happy fataversary to me

today marks exactly one year since i started posting on this here blog. a few days after my inital post i stepped on the scale at my first physical since before college and weighed 196. my highest documented weight. at my height that weight gave me a BMI of 31.6 and placed me as obese. a category i'd never properly considered for myself. it's not like i didn't know i was fat. or that i was happy about it or anything. i just really didn't care. i suppose that's what happens when all of your energy is spent on surviving grief. you get up everyday and you do the things you have to do and nothing really registers. the starting of this blog was the beginning of me rebuilding my life.

the blog has taken some different turns in a year. from the very personal journal of a person coming out of depression to an exercise and diet journal to whatever the hell it is now. when i go back through the archives the obvious need for therapy is sort of frightening but i'm very impressed by my motivation. it was almost manic. full throttle. which i guess worked for a while. i had to prove to myself that i could enact change and i did with the south beach diet thing and enough running/walking to give myself shin splints. and then i sort of stalled.

when i started to feel better emotionally and lost about ten pounds, watching every bite and running in negative degree weather wasn't so important anymore. i still lost a little, but it was slow. nowhere near what the manic motivator had projected (i can't bring myself to link to that post but somewhere i wrote i'd be at goal before summer...hehehe) but i got myself into the merely overweight range for BMI.

i gave up south beach sometime at the end of february and went it alone foodplan wise. i counted calories for awhile which was very enlightening if not a successful tool for me longterm. it taught me to see reality and not merely my perception of it. i learned having soda once in a while was not a one way ticket back to obesity. i also learned how perfectly healthy things, when you eat them 24/7, aren't the key to a size six bod. so now i work the middle. i read labels and make choices. the low-fat thing isn't always the low cal thing. the low-sugar things sometimes have more chemicals than a dupont factory. if i really crave some milanos it's better not to read the back of the bag...but it's best to share them with the boyfriend.

somewhere along the line i decided i was ready to be serious and motivated again and i made some little changes. and shaved off another ten or so pounds. this morning, after a week of not very careful eating and no weighing at all, i came in at 174 with a BMI of 28.9. i've lost a total of 22 pounds and about 3 BMI points. to get back to normal, i need to lose another 20 pounds. somehow i feel normal already and those 20 pounds seem like more of a bonus. reason enough to keep the extra chips and cookies out of the house, but not out of my life completely. reason enough to hop on the stepper or the pilates mat, but not to live with shin splints.

when i started this blog i sort of assumed that this year would suck. i would spend it in a gym surrounded by spandex clad stick insects and eating one rice cake a week and inevitably end in failure. but the year didn't suck. and i'm sort of shocked that i didn't fail myself. i don't think i've thought about it quite that way before. i made the assumption this year in weightloss would be another self-fulfilling prophecy of my inability to change for the better. but it wasn't. i'm still surprised by that. and glad. there's a lot of years left to live and blog and be skinny and i look forward to surprising the hell out of myself at every years' end.