I know some of you have been waiting very anxiously for these. Thanks for your patience! It takes a long time to coordinate with everyone, get their pictures, stitch them together, make sure I’m allowed to use names nad faces and such. I think you’ll see it was worth the wait. Out of the dozens of entrants these are the 5 people who sent in results. Let’s see more next time okay?

E-8.12%

E writes the blog Wedding For Two and she is the participant who interacted with me most frequently using the hashtag #TWLC on Twitter. I’m looking forward to conversing with her again this round. Won’t you join us? Just attached #TWLC to your That Weight Loss Challenge related tweets and we’ll all be able to see them.

142 has been my happy weight in the past, and I think there’s a reason I feel good at this weight – it’s realistic for me to maintain and my pants fit.  I wanted to send my pics even though I didn’t make too much progress because I didn’t have that much work to do when I started (IMHO).  I think a lot of people didn’t join the challenge because they didn’t think they could win. I didn’t think I could win, but it’s been great anyway – I was so depressed after my wedding because I had gained 12 lbs, and couldn’t seem to get out of my rut, so TWLC was perfect for that.  I’m now working very hard to get stronger and faster, rather than focusing on weight loss (especially after my SIL’s wedding, when my MIL and husband’s great-aunt told me I looked “perfect” and that I should stop trying to lose!).

J-9.45%

S-11.54%

A-16.46%

And the winner is….

P- 23.27 % (!!!)

She was nice enough to write up some details about her experience and how she worked to lose it thus far.

I did learn a very important lesson from all of this and that is… DO NOT WEAR BLACK IN “BEFORE” PICTURES. After taking these pictures, I was pleased but felt like they did not do

all of my hard work justice. I was kind of bummed about it so I thought to myself, ” Hmm… other than seeing me in person, how can people see the major difference?”. After some thinking, I decided to include a piece of clothing that I still have in my closet that I wore before losing all of this weight that told a story.

The two pictures on the left are of me in a jacket I had purchased for myself for a family photo session a little before starting TWLC. It was time for updated family pictures and I needed a new outfit. I remember going to the Lane Bryant, picking out my size and feeling like it was 10 sizes too small but it was the biggest size available and I was in a hurry.

So I bought it. I got home, put it on, felt like a whale, and left the house for picture time. Before taking pictures i kept thinking to myself, ” This is too tight. I am so embarrassed. I am going to look ridiculous. Oh yea, and by the way, this moment is being documented forever in a photograph.” I put a smile on for the camera but could wait to go home. At that point my self esteem was right up there with Eeyore.

I remember going home, racing to my closet, and stuffing it in the back of my closet where it could never see the light of day again. fast forward 10 months later, and today I had a crazy idea! I was going  to pull the jacket out and well….. The after picture attached above says it all. :)

I’m so glad I was able to participate in TWLC. I needed a jumpstart to a new lifestyle and this challenge gave me just what I needed. You know how people say, ” My metabolism isn’t what it used to be. I can’t eat like I did when I was a teenager.”   That’s never applied to me. All my life I’ve struggled with my weight. I’ve always been a big girl. Sometimes a little bit big and sometimes really, really big. But always BIG.  Growing up, it was really hard for me to understand why everything I ate affected me in a completely different way than it did those around me. Why could people my age have pop, chips, pizza, tator tots, doughnuts, and junk food galore without gaining more than a pound? But if I even so much as licked a french fry, I’d gain 5 lbs. Why was that? Why did I get the label of careless, obese, unhealthy person when I was just another student lined up in the cafateria waiting to load up on junk? It didn’t make sense and it didnt seem fair.

I remember many times in high school when I would go to lunch with some friends of mine. We stopped at a gas station and everyone went their seperate ways to find what they wanted. As you can imagine,everyone’s meals consisted of deep fried corndogs, pizza pockets, potato wedges, fountain drinks big enough to quench a camel’s thirst, and of course ranch dressing. With that kind of diet, you’d think we’d be a group of sumo wrestlers, right?

Nope.

A car full of size 2 & 4′s.  Excpet for me, size 24. When I graduated high school, I was sick of being fat. Everything I ate made me gain weight and I couldn’t take it any longer. So that summer I decided once and for all I was going to lose weight and get rid of my gross body. I wanted to feel beautiful and I sorry, but beautiful on the inside wasn’t cutting it for me anymore. So I went on a crash diet. In other words, I starved my self and exercised like I was training for a marathon. The pounds starting melting off and I starting feeling fabulous.

10lbs down.

20lbs down

45lbs down.

and in 4 months, I was 60 LBS DOWN!

I was gettin compliments left and right and it felt great. It motivated me to keep doing exactly what I was doing. Only, what I was doing was wrong.  I was on a strick diet on eating 1000 calories and working out to burn 900 calories a day. When people asked me how I did it, All I needed to tell them was diet and exercise. No one needed to know exactly how much diet and exercise. I knew it was a BIG NO NO. But I couldn’t stop. The results were incredible. I felt like I finally had control over something that had control over me my whole life. .

One morning I was taking a shower and while rinsing out my conditioner, a HUGE glob of hair came with it. And then it hit me. I was doing this all wrong. I was heading right into eating disorder territory and I wasn’t about to go from one extreme to the other. I needed to find a balance. Eventually I did, and within a year I had lost a total of 100 lbs.  I kept the weight off for almost a year.

The follwing year I got married. Long story short, we got “comfortable”….. and I gained it all back. AND MORE. I got too busy with work to exercise. I worked in a mall and my lunches consisted of the food court. It was like being a teenager all over again and the food court was like a never ending gas station. I started feeling so gross and I gained the weight back so quickly that I felt like a balloon. I was back to square one. Within 3 years of marriage, I managed to not only return to my biggest weight, but also exceed it. It didnt happen by sitting by a fridge and eating all day long. It was from eating all the wrong food.

Thats when That Wife comes into the picture.  A whole new world was opened to me. I learned all about how food isn’t the bad guy. It’s what we, as people do with food that makes it the bad guy. I learned the word ORGANIC. I learned that fruits and vegetables arent just side dishes and 2nd place to meat. I learned that I didn’t have to starve myself to lose a pound. I didn’t even have to go without. Rather, I had to learn how to replace the bad stuff with the good stuff. TWLC came at a perfect time in my life. I was learing all about this new way of living and now this was the time to see if it really worked. I took all of what I learned from Jenna, added a few of my own things, tweaked it to work around my life, and went full force to healthy living. I wanted to become my best self!

For the last 10 months My grocery shopping has changed from mostly processed/frozen food, to what you see below. And from that, my meals started to change as well. Do I eat like this every single day? No. But 6/7 days I try to. I am not yo yo dieting. This has become a normal part of my daily life. And I love that I am doing it in all of the right ways this time. I feel great, I love to cook new things, and I am happy with switching to this way of living. I exercise as often as I can. I drink plenty of water. and I eat well. I feel great. Has it paid off?  I think my before/after pictures answer that one.

I’ve lost over 20% of my body fat so far. I still have a long way to go, but I’ve come a long way, and I plan to go ALL THE WAY.

Congratulations to P! I’m really looking forward to the photo session we will schedule sometime in the next year when we are in the same place. I just know by that time she will have made even more progress!

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