Today was my first doctor’s appointment in more than 7 years.
I told her about my 105+ pounds of lost weight. I told her my menstrual cycles have become regular again. I told her I’m training for not one, but two half marathons this year.
She told me I was doing everything right. She told me maybe I didn’t need to drink quite so much water. She told me to get lab work and come back at the end of the month.
We talked about my complex medical history. We talked about my current nutrition. We talked about my future goals.
And we began a conversation about one big thing that’s been on my mind for the past few months: skin removal surgery.
Because in several places on my body where there used to be fat, my skin hangs low. It wobbles to and fro. Before too long, it wouldn’t surprise me if I could tie it in a knot and tie it in a bow. God forbid I should wind up with enough to do what’s described in the lyric that comes next.
I’m not done yet. There’s no certainty about much more time it will take me to reach my “end state” — but it could be about a year, give or take. Starting the conversation with my doctor is the right move strategically for insurance purposes as well as for my own psychological and logistical purposes. My doctor gave me a referral for a practice that has done good work for a past patient of hers for an initial consultation, as a first step, which I look forward to taking. And, if I’m being 100% honest, it motivates me to keep going. Yes, I am interested in the aesthetics of this because I’m a person with deep-seated body issues and some (probably standard-issue) vanity to boot; no question it’s unsightly. But also, it is physically uncomfortable. Loose skin hanging from my arms, belly, and inner thighs is in the way. It chafes. It bulges. It gets irritated. And it’s not the kind of skin that just burns off when you lose more weight; it gathers additional mass.
This is just the beginning of a longer discussion, but it’s the right time. A surgical option is a big decision with a lot to think about, and I’m ready to start doing that in a real way with professionals who can paint it all in practical terms. My body isn’t finished changing yet, but the progression has been so rapid — 92 lbs since mid-June — that the finish line is going to get here fast no matter when that is.
I want to be prepared for it, not blindsided by it.
So, yes: today was a big day. It felt like the start of a new chapter. Not the exit from an old chapter, but the beginning of a concurrent one that has never been foreshadowed in anything that has been written so far. It’s as grounding as it is exciting, because for the first time, I’m looking at something that feels within my reach. I believe I have a doctor who is on my side and is invested in my health. I don’t have to do it alone.
Going forward is going to get harder because it’s going to demand more and more from me. I’ve already had to persevere through the slog of the 200s, sticking to my plan without taking drastic measures out of desperation to finally cross that threshold. I’ve already had to work around injuries and modify training sessions. I’ve already had to creatively reconfigure my schedule to ensure my workouts and meals didn’t fall off. It’s nothing I haven’t been able to handle, but it is the type of demand that tends to produce fatigue that compounds with time and demand. I’m trying to be prepared for that, too.
I heard somewhere, in a different context, perhaps the most affirming and applicable quote that fits my whole approach to my self-improvement work: “Motivation is fickle; discipline is consistent.”
I’ve shown up. And I’ll keep showing up. Because god damn if I’m not disciplined.
I laughed. I said, out loud, “FUCK YEAH.” I took a few steps. I doubled over. And then I cried.
That’s how my weigh-in under 200 went today.
There was a lot of build-up to it. Six torturous weeks of crawling through the 200s while my clothes were fitting more and more loosely and my bones were getting more and more prominent. Just in the moments before my weight check, which was also for 2 DietBets, I slipped into scale-appropriate attire. I chose a sleeveless top that I knew would be too tight, because I last attempted to wear it a month ago and it was a no-go, but I wanted to wear something a little tight so that my size would be most accurately reflected in the pictures. (OK, and I also wanted that one for the color variety. Maybe even primarily for the color variety. I am what I am.) When it fit properly — perhaps even with a little wiggle room — I was pretty excited… but I knew better than to bank on due recognition from the scale after the heartbreak of last week.
But that nonsense was not to be repeated.
Today, on day 50 of Power 11, I became a resident of Onederland.
I’ve seen the 100s on the scale for a handful of one-off early morning weigh-ins now. 199.6. 198.8. 198.0.
But on my official Sunday weigh-ins — the only ones that “count” in my tracking — the 200s refuse to slacken their iron grip on me.
For six agonizing weeks straight, I have been slogging through this never-ending decade: 208.6. 205.2. 204.0. 202.4. 201.8. And, must torturously this past Sunday, 200.0.
Look, 200s: it’s been real. TOO real. And NOT a pleasure. It’s time to move on.
