My Weight Loss Journey

Today I thought I would share with ya'll my weight loss journey starting from the time I was just a little elementary school student. During elementary school I wasn't overweight but I was usually a little bit bigger than the girls that were in my classes. When I left elementary school and was preparing for middle school I decided that for the next month before school started I would work out and diet like crazy. So I made a schedule that involved swimming laps in my pool, crunches and push ups in my house and hours of stationary bike riding in my parents room. The only problem was that I barely ate for that whole month. I ended up not losing that much weight but I had apparently boosted my metabolism and grew 4 inches that summer. When I went into middle school I was a little skinny but not as I had hoped. Over the months, because of my boosted metabolism, I shrank down to a size 0, the skinniest I have ever been in my life. The problem with that was that I didn't do it the healthy way, and when I went to school I bought cheeseburgers on a daily basis from the cafeteria so eventually I started gaining it back. During the rest of my middle school years I wasn't very overweight but just enough to where it was noticeable.
Again I graduated from middle school and decided that I didn't want to be fat in high school so I joined the cross country team. It was the hardest thing I have ever done in my life, in fact my coach almost kicked me off the team because I walked too much during our workouts. I begged him to keep me on and I never walked during our runs again. I did indeed become much skinnier but I was still the biggest on the team and my coach always wanted me to go on diets and loose more weight. The reason why I wasn't super skinny was because I ended up eating whatever I wanted whenever I wanted and the amount of calories I was putting in my body had tripled. Nonetheless I still became the skinniest I would ever be during my high school year but the problem was when XC stopped, I still ate the same amount of food I had before and I slowly gained it back again. That summer after 9th grade I had found out about a "fitness camp" and I really wanted to go. So I packed my bags and left for 4 weeks of this camp. They had us work out for 4 hours a day and only fed us 1500 calories. We were starving but I lost 15 lbs in those 4 weeks and once again I looked better and felt better but I didn't keep up with the diet or exercise so the pounds came back.
Ever since fat camp I have slowly but surely been putting on weight. I would end up working out really hard for a day or two but I never stuck with it enough to make a difference. For the next 4 years I averaged a gain of 16 lbs a year and slowly my pants size went up while my confidence went down. The point where I really hit rock bottom was during my freshman year of college after I had moved out I realized that I weighed 208 lbs. I had never thought it possible that I could weight so much and I decided that if I wanted to be skinny again I needed to do something about it so I signed up for weight watchers during the spring tern of my freshman year and I lost about 17 lbs but once again I was doing it for the wrong reasons. I was doing it because I wanted to be skinny and look like all the other girls and I only lasted for 6 weeks.
During the next 7 months I gained back 10 pound of what I had lost and that is where I decided to do something again. So here I am on weight watchers again and this time around I have lost 12.4 lbs. Some of you may be thinking that because of my track record I am just going to fall of the band wagon again but there are several reasons why I think that this time I will stick with it. The first is because I have more support now and I check in every week on facebook with my sister and her friends that are trying to loose weight too. I think this has helped me because I know that someone is going to see what I have done that week and I am being held accountable for my actions. Another thing I am doing this time is this blog. I like to think of it as a different kind of weight loss journal although not all of my posts are about what I ate or how much I have lost. This blog has helped me so much because it has given me a safe place to explore what I am feeling and write it down. It has also been another way of holding me accountable because I know that people I love are reading it. I don't want to let you all down because I care about you so much and I know that you want what is good for me. The last thing I think is different this time is how I am thinking about my weight loss, I am not doing this because I think I will be skinny. I am living healthier because I was not happy before, most of the time I was good at hiding it but on some nights, as my roommate Carrie can testify, I would become so depressed about the way I looked that I would end up in her room crying my eyes out about why I have to have this struggle with weight while others don't.  It is kind of funny how God works because I have always had that little annoying thought in the back of mind saying, Why would God make me this way? Why can't I just be like the other girls and eat whatever I want? I am slowly starting to realize that God wants me to learn how to take care of the body He has created for me. I also think it is because I tend to become more prideful when I am skinny and I know that when I do get this under control I will have those memories of where I was before to humble me. I have actually learned a lot from trying to become healthy instead of just losing weight. The way I have viewed others is different, the way I look at myself is different and even the way that I think about the world around me is different. Well sorry that was such a long post but I hope that if you had time to read it I hope you enjoyed it because this is a little bit of an emotional topic for me. Loves ya and good luck to the baseball team tonight GO DUCKS!