Cantalope
+
Yogart
=
Uuuuuuummm, uuuuummmm, good!!!!

Work

     You know the saying...I never said it would be easy...I just said it would be worth it? Well it is sooo true. It is so easy to gain weight but losing it...Now thats another story! I saw a quote today and it was the perfect quote for me in my life right now!!!

-"The only place success comes before work is in the dictionary!" May V Smith

     I loved it because even though it took me a while to put the weight on, now that I've started losing...I want to lose it and I want to lose it NOW!!! lol I guess I just have to be patient and do the WORK!!!

Weigh in day!! -5.5lbs

    I a so excited I weighed in at 220.0lbs today!!! That means I lost an even 5.5lbs! I am so proud of myself, I think I'm off to a great start, and what is awesome is that if I wasn't motivated before...I am now!!! If I lost 5.5lbs in the first week...and I keep at it...I can't wait to see the results!!! :) I know I have a long way to go and I know there will be ups and downs, so I will just keep doing what I am doing and try to improve next week!!
    I went to the gym 4 days this week-my goal for next week is 5!
    I did not eat out at all this week, but this coming week the Rite Aid gang will be going to Bandits! I know I will be ordering a salad...but we will probably get corn nuggets to share!! Key work is SHARE!!
    Thanks again for the support!!!!

Jello snack

Ummmm look what I made today!!! I've been trying to make snacks a head of time so I have control of what that snack is!  When I'm at the store and get hungry for a snack it is just too easy to purchase a candy bar, cookies, chips, etc. By making the snacks a head of time, I not only get to control the snack, making it healthy, but I also get to SAVE money.....and who doesn't want to do that!!! Oh and even if you add a little bit of whip cream on the top...it is still less than 150 calories!!!           

       Ummmmmmmmm  Sooooo Goooood!!!!!!!

Zumba:)

I love Zumba!!! It's the only thing that is good about a Monday! LOL. Since there are only Zumba
 classes Monday through Thursday...I start to go through Zumba withdrawl by the time Monday night rolls around!!! Oh and they announced tonight that they are having a Zumba Halloween party!!! I am so excited! As with every Zumba party there are going to be lots of door prizes:) (Including 3 months of free Y membership) From now till the party on Oct 23rd every time you attend a Zumba class you receive an extra ticket for the drawings!!!! It is going to be awesome! Anyone who is in the Berwick PA area and is interested in Zumba let me know and I can hook you up with the details for the Zumba classes as well as the party!

Weekends

   The weekends are always the hardest to stay on track, but I think I did pretty well considering! lol
That's what makes it hard about starting this on a Friday, cuz I already feel like I'm not doing as much as I should. I didn't get any workouts in, but then I usually don't on the weekends. Food wise, it could have been better...but it could have been worse!!! I did eat some choc cake with some cool whip while I was at a friends house, but considering the whole table was full of choc cake, lemon cake, brownies, brownies with hot fudge...I think having a little choc cake wasn't to bad! Sunday evenings are going to be hard cuz there is always a table full of food and everyone is always eating. lol It's hard when not everyone has to say no!
   Next weekend I am going to set a goal for myself to go to the Y for an  hour on Saturday and on Sunday I will take Charlie for a long walk! As for the table full of food...maybe I'll take a veggie tray!!! :)

Losing it again...

   Ok, so here it goes. My journey to lose weight has officially started...and I survived day 1!!! I posted on my facebook page about this blog...so now...all my friends know! I NEVER TELL ANYONE HOW MUCH I WEIGH!!! but I have now! I've put my weight out there for the world to see.  225.5lbs, that's my official starting weight and my goal is to loose 65lbs. That puts me at 160lbs, which is actually about 15lbs more than I weighed when I first lost the weight. I figured if I gave myself a little cushion I might not get so discouraged if I can't get down to 145 again, but I am more than willing to exceed my goal!
   I just want to say thanks to all my friends for their support thus far! I have great friends, so I am excited to have their continued support as I continue on this journey. Over the past few years of gaining and losing weight, one of the things that I have learned  is that my friends, don't care how much I weigh. When I gained all this weight...no one treated me any different. This makes me realize that beauty is from with in. This is the first time I am losing weight in order to GET HEALTHY rather than to BE SKINNY!!! And I think this will be the key for me to take it off and keep it off!!!