Scale: you stay where I put you in your closet and you think about what you’ve done. You better have shifted your tired-ass perspective by the next time I see you.
Today is day 41 of Power 11. That’s a day and a half beyond the halfway point of my homemade challenge.
I am crushing it.
I’ll eventually know how much weight I officially lost in the first half, but that isn’t the point. I’ve stuck to my checklist every day and every week, which means I’ve shown up for myself for the past 40 days. I’ve honored my half marathon training, which means adjusting the plan when I’ve had injuries or other disruptions to work around. I’ve avoided sugar, followed my meal plans with meal prep, and guzzled water like it’s going out of style. I’ve read to engage my mind and written to express it. And I’ve stuck with my weekly selfies, measurements, and weigh-ins. Keeping the weight checks limited to once per week has remained the biggest test for me, and I have not caved to the temptation of curiosity when it piques midweek.
Somewhat to mark this, but mostly to mark my reclamation, I got myself a double forward helix piercing today. I scheduled my appointment more than 2 weeks ago, when I knew I would have lost 100 lbs by now — and with an eye toward the recognition that my most recent highest weight was recorded on this date last year.
I am obsessed with my new piercings.
I love everything about them.
In the same session, I also had the piercing downsized that I got in the flat of my helix in my other ear during my last weight loss odyssey… 10 and a half years ago. There’s something extra satisfying about the historical rhyming of that… and I’ll leave it there.
Today was a good day. After a week where I sobbed at least once a day every day for 5 days straight, I needed it.
Months ago, I predicted that I would reach a point in my weight loss where the emotional dam would break, unleashing decades of emotions locked away behind body armor I’ve packed on as excess weight.
That time has come.
I have been going through it lately. I have cried every day since Saturday for one reason or another — or, more likely, for a nice big tangle of reasons knotted together by tenuous, anachronistic threads that barely make sense as part of the same weave.
Drastic weight loss? It’s… forgive me… heavy.
Seeing myself in the mirror feels like an elaborate prank. Sometimes I look so small, I can’t reconcile my reflection with the image of myself that lives in my mind. Other times, I still look so huge that the amount of work I have left to do seems nearly undoable.
Getting dressed is a gamble. If the pants fit my waist, will they be too tight in the calves and consequently spend the day being pulled down by the war between my limbs and my trunk? Will the underwear that sags in the ass still cling to my hips? If it clings to my hips, will my ass be too big for it? If the bra band is snug enough, are my boobs spilling out over the sides? If the neckline of my top looks right on the shoulders, will it still be too tight around my midsection when I sit down? If the dress hugs my curves, will it accentuate the bulge from my recently adjusted bra band and downsized tights squeezing my stomach? And don’t even get me started on the legs.
But the real mind fuck is the fucking mind.
I am approaching a size I have never been as an adult. The associations I have to that body are not positive. It was not a time when I felt safe, sure, or seen. I blame the grown people in my life for not helping me. I blame the people around me of all ages for not seeing what was going on. I blame society for normalizing the pressure on young girls such that the unhealthy ways they cope with it are easy to go undetected.
And I blame myself for letting things get so bad that it cost me.
It cost me my health. It cost me experiences. It cost me closeness. It cost me understanding of self-care and self-love. It cost me peace. It cost me good decisions. It cost me years of life I can’t change.
None of that resentment is productive. It might not even be entirely fair. But I feel it all the same. I feel it with the weight of decades and pounds of body fat that I did not put on consciously, but that I now am consciously taking off. It padded me, but did not protect me. It fucking hurts.
So I’m wandering around like an exposed nerve, hell bent on surrendering no ground on my half marathon training, because showing up matters to me. But today, after crying throughout therapy for the first time and wiping silent tears from my eyes for the rest of the afternoon in front of my work computer, I realized: this is not a knot I can untangle in an hour with a 7-mile run on the elliptical. Being low-key competitive with the people around me at the gym would not soothe this ache.
I needed to go outside.
It was nearly 60° today, and there was enough sunlight by late afternoon that it wound up being a great opportunity for my first trail walk of the year. It was treacherous; the foot+ of snow we got last month has not been cleared, leaving it to melt on its own. The freeze-thaw cycle and intermittent sun has created a soggy, muddy, slippery network of pathways that are clear in some places, frosted over in others, and wet everywhere else. The climb to the top of the trailhead was almost too much for my worn-in sneakers. With ankle concerns fresh on my mind, I nearly turned back; if the entire trail was going to be like this, it seemed imprudent to risk a fall.
