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.]