a little background

When I first started getting serious about shedding those extra pounds by joining Weight Watchers in 2005, I weighed in at 81.2 kg (179lbs). This might not sound like a lot, but believe me, when you're as short as I am, it really is... According those BMI charts I was not only overweight, but firmly put into the obese section! Not that I needed any charts to tell me I had to change something: the way my body felt and also the way I felt about my body made it clear it was high time to do something about it! So I did. And it worked. At least at the beginning... After a while I got a little complacent and I kept gaining and losing the same 5 kilos again and again, all the while blogging about it. A quick peek at my old blog reveals that after almost 2 years of weightloss struggle I didn't even manage to lose a measly 2 kg (4lbs)... (While browsing through my old blog, I also found my long forgotten recipe blog where I posted exactly one single recipe! Wow. That's how persistent I am.)

Why people kept reading my ramblings, I don't know. I certainly wasn't one of those success stories! But having my blog - a place where I could just dump all my thoughts and fears and hopes, gave me something. And then all those friendly people who didn't judge me for my failures but kept cheering me on and congratulated me on every oh so tiny success - they gave me something more. They gave me inspiration and motivation to keep on going! There have been many moments when I was close to throwing in the towel, but I never really gave up because of the support and encouragement I got from my blog friends.

Nonetheless, even though I was officially trying to lose weight the pounds kept piling on again and when I stopped blogging shortly after my wedding in September 2007, I weighed a whopping 83 kg (183lbs) - even more than when I first started! At that time, my feelings ranged from deliriously happy about the wedding and the long honeymoon that lay before us to absolutely miserable when it came to my weight. Not only my body but also my self-esteem were in a sorry state!

You'll see for yourself when you look at these "before" pictures that were taken shortly before we left on our year-long honeymoon...

Being caught unawares is the worst... no chance to suck in the tummy or strike a more flattering pose!

This is me at my sister's wedding... All cheeks and chins! Thank God I was in charge of taking the pictures, so I'm not in too many of them!

And here's me on the morning after my own wedding... Obviously very very happy but (also obvious) very fat too. Actually it's not even that obvious since my arm kind of hides all the belly fat rolls... :)

But then everything changed. We left on our honeymoon and while I was travelling, things just kind of started to fall into place. Slowly but surely the pounds started to drop, even though I didn't actively try to lose weight! Sure, all that walking around in cities, hiking, backpacking and kayaking helped a lot, as did not having a fridge within reaching distance... (You automatically eat a lot less when you're far from civilisation at the back of beyond somewhere and have to carry all the food in your backpack!) And I'll admit that travelling in South America is also kind of conducive to weight loss... Catching a stomach bug every now and then sure melts the fat away! Being sick in a foreign country is not a nice experience at all (not that it is back home either...), but whenever I had a very close relationship to the local toilet bowl at least I could take comfort in the fact that it helped me lose some more weight... :)

Here's some visual proof of what was going on weight wise... These are pictures of myself I actually like!

May 2008: Happy excitement on the scale near Quito, Equador! Did you know that everyone is a few pounds lighter on the Equator because the gravity is less strong? I weighed in at 69 kg (152 lbs) - definitely a lot ligher than a few months before, even without the gravital advantage...

September 2008: Paraguay. Gone are the doublechins!

September 2008: Cataratas de Iguazú, Argentina, with my husband his mother who came to visit us. I'm not shying away from the camera anymore! And I'm not cringing upon seeing the pictures either... :)

October 2008: At a football game in Buenos Aires, Argentina. I'm amazed that while I still have a roundish face my cheeks and chins are not its most prominent features anymore...

So by the time our travels had to come to an end because we ran out of money, I had lost approximately 20 kg (44lbs) and felt absolutely great! Before we flew back to Europe I went shopping for new clothes and was ecstatic: suddenly I could just slip into any of those normal sized jeans or tops and they fit! And they even looked good! But the best thing of all was that I finally liked what I saw in the mirror. I finally liked myself! (Yes, I know I should like myself at any weight - but that's so hard. For me (like so many others I guess), being overweight comes with a lot of self-loathing and a lack of self-esteem...) But the good news is it actually changed when my body changed. I felt confident. I felt strong. I felt invincible. And of course I was determined to not let anything get in the way of my newfound attitude towards life. Never again would I let the scale dictate my mood and my level of happiness. Never again would I hide and feel inferior to someone because of my weight. Ha, these times were gone!