But I thought, I’ll be careful.Maybe it’s not like this the whole way. Maybe it clears up later.
So I pressed on. I slid a little once or twice, but I was careful. It wasn’t like that the whole way. There were clear parts.
Then I got to this point.
And something about it struck me.
This was the thing:
Choose your metaphor.
The punctuation mark of this outdoor trek was at the very end. On my first venture to this part of the trail in the summer, I took a spill and did some damage to my knee — which also got infected. At that very same spot where I fell, there is now a 2.5′ x 4′ puddle of ankle-deep water from melted snow. The only way back to my car from there was either through that small lake, or all the way back up through the treacherous trail. I spent a fraction of a second verifying that there were no ways around the pool of melt, and then I trudged right through it. It was frigid and sloshy, but I didn’t care. A few minutes later, I was driving my soaked feet home to a warm shower, weighing the same amount yet unquantifiably lighter.
Emotional excavation is hard work. It requires a type of fortitude you don’t get by turning away from rough roads and uncomfortable obstacles on your path. It’s exhausting. It has no timeline. It fucking hurts. But if you keep going, carefully, it might not be like that the whole way. It might clear up later. You might even come out lighter.
I saw the scale dip below 200 lbs for the first time in 10 years. I did this mid-week weigh-in specifically because I had my August 11th – February 10th weigh-out to do, which is *the* exception to my Power 11 rule about only doing once weekly weight checks (on Sundays). I handily won that Transformer, going from 268.4 pounds in August to 202.8 pounds on February 11th1 — nearly 2.5 times more than what I needed to lose. Even better, it was the most I’ve ever raked in from a Transformer bet: $343.70! Conversely, it was the smallest group of people I’ve ever played with in a Transformer bet, and possibly any DB at all — so it was a VERY pleasant surprise to clean up like that! My theory is that people signed up for it in August and either lost track of it with the calendar busy-ness between start and end dates, or they fell victim to it: back to school, Labor Day, Halloween, Thanksgiving, Christmas, New Year’s, and all the functions, parties, events, and promotions that come along with all those occasions.
It’s always a great day to collect. And I felt pretty proud to review these 6 months of pretty fantastic effort and results.
But the good times ended there.
At the beginning of the week, I was contending with intense lower back pain that seemed to hit out of nowhere last Saturday when I woke up. It followed me into Sunday and Monday, and finally fucked off on Tuesday after some desperate interventions I made on Monday night that either paid off quickly or perfectly coincided with the natural ending of the pain. One of those was changing from sleeping on two pillows to sleeping on only one pillow. After losing 100 pounds, my shoulders are narrower, which means I don’t need a stack of pillows to properly support my neck as a side sleeper. I never thought about it until my back started complaining, but I made that adjustment and not only slept better, but woke up on Tuesday with no pain. I felt rejuvenated enough on Tuesday to hit a PBR on the elliptical in my workout that evening: 7.05 miles in one hour on the elliptical. Woohoo!
On Thursday, I had a bit of an emotional hangover from putting myself through some mental health processing work on Wednesday night. It was a positive development overall that came from that, but it did leave me wrung out on Thursday — which consequently felt like a VERY long day. Friday also kind of dragged, but it ended with dinner with a friend I hadn’t seen since the end of June. Catching up with her was lovely and a much needed top-off of my social cup. (And yes, she was floored to see how different I look now!)
Yesterday was the roughest, though. I woke up with my period, which is a bit of a mixed-bag way to wake up. Now that my cycle has seemingly regulated itself, I feel this intense relief, joy, and gratitude when it shows up… and I also feel a bit of apprehension about it. Will it be debilitatingly heavy? Will the pain immobilize me? Then this spins out into feeling that I don’t even have the right to complain about any of the downsides, because I’m lucky to even be having a period now. (Yes, I have managed to emotionally complicate menstruation. Welcome to my mind.)
Anyway, I went for my haircut and lunch with a friend as planned, and everything was fine. Unfortunately, it all took a turn into death by a thousand cuts when I got to the gym for what was supposed to be my half-marathon training session where I’d be running 25 minutes straight for the first time, after multiple missed attempts at this since last week. Spoiler alert: it didn’t happen again. I got on the treadmill to do the damn thing, and my ankle instantly started whining. I figured I’d try to run anyway; it’s about 50/50 whether the pain subsides or not when I give it a shot when this happens. In the final minute of my warm-up walk, someone decided that the machine beside mine was The One — out of all the unoccupied machines beside absolutely no one in the gym that afternoon — they needed to use. Um, no, ma’am. So I hopped off and changed to a different machine that was apparently not good enough for her. I started my run speed, and my ankle all but tea-kettle screamed at me. I tried a couple of minutes, a couple of foot placement changes, trying to see if it would loosen up… but it wouldn’t. So I had to stop.
