Office by Alex Penny
Anonymous: why do you say you don't think you will/could be any smaller than you are now? if you're happy with the way you look now, great! and i think you do look great. just curious as to why you think you can't slim down anymore. anyone can lose as much as they want.
I think that is a bit of a dangerous game. Sure anyone could lose as much as they want, but then where does that stop? I know that maintaining anything much lower than what I am currently would involve a LOT of extremely hard work and deprivation and would probably entail me devoting much more of my life to weightloss than I would like to. I’m all for a healthy and fit lifestyle, but I don’t think the end game should necessarily be to get as small as you can possibly be. I’ve been about 10 lbs lower than my goal weight by accident and I felt like I looked ill and not healthy at all, I would never strive to be that on my own.
I think the “I could still lose __ more lbs” mentality is really dangerous. At some point, you have to realize that your body is going to equal itself out where it should be, and I don’t think fighting that is really the best choice.
I will never be a size 0, my body will never match girls on runways, but that is totally okay, it wasn’t built to be that. And even though I could probably coerce it into existing in that state doesnt mean that I should, because thats not healthy.
Anonymous: are you related to THE olsens?
I’d like to think I’m what the Olsens may have looked like if they had kept growing and eating.
One of my friends who teaches 2nd grade just sent me this with the caption “one of my students wrote a letter to their cat, I thought you would like it” (Taken with instagram)
3 miles and having the best Tuesday (Taken with instagram)
Those are my ‘holy crap a lot of people just started following me and leaving me nice messages’ faces.
WELL. First of all, hey guys! Thanks for all the positive words and encouraging messages and for following me, I was not expecting the post I made yesterday about my weightloss to take off like that, how neat!
Second of all, I’ve gotten a bunch of questions and I’m going to try to answer a few all at once so I don’t clog up people’s dashboards by answering them. SO, here goes.
I’m 24 years old and 5’8. At my biggest, I was 207, at my very smallest (last spring when I was pretty sick) I was 145. My current weight fluctuates anywhere from like, 148-155ish. So about 60 lbs lost total, depending on where I am while maintaining.
I’ve lost all my weight through Weight Watchers, and towards the end a bit of running (ran a half marathon, am currently training for another one.) I wasn’t really overweight as a kid, or in my teens. Went through something traumatic and put on the weight afterwards. It took me a WHILE to lose all the weight, like it was probably a three year long process total. It was a two steps forward, one step back, kind of deal for me. To be in the ‘goal’ range for my height the highest you can be is 160, so that was my original goal. I went from 207-180, existed there for a while, buckled down and got to 160, stayed there for a while, and then this past year got down to the low 150’s.
At my biggest I was a size 16, and currently I wear anywhere from a 6-8 and will probably not ever be any smaller than that.
Thanks again for all the lovely kind words, they have most certainly made my day and made me feel really amazing :) !
Sorry I’m not sorry that I will never take these shoes off (Taken with instagram)
Anonymous: how did you lose so much weight? I really want to lose weight but I have no clue where to start.
weight watchers! I know people that have success straight up calorie counting, or hitting the gym really hard (and haay, good for them,) but I needed the accountability involved in showing up somewhere every week and weighing in in front of another human being.
Also, a bit of running. I trained for and ran a half marathon last year after having never exercised just about ever, and am doing another one this year, although I’m admittedly both a slow and not awesome runner. But the majority of my weightloss was Weight Watchering :)
Weight loss is a weird thing, because when your goal weight is far away you have this model mentality about being skinny, and then once you get there, you’ve still got the same body type you had before, its just…smaller.
The further I get from the biggest I was, its harder to remember how far I’ve come, and therefore easier to get discouraged about my shape, if that makes any sense. Not to say I don’t think I’m a total babe at least like, 95% of the time, but occasionally I fall victim to the constant onslaught of images of tiny tiny women that we’re all subjected to daily.
Maintenance is a weird place to be in, because even though I could go down a bit, and could tone up a bit (and am hoping to do so) not much is going to change from here as far as overall size and shape goes. Which is weird and hard to wrap my brain around. It’s not always the easiest to feel 100% okay with being on the curvier end of healthy.
I’ve spent this morning looking at old photos of myself, there arent a ton of me at my biggest (because I was the saddest ever and avoided cameras like the plague) but I scrounged up some before and after pictures, and I’m gonna post em here, because I think its good to remind myself of where I’ve been, and how far I’ve come, especially on days where I’m feeling a bit discouraged. Because at the end of the day, I’m healthier and happier than ever, and a few photos of skinny ladies on tumblr shouldnt take that away from me.
Anonymous: Are you and Ben still friends?
With a little lurking you could probably find the answer to this on your own, but, as of recently. No. And probably not ever again.
My choice, not his. At this point, I’m not sure someone like Ben can truly be friends with anyone, unfortunately.
Some of my favorite text messages come from @jaycedinoclub (Taken with instagram)