I'll never quite forget the faces of our family members and friends who came to the airport to pick us up... Some of their mouthes literally fell open when they saw us! This continued to happen whenever I saw people I hadn't seen for a year. While some would just steal furtive glances at my new body, not quite believing what they saw, others would compliment me and gush over how good I looked now. I wasn't used to all that attention and even though the compliments were nice and gave me some sense of pride, they also made me a bit embarrassed about my former self. If people thought I look good now, surely they must have found me disgustingly fat and ugly before, right? And then I got the (well-meant, I'm sure) questions and comments like "You are going to stay like that, right? You really have to try now!" or "Now don't go and gain all the weight back, ok?"

I mean, what were they thinking? That I actually wanted to be as fat as I was before? That I planned on gaining everything back?! Admittedly, at some point it DID cross my mind that there's a pretty high percentage of people who lose a lot of weight and then go and gain it all back (and then some), and I also remembered other bloggers mentioning maintenance being pretty hard too... I just didn't think this would be the case for me. After all, I still felt strong and invincible. Does that make me a smug ignorant? Maybe. But i beg to differ. I think I was more of a naïve silly thing who was hoping against hope that somehow, miraculously, it would be different for me. I lost all this weight without even thinking about it, so I figured if I just kept on not thinking about it, not obsessing over points and calories and all that, things would work out just fine.

When I first stepped on our brandnew scale in our brandnew flat, I weighed in at 63 kg (139lbs), merely 2 kg (4lbs) away from a healthy BMI. Yay! Life got pretty stressful right away, considering we had to move all our stuff into our new flat and starting a new job all within the first weekend of being home! So a little gain was to be expected and pretty normal I thought, and I wasn't overly concerned at first when the numbers on the scale started to rise. I still thought I had everything under control and didn't realise it was slowly starting to slip away... I'm sure you can already guess where this story is heading... and yes you're right. Slowly but surely my weight steadily crept back on. I hated the fact that some people expected me to fail but what I hate even more is that it turned out they were right... I proved them right. How could I let this happen?

Today, I weighed in at 74.3 kg (163.8lbs). That means I gained half of what I lost back within only 5 months! Gone is the self-confidence and the feeling of strength. My new clothes don't fit anymore. I'm back to self-conciously tugging at my shirt and hiding in the background. My face is getting rounder by the day and the doublechins are almost back. So are the belly fat rolls. Ugh! Sure, theoretically I'm still far from square one. But I have no intention of going back there! And if I keep on doing what I've been doing for the last five months, that's exactly where I'm heading. So I decided that I'm going to fight tooth and nail to get THAT girl back:

Just before Christmas 2008: Me running my first race ever! It was just a fun race of 4.4K, but I felt such a great sense of accomplishment afterwards.

I chose this picture for a reason. For me, this is not just about some arbitrary number on the scale anymore. Sure it would be nice to see those elusive 55 kg (121lbs) that I once set as my personal goal weight, but the world doesn't end if I'll never see that number... And it isn't just about looks either, even though I'll be the first to admit that being able to like what you see in the mirror is SO rewarding! More importantly, this is about being healthy. It's great to live in a healthy body that can do things easily! It's great to be able to run and push yourself to new limits and even enjoying yourself while you're at it! And last but not least it's about my feelings too. I want to feel the way I felt again! I want to have that sense of accomplishment and self-confidence again! I'm not in that place right now. But I was there not that long ago and my body and my mind still remember that feeling of unbounded possibility. I want to be THAT girl again!

So even though I don't want weightloss to take centre stage of my whole life anymore, I know I need to put at least some focus on it to become the person I want to be. I'm trying not to obsess over numbers and points as I might have done before at times, but take a more relaxed and more intuitive approach towards living and eating healthily. After all, it has worked while I was travelling. Now I just need to learn and listen to my inner voice even when the noise and stress of daily life are threatening to drown it out completely... Obviously, I'm not talking about the voice that's telling me to go look what's in the fridge here, but the one that's telling me what my body REALLY needs! At times the difference between the two is hard to tell, but life's a learning curve, right?