I was pissed.
But I was at the gym, and the second half of my planned workout for the day was strength training. I was able to complete my circuit without event, but my earbuds did die two minutes into the first exercise. That’s annoying on its own, but I had JUST charged the suckers because this same nonsense happened earlier in the week. Between reps, I was rage-ordering a USB-C wired pair when I realized that not only was my ankle was still making its displeasure known, but my head had joined in. I suddenly felt the pain of a raging headache that was going precisely nowhere. I used to get headaches pretty regularly, but since I’ve started exercising every day, they’ve been a rare misery. When they hit, though… ugh. Right on cue, I moved to my next machine and felt violent cramps join the full-on assault my body was now waging against me.
This gym session was cursed.
That’s when I decided two things: 1) I was absolutely finishing this strength training, unless my limbs fell the entire fuck off; and 2) My evening plans were not happening.
I did finish the arm weights. With sincere apologies, I did cancel my dinner.
And then I went home, did the barest of minimums of prep work, ate what could passably be called dinner, dosed up on Excedrin PM, and promptly passed out on the couch with my ankle icing and propped up.
When I woke up some time later, my headache had not subsided at all. The recommended amount of time between doses had not passed, but I had no energy and no fucks left to give. I popped two more pills, crawled on top of the heating pad in my bed, and was asleep before 8 PM.
And there I stayed for the next 13 hours.
I woke up today feeling a million times better: no trace of a headache, an appeased ankle, and weaker cramps. I’ve been able to be as productive as I needed to be today to make up for the total unproductiveness of yesterday, and my whole list is now accomplished as of almost 6 PM: 2 loads of laundry, 3 meals prepped and snacks pre-portioned for the week, dishes cleaned and put away, and Power 11 Sunday tasks completed. I also went on a brief social call to atone for my last-minute jilt last night, got gas in my car, and transferred the contents of my work bag that broke this week (because of course!) into the replacement for it I ordered that arrived today.
After the weird week I’ve had, it’s no surprise that my total weight loss this week was 0.6 pounds. It’s frustrating, but not terribly; I am a walking skin sack of bloat, sleepiness, and emotional wear. I did the best I could at balancing my training against what my body told me it needed this week, and I can’t expect the scale to reflect that. And now, that week is over. I am letting this Sunday sunset with my yummy dinner, then taking my cramps to bed before they start biting again.
The most important thing I have learned over the past few months is that when my body talks, I need to listen. Feeling a little behind in my training is the price of admission for ensuring I don’t sideline myself for days or weeks because I was trying to prove the wrong point.
One positive thing I can say with full force is that even though this week tried my patience, disrupted my plans, and forced me into what feels like stalled progress, I have NOT fallen into past traps. I didn’t get angry and storm out of the gym, costing myself any amount of movement altogether. I didn’t push myself to keep plans — with myself or with others — that would have involved suffering for me. Most importantly, I never once reached for comfort in the form of sugar-coated sabotage.
I’ve said it before, and I repeat it for a reason: that’s how I know I’ve changed. Unhealthy food doesn’t solve my problems. It iswas my problems.
My body doesn’t want bad food that tastes good. My body wants care.
Some days go smoothly. Some days go roughly.
All I can do is keep going safely.
I trust myself now. Nothing feels better than that.
If you are reading this and noticing that 202.8 pounds is not below 200 lbs — yes. My below weigh-in at 198 was at 5:30 AM, after a pee, nothing new in my system, and buck-ass naked. This is not how I usually weigh in; my typical checks are between lunch and dinner, fully clothed. I have to submit photos for DietBet, so I follow their guidelines in my normal weigh-ins for consistency across my own records. Why the change, then? Because this milestone was important for me, and I wanted to do it this way. Enough said. ↩︎
We all know I could easily exceed a thousand words in this post, but I’ll do this instead:
I hit my goal of losing more than 100 pounds by today, AND entered the 100s in the same weigh-in.
I did not expect that.
