All About the Gains

When I started my “weight loss journey” I had no concept of what a realistic end goal was.  I was SO out of touch with the reality of where I was, that I had no foundation to imagine where I wanted to be.  I would kick around numbers in my head, trying to extrapolate from my high school weight what I thought a good weight goal was for myself.  I eventually settled that I could maybe get back down to the 150’s.  Knowing that my senior weight was 155 lbs. (with a LOT of muscle), even that sounded like a pipe dream.  I looked at recommended weights for my height, and thought “that’s never going to happen.”  And believe me, I had a whole series of solid justifications. 

I didn’t know where to set my goal, but I looked in the mirror and I said- “I just want my belly button to be a circle.” (Not an elongated slit smashed between fat rolls.)  Yes, that is a detail but a detail that served as a metric and indication of where I was and where I wanted to be.  It was the only concrete thing I could point to, because I was completely out of touch with the reality of how overweight I was.  I had convinced myself that the scale and the few photos I wasn’t able to avoid were all inaccurate representations of my health.  I didn’t really look like that, and I’m just a big-boned, densely-weighted person. 

I sat down and made a list of reasons why I wanted to get healthy.  I did not know what the end goal was, but I knew I had to improve my health. So, that was the goal- to improve my health.  With every meal I prayed, “God, please bless my efforts to get healthy.”  That sounded like an honorable way to ask God to help me lose weight, but the result was SO much more than weight loss.  God used this process to improve my health in virtually every area of life.  My relationship with food had knocked my WHOLE life out of balance, but by God’s grace, I have rectified much of that. 

I have reached my last and final weight loss goal.  I will continue to work to get healthier, but will be transitioning from getting skinny to getting fit.  I will no longer be standing on the scale hoping that magic number has dropped.  Over the last two years, I have lost 70 pounds and have reduced my overall body mass by more than one third.  Celebrating this accomplishment, I have created a list of 70 Gains and Victories I have experienced.  You can check out the whole list here.  But here are 12 of my favorites:

#6- Looking at old pictures of myself and experiencing feelings of disbelief.  Knowing that before I would look at the pictures and have disbelief in the sense that I couldn’t admit that I was that overweight.  But now, I look at them and cannot believe how far I have come.

#11- Getting to play volleyball again. 

#43- Buying that pair of Miss Me Jeans.  I had my heart set on a pair of Miss Me jeans back when we lived in Seattle.  They were a $100, which was far more than I was spending on pants at that time.  Worse yet, the store did not even carry them in a size big enough for me.  I told myself that when I lost weight, I would reward myself with those jeans.  That pair has long since come and gone.  I have moved across the country twice, and even gained more weight since that day.  But I lost that weight and then some.  I went to shop for jeans recently and came across a pair of Miss Me jeans that I liked even more than the original pair- they actually fit, were a better color/design, AND they were on clearance!  Still more than I typically spend on jeans.  But these weren’t just a pair of pants.  These were a celebration!  A celebration of the transformation that had taken place in my life. 

#48- Rebuilding relationships with people from my past simply because they have been inspired by my story.

#51- Identifying the ways that my relationship with food was unhealthy.  I recognize when I look for food to make my bad days good.  I catch myself when I am about to let my circumstances over rule my nutritional priorities.

#42- Buying size 4 jeans…  FIVE pants sizes different. 

#55- I don’t HATE shopping for clothes anymore!  I am looking forward to my birthday and spending all of my birthday money on clothes, because I will be in a place to enjoy investing in my wardrobe. 

#56- Wearing a shirt tucked in, because it actually looked better that way! As opposed to leaving everything loose and untucked so as not to draw attention to my fat rolls. 

#58- Overall increased happiness and willingness to just laugh and have fun.

#64- Being excited to buy a scale that could calculate my BMI, because I had set a new goal to get in the “healthy BMI range.”

#66- Telling everyone that, with our combined weight loss, my husband and I have removed a third person from our marriage. 

#67- The day my weight dropped below 150.  I celebrated as I reflected on the days when I believed this was straight up impossible.  I thought my weight would NEVER start with the digits 1 and 4.  It still feels surreal that that 4 has been replaced by a 3.  It’s NOT the number that matters.  What matters is, this forced me to recognize that I had underestimated what was possible, what I was capable of, and what could happen.  Furthermore, it gave me concrete proof that if I am consistently faithful and obedient to things God is calling me to, the results will exceed even my wildest dreams.

Yes, I have lost weight.  But more importantly, I have improved my overall health.  I have transformed my relationship with food and that has impacted every other area of my life.  I have had to make  changes and sacrifices.  There have been losses along the way.  But the victories make it all worth it.  My physical body has shrunk, but the rest of me as a person has grown at a much greater magnitude. 

If you are sitting where I was 2 years ago, don’t be intimidated by the daunting scale of the challenge ahead.  Do not allow your inability to even fathom a goal, stop you before you ever start.  Just set a goal to improve your health and put one foot in front of the other.  And keep moving forward.  Trust me when I say, stacked next to the gains and victories, those 70 pounds look small.  It is all about perspective.  Eventually momentum will take over, you will look up, and you will once again be in disbelief about your current state, but in a good way. 

That is where I am.  Enjoying actually being the person that I always believed I was, and still processing the shock of how far I have come.  Please let me know if there is anything I can do to support or encourage you in your own pursuit of health.  I would also love to hear from you- which of my gains resonated with you or maybe you have some gains of your own you would like to share?

 P.S. In case you were wondering- my belly button still is not quite a circle, but I can live with that.  :)