"Let Go or Be Dragged" success stories--pls. share!

The moment came when I came back from a leaving do, uploaded the pictures to Facebook, and saw how whale-like I looked in the dress. I'd let physical and mental illness just take over, and I'd put on 1 1/2 stone in less than a year. I was convincing myself I was still an athletic 11 stone 4 lbs, when really, I was tipping the scales at 14 st 7. I had been using another tracking website/app, but you had to pay for everything and I just wasn't serious about it. This time, however, I realised I was fat, that I looked awful in pictures and that i had just let myself go. If I continued, I would have been in the Obese Class II category.

Now, 9 months later, I have a BMI of 21.7, nearly 10 stone (5ft 8) and I feel great. Yeah, I have horrendous stretchmarks from rapid weight gain and my upper arms are still somewhat flabby, but I've worked damn hard to lose the weight and considering what I looked like before, I think I've done well! I can now see the fat when I look at old pictures, and I never, ever want to get back to that.

I'm not very far in - 10 weeks and 15 pounds - but I feel like I have been gearing up to take this step for the past year. My goal for last year was to make sure I ate all my vegetables including dark leafy greens. I got a nutribullet and made kale spinach blueberry smoothies and succeeded there. But for the losing weight part I just didn't know how to do it - if I'm hungry I eat so it was really hard for me to believe in myself and not have it be crazy difficult. For me I think there were 6 parts that have me convinced that this is my new healthy lifestyle (exercising a ton has never been an issue for me, I love to workout): (1) recognizing that it took my mom a few different times to really quite smoking, and that meant that I could succeed one of these times too, (2) I gained 100 lbs as a professor and hitting the decade of being a prof mark felt like it was time to make a change, (3) Reading about how yoga/mindfulness can help weight loss and committing to doing yoga, (4) Salad in a jar - now I make salads for lunch on sundays for the week and that makes it easy for me to have a healthy lunch, which promotes health in the rest of my day, (5) Not eating any refined carbs until after dinner - I discovered that I appear to have a really extreme response to sugar and it makes me really hungry so if I don't eat it during the day I'm not hungry, and (6) someone introduced me to MFP - and I LOVE this community!

It was a lot of things that led me to get serious about losing weight but the biggee was because I cancelled my physical at the doctor's office simply because I didn't want to be weighed. My clothes were all getting tighter, I had no energy, my motivation to travel went away and by me eating terrible foods, I was watching my husband getting heavier too. I didn't even want to go to work because my clothes fit terribly.

I told my husband on April 1st that I would no longer be buying ice cream, cookies, or pretty much anything with sugar or wheat in them, and that we were no longer eating junk food at our house. I told him to pig out that day because we were through with unhealthy eating. I started buying healthier foods, exercising more and he has even lost 30 pounds too.