gave up. I started with the prep schedule, but wanted to move onto the real schedule. It was hard. It was really, really hard. My feet hurt, my legs hurt, my abs hurt, I was out of breath. But you know what? 4 weeks into it, I started asking the people around me if I looked different. I DID! My hips looked smaller, my waist was 2 inches smaller, I could see a change in my body that I have never seen before. I have only seen my weight go up in the past, but now I'm shrinking! I became aware of what I was eating. I quit drinking sodas (except for that one ginger ale when I had a stomach ache!) I ate more real foods, and started counting calories. I made it a point to drink more water, take my vitamins, and wake up earlier. Starting my weight loss journey for life has changed other things in my life too. I've tried 'dieting' in the past without success. I'm making a life change I want to stick with. I had my splurge days and that dinner at Texas Roadhouse, but I kept losing. I kept exercising. I didn't let a chicken fried steak in gravy on a Friday night stop me from getting up the next morning and working my @ss off. I have the support of my amazing boyfriend behind me, and he's loved me at 150 pounds and at 195 pounds. He's told me "I don't care what size you are. As long as you're happy with you."

So, that's my story so far. I have 15 more weeks of Turbo Fire left. After that, I'm going to give either ChaLEAN Extreme a try, or go for Insanity. Good luck to everyone reading this!