Which is probably why the emotional surge hit so hard. I let it. I felt the huge rush of pride and excitement and relief and surprise and accomplishment overpower me.
A single sob. That’s all there was.
Then I slid into my red pants that haven’t fit in nearly a decade, noticed in the mirror how they made my ass look fire, and sashayed out the door, all smiles.
Somehow in the past 2 days or so, I managed to tweak my back. It hasn’t been debilitating, but it did inform my decision to take a rest day yesterday, opting instead to spend it and most of today laid up on top of my heating pad. After taking it easy today to not only treat my back, but also to bank on a crowdless gym during the Super Bowl when I went to complete my half-marathon running session as planned, I hit a snag: I failed to remember that the Sunday gym hours are shorter than on weekdays. By the time I got there, as the employee at the check-in desk informed me, they were 18 minutes from closing.
There went my planned 45-minute treadmill session and strength training circuit.
For a split second, I considered taking a second rest day in a row. What was the point of a 15-minute workout?
Consistency. Showing up for myself. That was the point. That’s the entire point of all of this.
So I dutifully took my place on a treadmill in the nearly empty gym, making it my purpose to log a mile. My treadmill pace has been a modest 4.3 mph; in under 15 minutes, I was not going to be able to pull off the distance I wanted, even with a truncated 1-minute walking warm-up. So my pace tonight — and from this moment until the next increase — was 4.5.
I got 1.02 miles in 14 minutes.
Seahawks. Patriots. Whatever. After snatching a victory from the jaws of defeat, I feel like the true champion of Super Bowl Sunday 😏
This coming week is going to be about some serious pushing of limits.
As of today’s weigh-in, I have officially lost an even 99 pounds since February 20th of last year.
As predicted, my numbers have slowed in the past couple of weeks. Some of it is because of travel and sleep disruptions. Some if it is the natural tapering that happens the smaller a formerly excessively large body becomes. And some of it is muscle building from the strength training I’ve incorporated into my regimen.
But I’m only a pound away from the 100-pound milestone, which I want to hit by the 11th.
This focus on a triple-digit loss by Wednesday is relatively new. I know the milestone is coming, just as I know the 100s are coming. The 100s are less of a fixation; that will happen sometime this month, and it will be the right time, whenever it is. The 100-pound loss is one I’m craving pretty strongly, and the date feels like gravity.
I do have a tendency to focus too much on the story, the poetry, the meanings of unconnected plot points.
In truth, I need no symbolism to anchor a 100-pound drop that happens in under a year or a big to-do for making it from a dark February 11th to a bright one a year later. Much less do I need something to tether these two big deals.
But I want it. All of the above.
So, just as I’ve been doing since June 18th, I’m going for it. Not desperately. Not maniacally. Not recklessly. But intentionally, and with all I’ve got.
If I miss, I miss. It wouldn’t be a failure, just a postponement.
And yet there’s something crazy enough in me that makes me think that losing a pound in three days is totally doable.
Six months ago, I was in the same vacation spot. But everything was different.
Then: heat of summer. Now: dead of winter.
Then: north side beach. Now: south side beach.
Then: could barely walk through the sand. Now: daily runs on the sand.
Then: 70 pounds heavier. Now: less than 70 pounds left to lose.
Those are just the easy-to-spot distinctions. It would take a lot more time to go into how very fragile, wobbly, unconfident, and ginger I was Then. Promising things were awaiting me at home after my summer trip, but I wasn’t feeling steady about them. I had lost trust in the universe, while slowly clawing my way out from under the pile of collapsed rubble that had been my worldview, and bargaining with myself to keep going.
I didn’t know why to keep going. I had taken the part of my brain that asks and tries to answer that question, offline. I just… did.
Running on the hardened sand at the very end of January was a much more meaningful experience than sunning on the gritty sand at the very beginning of August. It’s hard to compare two experiences that are so drastically different, but what makes it possible is me. I’m more different than any side-by-side pictures of the coast separated by seasonality. My seasonal changes are also visible, but it’s the ones only I can see that are the most pronounced, the most powerful, and the most profound. But the best part of all of that is the ownership I feel. I have rebuilt and reclaimed all of it, and used it to propel me forward.
That’s why in the Now, I had to frequently pause during my oceanside jogs. It wasn’t to catch my breath. It wasn’t to rest tired legs. It was to let the waves of months of emotion wash over me as I involuntarily recognized how far I’ve come.
I can’t wait to see what further developments come about by the next time I find myself on a beach.
Life Can't Weight 