Back At It, Again....

Hi, all.... well, it's been nearly four months since I last wrote a blog entry. Partially because I have been extremely busy with life in general; partially because that busyness has led to a lot of stress eating, poor food choices, and little energy to get much exercise in. I haven't given up; there have been periods when I have done extremely well with my diet. But they have been few and far between.

Sunday, I read a blog post by Shay Sorrells from Biggest Loser season 8. Shay was the heaviest woman to ever appear on the show (weighing in at 476 pounds). She lost 172 pounds on the show, and another 52 pounds by the season 9 finale. But she has been struggling, and documents how she even got to the point that she was not even acknowledging to others that she had ever been on the show. Her new starting point was one of honesty, and she wrote a blog about the seven mistakes she made after leaving the show.

So.... in the interest of honesty and transparency, I am re-starting my blog, and letting everyone know where I am at in my journey. I ended Augusta's Biggest Loser in May of 2010 with an "official" ending weight of 199 pounds. I probably only weighed 199 pounds for about an hour, having nearly killed myself that week to push the scale down. I actually used my vacation time the week leading up to the weigh-in, spending the week in the gym, and out in the yard, doing everything I could to notch that magic number on the scale. I was eating basically nothing but cabbage soup, taking in about 500 calories a day. I knew I would win... I knew that weeks ahead of time, just by doing the math. Coming into the last 11 days, I calculated that if I could hit 200 pounds, my closest competitor would have to lose nearly 25 pounds in that 11 days in order to catch me. So I did it, just for the ability to say that I had reached my goal of getting below 200 pounds. As soon as I got some food in me, and got re-hydrated, my weight almost immediately rose to my pre-starvation weight of 208 pounds. I managed to keep myself at a pretty respectable 215 pounds... for about 6 months. Then I moved into the season of the candy and sweets holidays -- Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas... by November 2010, I was up to about 231 pounds. I struggled with the 235-lb mark for a while... then 240... then 250.... Through this holiday season, I've been struggling around the 255-260 mark. So from where I wanted to stay, I'm up about 35-40 pounds.

These are tough pounds; it's not like when I started Biggest Loser. My official starting weight was 342, but I knew that I was not at my heaviest then. I'm pretty sure at times, I was well over 350, probably pushing 360. So I've basically kept 100 pounds off for nearly two years now. But I'm not satisfied with that.

Last week I tried on my "big" coat -- the suit coat that I went on TV with to show how much I had lost. It still swallows me up, which I am thankful for. But I also tried on the suit coat that I wore to our finale, and I see how much work I have to do. So here's my goal: as of today, January 3rd, I weigh 259 pounds. I am going to try and lose 39 pounds by my birthday in April, an average of a little less than 2.5 pounds per week. (By comparison, during Augusta's Biggest Loser, I averaged over 5 pounds per week.  I started January of '10 at 280 pounds, and by my birthday that year, was down to 212 pounds.)

I will update my blog at least each week with a progress report, in the hopes that this will help serve as accountability for me. I'll also update it periodically with what I'm doing to reach my goal.