what a year it has been.

april 2009

april 2010

the official photos from that work thing i mentioned. not too shabby, eh?

hello, thighs!

so glad to see you shrinking.

[strangely enough, the change in my thighs and stomach these past two months has felt much more extreme than what it actually looks like in these pics though. weird. still: very happy about what i have accomplished.]

ch-ch-ch-changes.

picasa's facial recognition feature is super-useful and super-creepy. it's been freaking me out a bit, really: it finds all the crappy pictures i ignored back when they were taken. and hence provides a much more realistic view of myself over the years than, say, my self-edited-must-look-fab-let's-take-another-selfportrait-flickr-stream.

2007

2009/2010

and comparing the crappy old pics with the new ones? is kinda awesome, really.

these used to be my skinny jeans.

i chucked them in the donation bin on saturday.

[mentioned here & pictured here. | very sorry about the fact that i did that whole 'leaning the other way'-pose to make this more obvious. silly me!]

possibly the worst photo ever taken of me.

it's been 618 days, 27,5kg and 5 dress sizes since this picture was taken.

what freaks me out the most, however, is that i actually thought that i looked good then. and i really didn't.

i'm having lots of weird moments of residual shame and sadness right now, looking at photos from my fat days - you know the ones, the ones that just barely escaped the delete-button, the ones other people took and emailed, the ones that are not on flickr.

it's so odd to think: that was me. i still own the very same body that looked that way. i'm so sad about having been that way. and so sad about feeling so crappy about my former self.

it's all a wee bit much sometimes, this change.

some more befores.

while searching for some pics on my computer at work, i once again stumbled across some photos i'd forgotten about. and that i can't stop looking at.

july 2007
oh, boobs: i miss you.

april 2008
this is a crappy hotel elevator mirror shot that i took a few days before i finally started weight watchers. i remember that day pretty well: a band that my then-bf managed played their final show that weekend, and i remember making sure to dress up: in jeans and a jersey shirt (clothes i wouldn't even wear to work these days), and i remember how tight the jeans were, how the shirt felt too short and how uncomfy i was all weekend.
i'm in shock really, how puffy my face was. so very different now.

july 2008

this is a 'during' shot, taken in late july 2008. i'd lost about 10kg by then. and when i saw this pic (and others), i couldn't quite get my head around the fact that i was still chubby.

looking at the woman in the mirror.

19 april 2008

20 november 2009

goals, and the reaching thereof.

hello internet, that's me in my underwear.

between these two photos are five months, 10kg (22lb), probably two dress sizes, three cup sizes, roughly 130 gym workouts and quite likely about 100kg of carrots and half a truck of milram frühlingsquark aktiv.

i'm a bit sad, that i never made the effort of taking proper progress pics at regular intervals. totally should have. looking at these two shots, it all doesn't seem that drastic anyway, which is weirding me out quite a bit. was my original shot in june too flattering? or does this loss look a lot more impressive in clothes, anyway? not sure.

so much has changed in these past five months though, and it's not just that jiggle in my thighs that's seriously lessened: i eat better, i love working out again, i have a fab, enjoyable routine. and i'm a runner, even when i'm under a no-running-order.

still not sure what exactly is causing my weird lack of motivation, my general underwhelmment so close to goal. maybe it's my general scepticism of that goal? do i really want to make it happen? can i really make it happen? is stepping it up a notch worth it? or maybe, just maybe, could it be that i am just a wee bit scared of finally arriving at the end of this weight loss journey?

something to think about on the arc trainer tonight, me thinks.

[nablopomo 09/30]

a different me.

i sometimes take photos with film. you know, like back in the old days. got some back from the shop just before i headed off on my holidays. hadn't changed the film in that camera in a while.

this is from a bike ride on april 10.

and this is me (please excuse the pre-holiday paleness) in those very same pants these days:

well, well.

denim days.

yesterday, in my old, too big jeans

i wore jeans for the first time in months this week.

see, i'm a girly girl, these days, all dresses and skirts and more dresses. don't know when and how exactly that happened, but at some point during this journey (oh, i hate that word), i stopped wearing jeans. not because i hated them, just because i started to prefer other kinds of clothes. and well, maybe i did hate them, a bit. jeans, during my fat days, were (like most clothing) uncomfy and too warm and uncomfy. and did i say that they were uncomfy? always digging into my love handles and pinching my ass and just never feeling right. first thing i did when coming home was always taking off my jeans and my bra.

during my fat days, i wore pretty much nothing but jeans and random tops. jeans were the only pants i could ever find that fit and i got so obsessed about fits that did, that i got people to import them from the us and uk for me. as if there were no jeans in this country that could snug my bum just so.

[on another note: you know, i'm still learning how to dress and all. i never learned how to combine clothes, what stuff flattered my shape, how to accessorize, whatnot. i never learned on what items to splurge and on what items to save. never had enough pants or bras, not because we were poor, but simply because my mom had no clue about how to dress herself, either.]

in any way, i wore jeans this week. and lo and behold, the jeans that i bought at 75 or so kilos just about a year ago, they're too big. way too big. taking-them-off-without-undoing-them-too-big. i wore them anyway because it's cooled down significantly and i had just done four loads of laundry with all my fave skirts. and poof!, all day, i got compliments. out of nowhere. from colleagues that i hang out with every day (who should have gotten used to the smaller me by now), from random aquaintances i ran into and especially from a., the bf's daughter (who lives in another ity and came to visit over the weekend). a. couldn't get over how much weight i've lost. she last saw me in late june, btw.

it's the jeans, i swear. i guess all those skirts and dresses i've been wearing (while nicely showing off my back and arms) just haven't shown off my legs and bum. and well, they're smaller, that bunch. a lot smaller, actually. i had a weird disconnect all day, looking down at my jeans-clad thighs, not recognising them as mine. they're SO! SMALL! NOW! (which they're not really, just in comparison to what they were like back in the day.)

loved that feeling so much that i actually went out and bought some more jeans today, at h&m. just cheap ones (they had a 10 euro off any jeans-offer, yay!) , to get me over this fall. one, a lovely dark dress pant cut, is a dress size 38 (or 10, woohoo!), the other a 30 inch; same cut, just two inches smaller than my too big jeans from last fall. yay.

i guess i'm making peace with jeans. and well: they're not uncomfy anymore. which surely helps. lucky me.

narcissistic pre-work out-photo.

without make-up but with pulled in abs. still pretty awesome, methinks.

the before shot.

in order to drag myself out of that hole i've been hanging out in all week, i tried to find what i consider to be my most accurate before photo. and here it is.



it was taken at my brothers wedding in mid-may 2008. so it's not quite a true 'before', as i'd been on weight watchers for two weeks by then and had already lost like 2kg or so. but damn. i hate this photo so much.

you know why? because it's a good photo, taken by a professional photographer. i look *good* but - well, fat. because i was fat. obviously.

i'd never realised that, back then. not even when i'd joined weight watchers and stepped on the scale for the first time in months, two weeks prior. it took this photo to make me fully get it. previously, when i'd seen unflattering i.e. fat looking photos of myself, i'd deleted them, telling myself, that they'd just been taken at a bad angle. there were lots of bad angles of me.

this is not one of those unflattering photos: this is a very flattering picture of me, at 87kg. i look pretty, here, well dressed, even, but damn, i was not just overweight: i was obese, at least by nhi standards. my bmi was 32.

i guess i just never looked at myself, for real. i looked in the mirror and saw a reasonably healthy sized person. i know some people insist that they are healthy at this kind of size, i however, wasn't healthy. i had untreated hypothyroidism, my cholesterol sucked, my blood pressure did as well, i was always tired and i got out of breath from walking stairs.

that's a size 44 (16) dress, that i am wearing, btw, and it took days to find (i cried several times during the dress shopping) and it is bursting at the seams. i actually tore off one of the belt hooks that day, through sitting down on a chair. i hated the fact that my boobs were spilling out of the dress and i actually had to have the top of the dress sewed together, to minimize boob spillage (these days, i actually miss those boobs, a tiny little bit). i got lots of pretty horrible comments from my mother about my boobs and my weight that day.

anyway. days long gone. contrast and compare with these shots, from a friends wedding on august 1st.



that's much better, isn't it?

in actual (har! har!) news, this morning, the scale showed 67,2kg. my goal, btw: 65kg by my 5k race on september 13. totally do-able, me thinks.

[very odd: i keep typing 77kg instead of 67kg. as if my mind hasn't realised that those days are over.]

contrast and compare.

on the left: me, carrying 22kg of vegetable shortening, the weight that i have lost so far.
on the right: me, carrying 3kg of vegetable shortening, the weight that i still have to lose to reach my official ww goal.

't was a humbling experience that one. surprisingly emotional, too. literally ran into the boyfriend in front of the supermarket on my way home from the gym last night, and so we finally took that photo i've been meaning to take for a while.

these past days, i've been really struggling with the realisation of what i look like now, what kind of sizes and what kind of clothes fit. it's a bit eerie, but my mind doesn't seem to have caught up with the reality of my body yet. it's the exact reverse of what i was suffering from back in the day, when i looked in the mirror and didn't realise that i was fat.

i've been looking at snapshots someone took of me at a wedding yesterday, and can't quite grasp that i don't hate a single one of them. i look athletic and fit and happy in all of them. my arms and my back have definition. how weird.

this is me now, and if i dare say so myself: i look pretty damn fine. i'm partly this stunned, because i never expected this at 67kg. 67kg is not that little. my bmi is 23 or so, and it's definitely significantly more than i expected to weigh when being able to fit into a size 38 (10) dress. but i'm not complaining, at all. ever again. i'll lose those 2 point something kg, and then i'll continue a little more and then i'll focus on fitness, and nothing but fitness, and all will be well.

it's so weird that there was so much more of me, not so long ago. that i was lucky when i found clothes that fit and wore worn-out pants, and bought mainly underwear and shoes, because most of the time nothing did. i can buy a 10 euro dress at forever 18 in a size medium now, and make it look good. i can wear one of those almost see-through halterneck hippie dresses from nepal. i can buy clothes whenever, wherever. i don't have to buy something, just because it fits. that flowery dress i ordered from frontline the other week arrived yesterday, and it fits perfectly, but it just doesn't look like *me* at all. so i'll send it back, and possibly order something else, or get a custom-made dress from etsy or go out and buy another. clothes are so much more fun now. my body is so much more fun now. everything is.

the weirdest thing, though, is: i not only lost this weight that i carry in that above picture, i *gained* it, before, obviously. how did i let that happen? how did i not *care*? life must have gotten harder, as i gained. i must have bought bigger pants and whatnot. i must have noticed. but i can't remember noticing it until trying to buy a dress for those weddings in spring last year.

in any way, i'm trying hard to not put too much importance to the number on the scale (or the number of packages of shortening): i am so much healthier now. i eat yummy, healthy stuff that gives me energy, instead of stuff that makes me feel bad. i bike everywhere, i run, i lift weights, i go for 15+k walks with the dog, just because i feel like it, i sleep better. it's a different life. and right now, i can't quite believe that it's mine.

i'm starting to feel all guilty about chucking successphotos into the accountability pool, lately. i can't quite believe that i've done it, finally. i really have. wow.

crazy.

woah!

four years ago.

july 2005
i was just looking through my old weight logs to check out when i last weighed exactly what i weighed this morning, 72,2kg, and what i looked like back then. it was on july 21 2005, and believe it or not, that day i also took the above photo in a crappy hotel room in lyon. wow. what arms! those were mine! crazy.

so odd, that the same weight can look so different on the very same person. and it just goes to show that 'weight' is a pretty useless measurement, when taken by itself. you can be fatskinny and all, and while i'm at the very same weight, i am sure my body fat percentage is much higher that it was back then. and i am, quite simply, nowhere near as fit. yet.

back then, i worked out like crazy - two or three hours every day - but only barely controlled my eating. i ate low fat, yes, but lots of sweets and struggled with portion control. i was awesomely fit though (as evidenced by that shot - i also have a photo of my david kirsch trained rock hard abs, weeh!) by that fall, i'd lose another two or three kilos, to briefly flirt with 69kg for a while. that looked like this:

september 2005
good stuff. these pants should totally fit again, btw. i wore them for a few times last fall, when i briefly had 73kg. anyway. so yeah.
kinda struggling right now on whether i should go to the gym again this arvo, even though i was super busy there just last night. maybe just a short round? i know for a fact that i'll only get to work out on monday, friday and saturday next week, and was only at the gym twice this week so far, so... i should go, right? yes, i should.

where i am at.

june 11 2009

last weekend, one week into working out again. hello, treetrunk legs!

before.

i lost 16kg at my first go-round with ww and all was splendid. and then i fell in love with mr.superskinny, who has chocolate in bed for breakfast.

these are my 'before restart-shots'. and damn, they are motivating, too.

april 19 2009

at around 79kg. the skirt is a size 40/10 from h&m, that i bought in september, at 74kg or so. which was - of course - too tight and uncomfy. check out those folds and creases on the skirt.

april 25 2009

this photo horrified me, when i saw it for the first time. what the eff is wrong with my arms? creepy. coupled with the fact that the girl on whose lap i'm sitting had just lost 20kg or so (and has since lost a lot more), this was one of the reasons i restarted weight watchers. the top is from american apparel size s. underneath, i'm wearing a size 75e bra.

before - before.

so here are some of the befores i've been looking at these days. from back before i started last year.

april 2008almost at my heaviest, at the upper end of the 80's, about four weeks before i started weight watchers at 89,3kg. that dress is from mexx and a size 44/14. the above photo is way too flattering, actually. it was rather tight.

i had also grown an extra chin. the photo below? one of my worst, ever.

november 2007

believe it or not, that night i had sex with a rockstar. even though my belly was hanging out of my jeans! (can't figure out from these pics, what jeans these are, btw, weird.) blessed be booze! and my bursting-out-of-my-bra-boobs!

so glad my friend l. took these photos. i hate them so much, and would have deleted them immediately, if they had been on my camera.

august 2007

this was at a bbq-party from work. the hoodie is a size m from the gap. and actually long. couldn't wear it over my hips, though. and again, i just don't remember those jeans. not a loss, really.

disconnect.

i'd been feeling so great lately, smug even, about losing all this weight, just like that. a week and a half after wearing my skinny jeans for the first time in months, i can do every skinny-girl-in-training's fave trick: take them off without undoing the button and zipper.

and then i saw some photos someone took of me yesterday.



in one shot, i looked almost pregnant, my stomach pressing against the fabric of one of my fave asphalt coloured t-shirts, a shirt i'd registered in my head as almost too big. in another, i look stocky, dressed in a boxy black long sleeve and the too loose jeans. they are horrible, these pics. i hate that i look like this. that i still look fat. i'm not unpretty, but fat.

it's a total disconnect: anorexics look in the mirror and think they're fatter than they are. i look into the mirror and think that i am skinnier than i am.

i realised i still have such a long, long way to go with my weight loss, even if i'm almost halfweigh to goal, even if i weigh less than i have in 18 (?) months or so.

it's so odd. i think this disconnect stems from the fact that i ignored my weight for such a long time. for the past three months, i've been tracking my weight, when for ages before that, i never stepped on the scale, ever, for fear of what i'd see. i'm trying to reconstruct what i weighed when, to understand when and how i managed to gain all this weight, and why the hell i let it happen. how the hell did i get here?

it's sketchy, but i have some clues: i know that last august, i weighed about 84kg. from barely filled spreadsheets i created with every diet effort, i gather that the year before, in august 2006, i weighed 74kg. a year before that, after a year of extremely hard workouts and heartache, i was at my skinniest documented weight in recent years, hitting 69kg for a short little while in the fall of 2005. that's where i want to get back to. i liked my body back then.

but yeah, 14kg in three years, plus an extra five. 20kg. that is SO much weight. the possible culprits: my deskbound job, long hours, a complete lack of workouts, an overweight boyfriend, lots of emotional stress and the bakery downstairs from the office.

i still got the job, the long hours, the overweight boyfriend. the bakery is still there, but i've been avoiding it, and it's easy now. once you're out of the cheese roll and muffin-combo ever afternoon-habit, life is better. i have been working on reducing the emotional stress, telling people to get lost, but there have not been any (!) workouts yet. i got a turbojam dvd off ebay a few weeks ago after seeing the scarily awesome results that sundry mourning's linda got from it, but haven't done it once. haven't been to the gym in months, because it's too far from home and work and i am always exhausted after work. the only thing i've been up to is a couple of bikram classes when i'm at the boys', but that's it. but i absolutely need to start working out. otherwise, life will suck royally. because weight watchers now allots me a meagre 20 points, total. which is mean. and likely to drop further. so i need to workout to be able to eat more. and to feel better.

i know i feel so much better (and see results so quickly) when i work out. so why is it so hard to get myself moving?

gah.

in other news, i'm starting to get all paranoid. am i really losing weight? maybe it's just the battery in my scale dying slowly! maybe it's just my thyroid medication! maybe i don't need that medication to start with! maybe, maybe, maybe.

they're so very lame, these selfdoubts.