How I Did NOT Lose 98 pounds

Yes, I've lost 98 pounds. I started on my birthday in December 2009. A year ago, I'd lost 88 pounds and reached a healthy BMI. Since then I have lost an additional 10 pounds. This past week I observed my one year anniversary of being at a healthy BMI.

Last year I wrote a long post about how I did it which you can read here:
http://www.myfitnesspal.com/topics/show/314505-success-before-sixty

From Day One, my goal has been to not gain the weight back. I've yo-yo'd all my life and I just didn't want to go through all this effort to gain all the weight back yet again.

So, I didn't do a lot of things that you commonly see here on MFP. I think of these as the mistakes I made in the past.

1. Lose weight quickly.

The stress of restricting eating, exercising like crazy and worrying about my weight would be too much to bear long-term. Something always happened and I'd ease off, gain weight and give up.

2. Set short term weight goals.

Inevitably I'd miss them and then feel like I was failing. Probably it was just my natural weight fluctuation. But regularly feeling like I was failing left me, at the end, not feeling like the success I was. Without feeling like a success, I had no self-confidence about dealing with the natural difficulties of life and I would start over-eating again.

3. Focus on how much weight I'd lost.

All that did was keep reinforcing my self-image as a fat person. I was a fat person who'd lost weight. This time, I focused on how much I weighed and how good I looked. I threw away my larger clothing and bought new stuff all along the way and really worked at feeling happy with how I looked and felt. I refuse to answer questions about how much I've lost - I just say "a lot."

4. Dream about how happy I'd be when I reached my goal weight.

It's weird but you have to learn how to be happy. Just being at your goal weight doesn't automatically make you feel happy - at least not for long. The compliments stop, the thrill of losing weight stops, the ordinary trials and tribulations of life continue and sooner or later something goes wrong in your life. If you haven't learned how to be happy through all those, then you won't be. This time, I focused on being happy at whatever weight I was because I focused on enjoying my food, enjoying my exercise and enjoying how I looked and felt each and every day. Now I have the habit of being happy and I know how to get through the lows of life.

To sum it all up, my motto is: Work on Today, Let Tomorrow Worry About Itself.

Everybody loves Before-and-After pictures so I'm going to post mine. You can see my previous weight losses on this blog post: http://www.myfitnesspal.com/blog/JeanneTops/view/official-135794

All I'm going to say is that the way I look now (on the right) is EXACTLY how I wanted to look when the picture on the left was taken. (Note the same style and color scheme!)

Best of wishes to all of you.