Weight Loss -- and my Weight Watchers commercial

This is something I never had to deal with the first time around in college, weight loss.

Up until 2000 I had never been more than 123 lbs, and that was high for me. I had been as low as 103, and while I looked awesome it just wasn't healthy. My 'average' was about 110 or so, and while I wasn't model looking it worked for me.

As a note, I'm 5'2" so 103 isn't obnoxious.

So a combination of a new medication, new job, new lifestyle and who knows what else, suddenly I was 163. This was nuts, I had no idea how to even begin to deal with it. I hated myself in the mirror, it wasn't me, I didn't recognize myself. Nothing fit, I was a size 12! I had never been over a 7 in my life, and suddenly nothing fit. I went from a 7 to a 12, nothing inbetween, seemingly overnight.

At first work was so busy I really didn't care. I was still the center of attention of the males whose attention I wanted and there was just too much going on to really pay attention. I had stopped gaining weight so I just carried on.

So after a picture of me holding one of my twins where it looked like *I* was the one that had the kid, and my 12's were getting tight, I decided to fix this.

First off I have never in my life had to diet, nothing had ever worked when I had tried. I had previously done six months at the gym with a trainer 3 times a week and I had lost a pound. My body just doesn't like to change it's weight. So I did Atkins with a friend. I felt like shit but damn it it worked. I went down, over the next year, to about 135 or so. I stopped there, a lose size 10, to make sure I wasn't going to yo-yo. Having extra weight is less unhealthy than going up and down and that scared me.

So comes Christmas 2006 and I got a stomach flu. In the process of the week of sheer misery I went down to about 131 or so. I felt good! By the summer I had put a little of it back on, which is normal when weight is lost due to illness but I liked the idea of finally getting rid of the last of it. I was speaking to a friend and he told me how he and his wife had dropped a ton of weight doing Weight Watchers.

Now I'm not going to go to a meeting. I had tried NutriSystems and the food sucked (I hear they've redone a lot of it since but it's too expensive anyway). Weight Watchers had an online program, where you eat what you want and enter it into their system and they keep track. You can enter recipes or just the 'fat, calories and fiber' amounts and again, they figure things out. They assign points with a system taking those three into account and depending on your age, weight and a few other things they allow you X points a day, with a bunch 'extra' for the week.

This worked. Who knew? I could even 'cheat' occasionally and stay within my point limits, though I wouldn't lose a lot of weight that week. It was slow, but slow is important to keep it off for good. I took Thanksgiving to Christmas off cuz that just wasn't going to work for me.

Well I just canceled my subscription, I'm a size 6, and they're a touch big on me, and I'm down to 123. It's not my ideal, I'd like to be 110 again but my body proportions have changed so that most likely isn't going to happen. Anything left isn't weight as much as it is tone and muscle, so the scale isn't a great measurement anymore.

Ok I think I have the chart uploaded: