New to the boards- My story.

funkychickenbean

Hi all!
Thought I would come introduce myself. I've yet to work on my profile so my apologies if you go there and there's no info. I literally just created it. Hoping to find some advice and support here as I've been more or less staying on track or trying to for the longest time ever in my life.

In the past I have gone through phases about changing how my body looks.

If you have some time, below is a short story about my fitness history and how I got here tonight.

This time a year ago, I went to the beach. I asked someone to take a photo of my other half and I standing by the surf at sunrise. I was wearing a tight tee shirt and long skirt and did NOT like what I saw. I couldn't believe how fat I was starting to look. I weighed myself for the first time in ages and took a dizzy spell to see I had gone up to 145. All throughout childhood I was never conscious of nutrition and such. Even entering my teen years I was proud of myself to have stayed fairly thin while eating whatever I wanted and NOT being obsessed with body image. As high school wore on I started to feel the pressure to look a certain way. It felt like really skinny, lanky, toned and otherwise perfect female bodies were the norm and bodies like mine were not. After spending some weeks eating fast food while vacationing at my older sister's, I decided to start dieting. No more weekly 12 dozen hot wings and bleu cheese, no more weekly bags of doritoes, etc.

I did really good! I had had fatty tissue along my knee areas and once I started working out and limiting myself to slim fast and smart ones dinners, that went away and I could see what had been going wrong with my weight. It fizzled out. I yo-yo'd with diets and exercising, always getting bored and sick of not being able to eat what I wanted.

Fast forward some years. I started working full time and thinking I needed to eat like a man because I was working a vigorous on my feet production job all day. Started to gain weight, started dieting and going to the gym in 2005 or 2006. That lasted only as long as I could take having to force myself to go and looking forward to healthy choice dinners afterwards.

Took up a Bally's membership in 2008 and that only lasted as long as the previous conditions were bearable.

Etc. etc.

Every time, with the same motivation in the beginning and determination to make it permanent and stick to it until I REALLY finally change my body, it always came to an end. Meanwhile come 2011, I hit the max my weight has ever been. I knew it was a problem yet even after realizing I was 145 I had yet to start doing something about it. I had gotten into the habit of waking up in the afternoon, going to my computer, sitting online pretty much all night into morning, going to bed, waking up and doing the same. When I noticed one of my ankles/calves was visibly swollen, it was a wake up call big time. I HAD to do something. At 27, my body was starting to deteriorate. This was scary. I had symptoms of possibly getting diabetes, numbness in my feet, the swelling, the obvious weight gain that forced me to go out for the first time and buy new clothes cause those I could always fit into no longer fit me.

I did really good, bought an elliptical machine but couldn't get it to work. Come last September when school started again and with the broken machine, I sort of stopped because of time and energy restraints.

This last March I bought a pair of jeans for an event I was going to and was determined to fit so I started again. Not wanting to let my $300 purchase go down the drain I got on the ball and finally forced myself to get the elliptical machine fixed. Yay elliptical! Now I can adjust the resistance and track time/estimated calories burned!

I got down to, in about three weeks, 5-6 pounds lower AND Into the 28 inch waist jeans I had thought were 32. The good thing is that my weight had still been a few pounds lighter still from exercising over the summer so I was surprised to start out not at 144 but at 139! My pants fit in time for the event but I kept going until hitting 133. There, I felt, comfortable and managed to maintain it until recently. I plateaued and stayed there and in the last couple weeks I decided to start again, this time from a solid 133 and try to get back to my 125 I had in high school. Not sure how possible it is without starving myself like I was then, but I want to finally keep this motivation up and SEE what happens IF I actually keep going.

I never seem to look any different to myself. I even worry that maybe I WILL get to 125 and still not like what I see. IS this even possible? I want to get rid of all this squishy stuff at long last and be able to see the muscles and shape underneath. When I get them together, I will post images of how my body has changed over the last 10 years or so.

It always feels to me that I am SO close to my goal that I have to be able to do it. I am lucky not to starting out 150 pounds over my goal, you know? Again, my fear is that I'd have to weight in at 120 or less to look the way I really want to. All the toning and sculpting in the world won't matter if there are layers of fat covering it.