So, I got on the scale the other day.  The last time I did so, I weighed a little over 160 lbs.  Hilary just reached 160, so she wanted to see if she’d passed me yet.  To our surprise, I weighed in at 144 lbs!  I lost about 15 pounds and I’m not really sure how.  But looking back, I can guess. . . . It probably started with the diet soda.

I used to drink a lot of regular soda.  Hilary used to drink a lot of diet soda. When she and I first moved in together, I tried some of hers and it was okay.  Since it’s easier to just buy one kind of soda at the store, I started drinking the same kind she did.  As time went by, she drank less of it and somehow, so did I. When she started on the Tiny Glow project, I wanted to be supportive.  I encouraged her as best I could, and I helped her think of solutions when the planning got difficult.

I started thinking about what people eat a lot more than I ever had before.  Food choices were heavily on her mind, so I made it part of my mind, too.  We had discussions about eating during the holidays, whole foods versus processed foods, and different approaches to diet in general.  We talked about protein, fiber, carbs, and the importance of plenty of water.

Somewhere in all that, I started eating differently.  We stopped eating out as often, since it was hard to figure the calories for her meals if we didn’t make it at home.  I stopped eating candy as often, since there wasn’t any in the house (and I didn’t want to buy any for myself and make her unhappy).  I started eating more healthy foods, since they were in the house.  I started increasing my protein and fiber, just because it was on my mind.  I started drinking water at work instead of soda.  I didn’t snack as often, because I didn’t want to eat in front of her if she was hungry but didn’t have calories to spare in her plan.

So I guess that I lost weight just because she was.  Being surrounded by healthier options caused me to choose them more often, mostly because it was easier than leaving the house to seek out an unhealthy option. Maybe you can improve your loved ones’ lives simply by improving your own. It appears to have worked on me!

I really believe that I will do this. I have to do this. Being 80 lbs overweight might not put me squarely in the life-or-death category of obesity, but it makes life . . . well, uncomfortable, a lot of the time. My lower back hurts from doing the smallest amount of housework. I’ve noticed that airplane seats seem to have shrunk . . . . erm. Right? Same goes for public transportation seats. I’m sick of the focus of my life being on eating. I’m tired of hiding behind that. Maybe this really is life-or-death in a way, because my life has felt so diminished as I have sat here covered by layers of excess fat. My confidence, my energy levels, my willingness to meet new people . . . all of it diminished. I’m afraid to shoot for the stars. Instead I have another candy bar and try not to think about it.

But not anymore.

Now here I am, about four and a half months later. I’ve lost 34 lbs and experienced some significant improvements to the quality of my life: I no longer have horrible acid reflux every night; my back doesn’t ache when I take the Bean for a walk; I’m wasting a lot less money (on all that candy and delivery food I used to eat); and I’m fitting into the upper end of “normal” clothing store sizes again.

At the same time, January has been a frustrating month in some ways; most notably because I only lost 3 lbs despite the fact that I stuck to my plan and still have quite a ways to go before I hit my goal weight in the 120s. Last week I actually gained a pound and it threw me into a tailspin of self-doubt.

I can’t completely write off this past month, though. Today was the final day of the SparkPeople online boot camp—I stuck with it and did the online mini-workouts every single day. I’m getting better and better at not giving up. That’s what they call a “transferable skill”! I don’t know that I made tremendous gains in strength this month, but the SP boot camp had a ripple effect, in that it got me thinking more seriously about ways to ramp up my strength training and fitness levels.

Today I attended a free CrossFit Central Relentless Boot Camp class down by Town Lake, and I’m 99% sure I wouldn’t have been out there in the cold this morning with my two co-workers and a bunch of strangers busting their butts if it weren’t for the baby steps I took throughout January. Now that my SparkPeople challenge has wrapped up, it’s time to commit to a new routine for at least the next month; I’ve decided to give CrossFit boot camp an honest, committed effort. I’d like to attend either two or three nights per week; I’ll be checking out the boot-camp class my co-workers attend this Monday evening.

My food plan is the area where I find that I’m still mentally balking at making serious improvements. I just have to remember that although it was really tough in the beginning of this for me to rein in my calorie intake, now it’s second nature; eventually, the same will be true for eating quality, nutritious foods. I’m also hoping my future boot-camp coach can give me some guidance in this area.

The person speaking to me was the older man behind the register at the 7-11 where a friend and I were buying cheap alcohol for a party about five years ago.

