Today’s Weight: 262.2
Current Method of Weight Loss: Watching portions, increasing water intake, taking Xocai chocolate, reducing sugars and refined foods, increasing fruit and vegetable intake.
I have been overweight for most of my life. There was a brief time just before and just after I got married that I was slender, but that hasn’t been the norm for me. I started putting on weight at the age of ten, when I was diagnosed with Hashimoto’s Thyroiditis (which essentially just means I take a pill everyday to replace the thyroid hormone that my body doesn’t produce naturally) and my weight just kept going up from there. I weighed 180 by the time I was sixteen.
I met my husband, Matt, when I was eighteen. I don’t know if the magic key was my strong desire that I not be a fat bride, or if it was the long hours I was working coupled with infrequent lunch breaks, but I took off thirty pounds before I got married. I was a really cute bride, if I do say so myself. We had our first child a year after our marriage, and I was able to get all my pregnancy weight off again. But after the birth of my second child, financial and marital stress piled up and so did the weight. (Like many people with food addictions, I’m an emotional eater.) I’ve never stopped gaining since. As I’m sure you noticed at the top of this blog, I now weigh 262.2 at the age of 30. That’s actually down a little bit – around the beginning of October, I weighed 274.0. My goal is 150, so I have 112.2 pounds to go. I believe this gives me the dubious distinction of being the plumpest blogger currently contributing to the weight loss blog. If I’m wrong, please correct me. (Yes, please, please correct me!)
Even though the marital stress has been lifted and the financial stress is easing up, the bad habits I acquired during that time are still with me. One of my main challenges has been learning to turn to other sources for comfort, rather than food.
As we take this journey together, you’ll see me struggle with my food addiction, my seemingly never-ending health problems, and my deteriorating joints. But you’ll also see me handle it in good humor and with a grain of salt – I’ve learned not to take myself too seriously. In fact, that’s part of the problem. I don’t take myself seriously enough and so I come pretty far down on my list of priorities. That’s my goal for this week. I’m going to make a list of everything one must do to properly care for a Tristi, and then I’m going to start doing it. When I meet you back here next Monday, I’ll tell you what I learned and what I did. In the meanwhile, I’ve got a lot of soul-searching and prioritizing to do. It’s all well and good to change my behaviors, but I’ve got to change my mindset or I’ll never fully overcome the problem.
Tristi Pinkston is a blogger in Media Reviews and Movie Reviews, specializing in helping you find books, movies, and magazines that will uplift and be of benefit to you and your family.