Found it...

    So after my experience with finding out my body fat percentage, things all went down hill. It took two years but I gained it all back and an additional 25lbs. It seemed like everything that could go wrong did. Lindsay graduated, so I didn't have that motivation (or a spotter) to get me to the weight room. The aerobic type classes were scheduled at times I had classes and was not able to attend. At the time I was managing a 40 unit apartment complex and It kept me constantly busy. I tried to work out as often as I could...but that didn't turn out to be very often. In addition I was not eating properly. It was a very stressful experience with the apartments and I turned to food. It seemed like I was eating when I was board, when I was stressed, when I was upset...I was just always eating and I didn't know why! Not to mention that I was so busy it was easier and faster to eat unhealthy. Then my senior year I no longer had to worry about the apartments but I had other stresses that I was dealing with. With graduating I had to worry about what I was going to do...Was I going to stay in Virginia or move back to Pennsylvania? I also was an art major so I was extremely busy and stressed with my Senior Art Show. The summer before my senior year a friend of mine had found a puppy in the woods. As soon as I saw him I was done for...I knew he was coming home with me. It was a lot of work to be as busy as I was with being a senior and trying to train a  puppy at the same time. I also felt guilty for spending so much time at work , school, and working on my art show. So any free time I had I spent with Charlie. I would take him for a walk everyday so I was getting some exercise but nothing compared to what I was used to.

   In addition to not working out, not eating properly, and stress, was the emotional aspect. The feeling like I had failed because I had gained the weight back. I tried to pin point the issues that lead to my weight loss and then the issues that lead to my weight gain. It was a lot of work trying to figure things out. I spent a year meeting with the schools student support director, and I still don't have all the answers. What I do know is that it is both a combination of physical and emotional factors.  I finally feel like I have the emotional part figured out. I know that I am the same person that I have always been regardless of the weight I am at. I also realized that people who are my friends and family treat me the same way weather I am over weight or weather I am thin. I think back on the ten year relationship that I had with my ex boyfriend and I always used to think it was my weight that was the issue, even though he would never admit to it, that's what I believed! I realized by seeing him and the relationship he is in now that weight is not the issue. It has helped me realize that it just wasn't meant to be. It had nothing to do with my appearance.

   These are some of the realizations that have kept me at the weight I am at. If my friends like me the way I am, why should I change? But the answer has nothing to do with anyone but myself. I think back to how I felt when I was down to 150lbs!!! I felt great! I felt good about my appearance as well as physically, and this is how I want to feel again.

Lost it...

I weighed 199 lbs when I first started this journey. I know for a fact it was 199 because I swore I would not go over 200lbs!!! I weighed myself everyday and I would fluctuate but it never went over 200. Then one day I saw a picture of myself at a baseball game with my boyfriend at the time. I was disgusted with myself. I know that disgusted is a little harsh, so I would like to say I was disappointed with myself, but that would be the understatement of the year. I really was disgusted. I had always struggled with my weight but this was the heaviest I had ever been and seeing what 199lbs looked like was not OK with me. That was a turning point in my life. I didn't know what it was like to be fit or skinny, but that is what I wanted. It was like a switch had been flipped and it was all down hill from there. The weight just melted off. I realized later that I was not exactly going about it in a healthy manner, but at the time I was loosing weight so whatever I was doing I was going to keep doing. Shortly after I started loosing the weight, the guy that was in the baseball photo with me..., the guy I had been dating on and off for almost ten years, and I had ended things. This time it was for good. This only helped in the weight loss journey. It helped for a couple reasons; first, of course it is easy to loose a few pounds when you end a relationship...when you don't even feel like eating. Second, because I felt a huge weight lifted off my shoulders. Although I loved him more than I could even try to put into words, I knew it wasn't going to workout. It had been almost ten years and yet our relationship didn't seem to be going anywhere. I finally felt like I could move on and start over! and third I wanted to loose the weight so he would see me and realize what he was missing out on! lol I realize now those are stupid reasons but at the time they seemed to be helping. Ironically those are some of the same reasons that will eventually lead to my demise (I will explain that in the finding it part! lol)

