Dear 100# Loss, Happy Third Anniversary. Love, Me

On August 5, 2011, I met my goal weight, having lost 100 pounds since joining MFP and 114 pounds from my highest recorded weight (not that I made a point to step on scales frequently at that point, so it may have been higher at some point).

Today, exactly three years later, I weigh what I did that day.

At one point, I was 24 pounds lighter and quite a few inches smaller. I was a poster girl for MFP Success. I had gone from close to 300 pounds, more than half of which was body fat, to essentially half of that weight and only around 20% body fat.

I felt too small then, so I was okay with gaining some back. I didn't really want to gain as much back as I have, but...

This body, in the past three years, has gone through a divorce. It has gone through an 850 mile move to a place where the ONLY person I knew was a man I'd fallen in love with on MFP and where the culture was so very, very different than the one I was from (I am from an artsy/hippie community in southern AZ and moved to northern Utah... need I say more?). It's been through more miles sitting in a car each week to and from work than it used to go in a month.

This body has been through a life-threatening spinal cord injury that paralyzed my left leg. It's been through re-training my left foot to point forward, to rise up, to do both simultaneously, and then how to walk with a cane instead of a walker and finally without anything at all but my own two feet, even though the left one was left with permanent nerve damage and partial loss of movement. It's been through doctors saying the leg wouldn't get any stronger and then it's been through repeatedly proving the doctors' predictions wrong (up to a point - about a 2000% stronger point - and then it's been through disappointment but otherwise complacent acceptance - it's a lot further than the doctors thought, anyway).

It's been through failed back surgery that meant that although, thank God, I could figure out how to walk again, I was in constant agonizing pain despite a pharmacy worth of medicine. It's been through having a spinal cord stimulator implanted. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, you CAN feel the [roughly half-a-deck-of-card-sized] power box on the back of my hip, which I have to charge for several hours every week with something that looks like a very unimaginative person's version of a medical Iron Man belt, and you can even feel the spot where the wires come out of my spine - it feels like an al dente spaghetti noodle, by the way.

It's been through significantly less (although still a substantial amount of) pain since this surgery was complete.

This body has been through a wedding, just a week and a half ago, to that incredibly wonderful man I met on MFP. This body will spend the rest of its years with him (YAYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYYY!!!!!!!!).

This body will go through a lifetime of hills and valleys.

And although that number is just a small part of its story, this body weighs the same today as it did three years ago.