drum roll please...

One hundred pounds! One year and one hundred pounds. Can you believe it? One pound at a time, the hard way! Calories in, calories out. 350,000 calories (give or take). I am not done losing but this is a huge milestone. It has taken me a couple of days to post this because I kept thinking I would get back on that scale and have gained 3 pounds or something. Today I am feeling comfortable that I have truly lost 100 pounds and am looking forward to 110 and beyond.

Hitting the 100 lb. mark has been strange. It is so exciting and totally worth celebrating but how? You can’t sit down to a cheesecake. I’m too old for keg stands. Jewelry maybe? The other side of it is that losing 100 lbs. means you had 100lbs to lose. You know what I mean? Obesity is tough to talk about. I mean, think about whatever the word conjures up for you. OBESE. Oooohhhh-Beeese. It’s not a nice word, like “poofy” or “fluffy”. It’s an ugly word for an ugly thing. When you talk about being fat, it makes people feel really uncomfortable, which is funny because you want to say, “You think you’re uncomfortable? Have you seen the size of my ass?”

I don’t want to intentionally make people uncomfortable, but I do need to keep talking about being fat. Here’s why. When Oprah started the new year out talking out her weight gain, she said she couldn’t believe that 10 years later, she was still talking about weight. I feel like the second you stop talking about it, is when you start to gain it back. Many of you know that this is not my first time losing a lot of weight. After the birth of my first child, I had become “the house that Jack built”. I lost around 70 pounds in 2003-04 and by the time I was pregnant with my daughter in 2005, I had gained back 40 pounds. After she was born, I had put the rest back on and then some.

I feel more confident this time for a few reasons. First, I have completely changed the way I eat. My food allergies have required me to really be conscious of this. I am not on a diet and I do not go hungry. Second, is the exercise. I think people have a bad habit of seeing exercise time as somehow self-indulgent. We need to see time spent at the gym more like time spent brushing our teeth or getting a good night’s sleep and less like getting a mani/pedi with the girls. This part has been especially hard as a teacher and a mom. I had to stop seeing the time I spend at the gym as time taken away from my kids or my students. I had to stop apologizing for that time and stop feeling like I was being selfish. My health is the greatest gift I could give my husband and my kids. I will not apologize for that. The best part, like I have talked about before, is that my husband has always made me feel the importance of that time. His support is the only reason why this works.

Another reason for feeling more confident this time? As far as I can tell, putting on weight is not as popular a topic to blog about!

Here’s to every ounce of those lost 100 lbs!

Thanks for reading. More later…