Almost there.....

Firstly, let me say that there were times when I wanted to ditch the whole counting calories thing. However one of the things I would do to get me out of that funk, and still do, was to read all the Success Stories. So a shout out to everyone who has posted on here!! :drinker:

A little history. I was always the chubby girl growing up. When I hit high school I wasn’t fat, but I was stocky. I played a lot of sports and was pretty active. I remember that I stood 5’ 4” tall, wore a size 7 and weighed 145 lbs.. I went up to a size 11 a year after graduation and it didn’t stop there. On my wedding day (29 yo, 1998) I weighed 201 lbs. It seemed as if I was constantly trying a different diet. I would lose some weight but then gain it all back plus some. It got to the point where I figured it was my lot in life to be fat and I stopped trying and told myself that I looked beautiful no matter what the scale said. At my highest, I weighed 230 lbs.

My journey started because I missed being active and wanted to move more. A friend of mine, who is a personal trainer, always offered his services to me and I finally took him up on his offer on July 6, 2013. I remember thinking to myself that I was only going to start exercising, that I was not going to “diet”. I could not and would not give up my favorite foods. After a week of literally busting my backside, I decided that all that effort and pain (OH MY GOD THE PAIN) was useless if I was going to hide all of it under layers of fat. So a few weeks later I found myself creating an account on MFP.

Once I made the decision to do this thing, I needed to set goals. So I set a goal of fitting into size 10 jeans. I figured I would be about 175 lbs when that happened. Well I reached that goal when I hit 190, albeit they fit very tightly. So I figured I would keep 175 as my goal and see where I would end up. Well I finally reached that goal on April 9th and have gone down to a size 8 and am just a pound away from crossing into the BMI overweight category from the obese category.
So now I have set my new goal to 160. I realize that losing the last 15 lbs is going to go much slower than losing the first 15 lbs so I am not going to get discouraged and will keep in mind that regardless of what I do, time is going to pass, so I might as well do it at a deficit. :ohwell:

I don’t have too many pictures of me before but I wanted to show you all the difference. :happy:

EDIT...couldn't get the pictures to show up so will update it tonight. But you can see the pictures on my profile page.