43 pounds gone (with pics)

I never thought I'd be posting in the Success Stories forum. While I'm planning to lose more weight, I took progress photos yesterday that mirrored ones from six months ago, and I was surprised to see a real difference.

First, the backstory. I'm 5'9"/5'10"ish. Size 16 was my default size for so long that I still look for those clothes when I'm shopping. I was a size 14 in middle/high school, but I always figured I was about 120 pounds. When I was 14 years old, I found out I was 172 pounds. I went straight into an insane crash diet of 200-600 calories a day. I dropped down to 145 pounds and felt as amazing as you can while being obsessed with wanting to see more bones and writing journal entries about how much you hate yourself. So, really, not that amazing.

As we all know, insane crash diets do not last. I gained it all back and then some. For the next 12 years or so, I continued bingeing and restricting with emphasis on bingeing. The result was a peak weight of 226, where I hovered for the last two years. Last June, a close friend went vegan for health reasons; I'd been vegan for animal-loving hippie reasons for a while, but I decided to give healthy eating a try with her since we already ate together quite a bit. This coincided with summer, when I spend lots of time swimming, and with beginning to ride my bike to the metro rather than taking the bus.

I can't pinpoint when things changed, but I give biking most of the credit. I used to think that since I didn't like the treadmill or the elliptical, I didn't like working out. It turns out that I just like being outdoors. I'm lucky enough to have good bike trails in the area, and when I started exploring them, I found a form of exercise I genuinely enjoyed. I went from a not-even-one-mile ride to the metro to 15- and 20-mile rides for fun. I started biking the 8 miles to work a few times a week. I also started eating tons more raw vegetables and kept my intake around 1600 calories.

On to the pictures. While I've lost about 43 pounds total, I took my initial progress photos after losing 10 pounds, so I'm down 30+ from when these were taken.




These next two are both from yesterday (no old version), in more typical clothes. I'm now a size 12 or 14 depending on the brand -- these jeans are actually 10s!



I'm not even in the healthy range for my height yet, so there's definitely more weight to lose, but I'm actually excited to keep going. Plus, I'm enjoying my more active lifestyle. While the winter weather messes with my biking, I'm working on indoor rock climbing and planning skiing/snowboarding trips. When I filled out my profile on MFP, one of my reasons to get in shape was to be proud of what my body could do. I'm getting there.