Monday, November 4, 2013

Happy sixth birthday, blog! ...and how we got here

WOAH.  Six years (with varying degrees of posting frequency) I've been blogging here - and woah, that's an eye opener.

I've always been overweight.  I don't know the numbers, but I'd guess I put on 100 pounds during college and the first few years after graduation.  Looking back, I bounced around in a 20 pound range since 1999 until late 2006 when I finally bunkered down and realized I needed to lose the weight.

In November 2006, I lost about 5 pounds before Thanksgiving.  Then we started a Weight Watchers at Work group, and I also joined SparkPeople.com.  Over the next year, I lost 80 pounds.  Awesome!  That's when I started this blog - 80 pounds down, 50 pounds to go.  Woo!

I plateaued in 2008 and most of 2009 - despite walking 10,000 steps a day!  Ugh, it was so frustrating.  I finally lost another 10 pounds in late 2009... and then I had surgery, changed jobs and bought a house - all in the same week.  Aie.  Unfortunately, the weight came right back on.  When I got pregnant, I was basically 40 pounds up from my lowest weight.  I was nervous about the gestational diabetes and thankfully did not develop it - but I gained 30 pounds during pregnancy.  Honestly, I was proud I was able to keep it to 30 - I only gained 10 in the first two trimesters!!  I really tried to keep it under control, but I was on near bed rest for that last trimester and that's when I gained (as did the baby, as planned!).  My son was born at 7 pounds and 13 ounces (yes, I had feared that I was going to have a massive baby and thankfully he was average in weight).

Unfortunately, I had some pelvic separation during pregnancy and despite trying many things, I still have a lot of pain in that area (and my hips now), which makes walking a long time quite painful.  As someone who did the 10,000 steps a day thing for hundreds of days, you can imagine how the lack of walking has stifled my weight loss.

Six years ago, when I started this blog, I weighed 53 pounds less than I do today.  That's quite a kick in the stomach.  Six years ago, I was all excited about my 80 pound loss and figured the final 50 would come with continued effort.  Plateau from hell and life interference showed me this isn't easy. ;)  So now I start over, yet again.  Today's my first day gluten-free - and I'm back to tracking my food.  Now I'm using myfitnesspal.com and their awesome (and free!) app.  Here we go!

Hopefully my seventh-blog-birthday post will be a much happier one! ;)

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