He looked at my driver’s license, looked at me, looked back down at my I.D. and said, “This isn’t you.”

My friend looked merely baffled but I could feel myself turning bright pink. “It’s me,” I said.

The cashier remained unconvinced.

“It’s me,” I insisted, then blurted out, “It’s just that I got fat!”

A year or two earlier, when the driver’s license photo had been taken, I weighed fifty pounds less than I did standing there that night at the 7-11. Now apparently I was totally unrecognizable as that girl, the one hovering toward the upper end of a healthy weight; now, I was just plain obese. I wasn’t me.

I wasn’t just completely mortified; I was also shocked by the unexpected reminder of my fairly rapid weight gain, which had been spurred on by overeating and depressive habits. I may have been subconsciously hiding from myself, but there was no hiding from objective strangers.

How can I become myself again, I thought afterward. Obviously it has taken me years to finally make some real progress toward losing my extra weight. Now that I have begun to succeed at losing pounds, I think: Do I even want to resemble the admittedly thinner girl I was before? The girl in the driver’s license photo?

I’m thinking no, honestly. I’m thinking: I want to be stronger, healthier, and subsisting on more than 1000 calories a day. I want to lift weights. I want to learn to like protein. I want more for myself than I ever did before. More peace of mind, more confidence, more fulfillment.

At any rate, we can’t go backward, even if we want to; but we can always move forward.

Somehow that didn’t happen. Instead the days linked together, one after another. Now I have a necklace of 60 or so days in which I have deliberately worked to reach a healthier weight.

Still, I can’t emphasize enough: I did not have some huge epiphany or experience anything that felt like an earth-shattering change of mentality. I just decided to give this whole thing a shot one more time, do things maybe a little differently to address my personal concerns. I had to confront the fact that I was not going to do this “perfectly.” I would eat things that weren’t the healthiest at times, and I would eat more calories than my previous diet plans allotted me. Giving up on being perfect right off the bat was hard for me in some ways (after all, my dysfunctional unofficial motto might be: “Go perfect or go home!”). But in the end it was an important part of what I needed to do in order to get past my inertia and start actively working toward weight loss.

I’m still not certain of where all of this will end up, but the progress I’ve made during the last nine weeks urges me to keep on keeping on. The glow is still there, and many days it is still tiny. But it turns out that’s enough for now.

I won’t say “it’s different this time” because I have no idea what the future holds. But it’s started out differently. That I can state with certainty.

I haven’t promised to eat all my fruits and veggies. Or exercise every day. Or join a boot camp. Or be the best weight-loss blogger ever.

I still eat a lot of what you might call junk. After all, some of my meals come frozen in little containers; in other words, a lot of it isn’t “real food.” But coming from a former daily intake of well over 2,500 calories that partially consisted of candy bars, I consider my current diet real progress. I am learning to eat a bit less food; specifically, I am sticking to a calorie budget of 1700 per day. One day, I may add additional guidelines to my food plan, and whittle down the processed foods. But I’ve found from past trial and error that a radical departure from my familiar foods proscribed at the same time as a big drop in calories equals tears and quitting on my part.

I have been doing my not-too-fancy, not-so-perfect plan for almost a month and a half now. I haven’t quit. I have had some mentally tough days, but I have been able to cope. I have lost 12.5 lbs since I began on September 15. Although I don’t have a strict workout policy, I have worked up to exercising for 30 minutes at a time, about 5 days per week. I have dealt with stress injuries. I have taken unplanned rest days. But overall, I am doing so much more than I was six weeks ago.

I’m not out of the woods (are we ever?) but I’m proud of the solid start I have made. The holidays are coming up, and will be an interesting challenge, but with online support here and on SparkPeople (the free site where I track my calories), I have a good deal of cautious hope that I will enter 2010 with my weight-loss efforts relatively unscathed.

We’ll see! At any rate, I am letting go of my self-hosted blog with its monthly fees and getting back to basics here on WordPress.com. I don’t need to spend money on an ultra-spiffy blog and invest in pipe dreams of internet popularity; I do need to focus on sticking to my plan and staying reasonably accountable. Please visit often and feel free to add me on Twitter and SparkPeople if you’d like! My About page goes into more detail about yours truly, and my Progress/Rewards page is regularly updated with my weekly weigh-in results. (Tomorrow is weigh day, FYI!)