   A few month after our break up I decided I needed a fresh start in a new environment so I transferred to a university in Virginia. While I was there I met a few people who would be key in helping me on my journey. One of whom helped me realize that I wasn't going about things in a healthy way. I knew what I was doing but I don't know if I was in denial or if I genuinely didn't know it was wrong and technically could be labeled as an eating disorder, but none the less I realized what I was doing was wrong and I tried to fix the problem. In the end this also played a part in my gaining the weight back. Some of my roommates were also key to my weight loss. One especially was Lindsay, we even took a weight lifting class together! Our coach was always so proud of us because he would come in to the weight room and there were all of the huge football player...and then there were these two prissy girls bench pressing!!! And we loved every minute of it!!!

   In the end, I had gotten down to under 150lbs! I had lost over 50lbs! I felt so good at the time. I felt healthy and fit. Although I didn't look like I was going to win any bench press competitions, I had some definition in my arms that I was extremely proud of. I have more pictures of myself from that time than any other time in my life and I know it was because I actually liked what I saw. This is one of those pictures. I still have one of these pictures as my profile picture on facebook and sometimes I feel bad about that because I feel like I am deceiving people making them think that is what I look like today, but I can't bring myself to change it. For one thing because I am embarrassed, but for another thing is because I feel that is who I am. I never felt better than I did then. I feel like I am that person trapped in this body.

   Then one day my weight loss journey came to an end. I made the HUGE mistake of getting my my body fat tested. It came out to be 33%. I knew that a healthy body fat ppercentage was lower than that so I felt like I had failed. I felt like I had done all that work for nothing. Like it wasn''t enough. Like it wasn't ever going to be enough. I was never going to be skinny! I realize now how dumb I was to think that. I realize how happy I was and I would give anything to be that size again. But at the time I was extremely discouraged by it. My friend realized that there was something wrong with me so I told her what I had found out and how I felt about it. I never thought, that how I felt about myself could effect someone else or their self esteem is such a way. She was overweight and I knew that, and I knew she knew it, and I also knew that it bothered her. But the difference was I measured my self worth by my weight...and I wasn't good enough, but I didn't measure her worth by her weight. She was beautiful and even at a heavier weight than me I still considered her more beautiful than myself. Therefore I never would have imagined that my insensitivity would be taken as, if I at 33% body fat thought I was fat, then what did that say about her! I felt extremely horrible about how I made her feel, and it made me feel even worse about myself because I was so superficial.

   This was the beginning of the end. It was like, when you get a pull in a rug or a sweater, and it just keeps unraveling more and more. That switch that had been flipped, had just been turned off. The next thing I know I am 225lbs! Yep so much for refusing to go over 200lbs!

Lost it, found it, losing it again!

   I recently became friends with someone on facebook who I knew from a long time ago. Her name was Jessica  and her sister Heather was one of my best friends in school. We had had tons of sleep overs and did everything together. While I have very fond memories of them, we had lost touch over the years. But a few days ago Heather found me on facebook. I was so excited to be reacquainted with her! I also became friends with her sister Jessica. I noticed on Jessica's facebook page she had posted a picture of her with a comment, that she had reached 50lbs lost. She had a link to her blog so I immediately went to her blog and saw her before and after pictures. I was so impressed with all the work she had done to accomplish this goal. Then I saw a post stating that there was an article about her in the Aug 23rd issue of Woman's World magazine, and our local newspaper ran an article about her, her weight loss, her blog, and about the article in the magazine! All of this has been within the last few days!
   I was so excited for her. It got me reminiscing about my own weight loss story. I started thinking about how she had been a motivation to me, as well as many others, by putting herself out there. She told of how she was motivated herself by those who had been following her weight loss on her blog. That they were a form of support.
  So I decided I wanted to follow in her footsteps and share my journey as well. I am hoping for the same results: That I will be able to help someone find the strength and motivation to loose weight, as well as find the support I need to get back on track and loose the weight once and for all!
   My journey is a little different though because if you haven't figured it out by the title of my blog, I lost the weight, then I gained it back, and now I am going to loose it again! I will be sharing my past experiences as well as the experiences that come along as I continue on this journey.