From Obesity to a Healthy BMI! (lots of pics)

For most of my childhood, I was a really skinny kid, the one some of the other kids picked on for being nerdy, rail thin, and bony, and I was a runner.



I was 125 lbs in this picture (roughly), and I'm 5'8".

College came around, and I started turning to food as therapy for stress and depression. It wasn't long before my weight started to reflect my poor choices and deteriorating mental state. By the time my senior year in college rolled around, I had put on almost 60 lbs and had gone from a size 2 to a size 12.



Graduate school came, and it just got worse. I ballooned up to a size 18W at my wedding in June 2010:




By December 2010, I was up to a size 20/22 though I insisted that I could still wear my size 18W's since they "zipped", muffin top be darned...





I finally got the courage to step on the scale, and to my horror, I saw a number I never though I'd ever see: 228 lbs. I was in major major denial about how fat I had gotten. I had put on over 100 lbs since my senior year of high school.

I was lying to myself about it when I had to buy bigger pants all the time.
I lied to myself about it when I looked in the mirror.
I lied to myself about it when I could no longer tie my shoes without turning my leg to the side because my belly was too big.
I lied to myself about it when I couldn't get off the couch without using my arms.
I lied to myself about it when I could no longer cross my legs.

I started on MFP in December 2010, and decided that it needed to change. I ate at a huge deficit, worked my butt off, and then would binge eat out of hunger and stress. So, the whole process became a rollercoaster.

Here I was at about 210:



And at 195:




Back up near 200:



Finally, I decided to get myself together for good and lost 42 lbs (down to about 190 here):



Down to 186 here (this picture was a joke btw. I really don't make serious duckface pics):



AND then a monkeywrench got thrown into my plans. I got pregnant. It had taken me almost two years to lose my 42 lbs, and I was terrified to gain it all back with pregnancy, so I decided that I was going to keep tracking my food and do my best to gain only a healthy amount of weight, which given that I was overweight when I got pregnant, was about 25 lbs. I ended up gaining 30, and this was me at full term about a week before I gave birth:



After the birth of my son, my depression got much much worse, and I lost control of my eating all over again. I lost about 20 lbs just giving birth, and then I started to gain again from emotional eating. Eventually, I got all the way back up to almost 200 lbs again:



After a lot of soul searching, I decided that this time I had to treat the underlying cause of my weight gain: depression and subsequent emotional eating.

This is me at Halloween 2013 with my son (he was a shark but didn't want to wear his shark hat), and I was at 185 lbs:



And here I was in November 2013 at 177.5, a size 12, and the smallest I had been since sophomore year of college:



And finally, today, I'm exactly 164, which puts me in the "healthy weight" range for the first time in a LONG time.





I'm between a size 10 and 12 right now (pants in the pic are size 10's but they're a bit tight around the waist still).

To those of you fighting emotional eating and depression, don't give up. Get help if you need it. It's your life, and you deserve to be happy.

I've still got another 15-20 more lbs to lose, but I'm finally no longer overweight!

Thanks for taking the time to read this, and I wish every one of you all the best.

Finally, I want to give a huge shoutout to my husband, my family, my close friends, and my MFP family (past and present, near and far) who have been such an amazing source of love and support for me. I couldn't have gotten through this without you all.