A Look Back

Wow, three posts in three days from me…how crazy is that?!  But, today is a pretty important day—at least, to me it’s important!

It was November 18, 2011 when I saw my friend Katie on the Dr. Oz show, celebrating her 125-pound weight loss.  I can still remember what an amazing experience it was to watch someone I know personally on national television.  She was awesome! And beautiful, and well-spoken, and just everything that I know her to be in real life.  🙂  But more than all those things, she was just herself, and that was the most inspiring thing about it all. I had seen Katie go through her journey, I had seen how hard she worked, what she had to overcome, and how fiercely determined she was to reach her goal.  And I realized at that moment that it really wasn’t rocket science…just hard work and perseverance!

That realization was my “aha” moment, and it was the following Monday, November 21, 2011, that I went “all-in” with my diet and fitness regimen, and now, a year later, I am proud to be where I’m at. Today when I was logging my food in my Weight Watcher eTools, I took a moment to look at the past year’s worth of my weigh-ins (a neat eTools feature—it actually goes all the way back to when I first started WW online in 2004!).

You can see that there is a steady downward progression.  My losses weren’t huge most weeks—usually around a pound or so.  But one thing that I think is more telling than the weight loss is the number of little dots…each dot represents a recorded weigh-in.  Notice that there isn’t a single week skipped in 12 months!  Too bad it won’t show all my food logs and all my activity points.  I didn’t skip any of those in the last year, either! (Okay, I did skip activity when I was sick, but I always tracked my food.)

So I guess what I’m trying to say is, I’m no diet expert (not by a long stretch!), but for me, slow and steady won the race.  I know it can be frustrating to not see big losses on the scale every week, but losses are always better than gains, right??  And it’s amazing how one year of little losses can make such a big difference.  Here’s a picture of me from Thanksgiving 2011.

And here’s a shot of me at my birthday in October (which is the most recent, decent picture I have of myself!)

For my next post, I’ll share this year’s Thanksgiving picture for a true year-over-year comparison. 🙂

Tomorrow morning I will celebrate the “fitness” part of my journey by running the Detroit Turkey Trot 5k with my son.  I still chuckle to think that last year at this time, I would’ve never dreamed I’d be running in the Turkey Trot—much less with my son!  😉  We’re both excited about it…as I learned during the Free Press marathon relay, being downtown during an event is lots of fun, and the weather is supposed to be beautiful tomorrow, so I expect the kids and I will definitely have a good time. 🙂

Tomorrow will begin the first of two Thanksgiving dinners for me.  I’m not overly excited about that, but on the other hand, last year at this time I had Thanksgiving, a trip out of town, and then a baptism…plenty of temptations in just four days’ time!  And yet, I still managed to lose a pound through all that!  I tracked everything, and made sure to watch my portions, and that formula resulted in success, over Thanksgiving and every holiday since!

Happy Thanksgiving to everyone!  Remember to enjoy the company of your family and/or friends as much as you enjoy the food!