Office by Alex Penny
I keep getting ‘how did you lose weight?’ and ‘how long did it take you?’ questions along with a few other things so I’m gonna try to get a few birds with one stone with this post.
First of all, my before and after pictures I posted were only of me at my heaviest and me at my smallest, I tried to piece together some shots of the progression of my weightloss to show how for me IT TOOK A WHILE AND WAS A SLOW GOING PROCESS (sorry for yelling, I just feel like this is a really important point.)
I lost in increments, and when I lost, I never lost more than about 2 lbs a week. Overall, I would say it was probably around a three year process to lose 60 lbs, because after losing 20 lbs, I took a break, and after losing another 30, I took a break, and then I buckled down and lost the last 10 (which I sometimes still a struggle to maintain.)
Mine is not one of those ‘I decided to lose weight and I changed my lifestyle completely and did it in 6 months!’ kind of stories (although good for those people holy crap that is amazing.) It was a two steps forward, one step back, slow and steady wins the race, kind of process. I was not perfect, I fucked up, I fell off the wagon, it took me a WHILE to really and truly make the lifestyle change and stick with it, it just did not click instantaneously. Now granted, I never backslid too much, and when I did is when I started up again, but it certainly wasn’t a magical overnight transformation.
Now that I’m here, I don’t think I would ever allow myself to fall too far off the wagon, I’ve worked too hard and I feel too good to ever lose myself like that again, but so much of this has been and probably always will be trial and error, and that is SO okay. Nobody’s perfect, and at the end of the day, it may have taken me a while, but I got here.
It’s not some sort of race against the clock, set your own pace, do the best you can, and eventually you’ll get there. Whether it be in 6 months or 3 years.
And for those of you asking:
-I’m 5’8. At my biggest I was 207, I’ve gotten as small as 145, but generally fluctuate somewhere in the low 150’s. So around a 60 lb loss total.
-I was a size 16 when I started and now I wear anywhere from a 6 to an 8.
-I did weight watchers, it really worked for me and I still to this day use their points system. I only brought exercise into the last 10 lbs (I run, poorly, and I hate every second of it) but the rest of it was just from diet.
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.
