From Fat to Fit to Forty

Them's fightin' words!

If you are looking at my site, you may have gotten here by way of the Weight Watchers message boards.
I post there under the name ellynad.
My name is Danielle and my husband and I have 4 kids, ages 10, 9, 7, and 4.
We live in suburban Minneapolis.

I wait tables part time, and also have been selling stuff on Ebay for over 7 years now.

Just to give a little background about me and my weight struggles: I was not an overweight child. As a teen, I was always conscious of my weight. I always felt so much bigger than my peers. I had reached my full height of 5'7" by the time I was 16, and I weighed about 155 pounds. I am not "big-boned"; I was fit and muscular, and since I was on the dance team all through high school, I was in good shape. Yet 155 seemed SOOOO fat to me, in comparison to those tiny little pixies I danced with! But by the time I graduated from high school, I was about 175 pounds. And the weight kept coming on, year after year.

Fast forward through college, dating, meeting and marrying my husband, and having 4 babies!

I weighed 240 pounds. Over the years, and through yo-yo dieting, I seemed to fluctuate between 215 and 235 pounds.

So, what got me started on yet another weight loss program?

Well, since the new year of 2007, I knew I had to do something. I was 38 years old, and getting to be about as heavy as I had ever been. Another pound and I would have surpassed that heaviest weight.
.
January 1st came and went, and I just couldn't do it.

But then one day in the very beginning of March, a friend of mine said, "Let's have a weight loss challenge!".

Oh, really?

Because anyone who knows me well knows how competitive I am, and those words were exactly what I needed to get me going!
So on March 5th, 2007, I joined Weight Watchers online...again. I had had good results with Weight Watchers in the past, but it seemed that every time I lost about 20 pounds or so, I would lose motivation, give up, and gain all the weight back, and then some.

But I thought I would try one more time.

I originally set my goal weight as 152 pounds; 160 pounds is the top of the healthy weight range for my height, according to Weight Watcher's height/weight charts. Now I have my goal weight currently set at 157. That seems a bit more realistic for me. And once I get to that point, I can always change it.

I chose to follow Weight Watcher's Flex Points plan, so I started counting points.

The first week was hard: the usual feelings of being very hungry, and very irritable, but I did lose 5 pounds that first week. Whoo Hoo!

It was a start.

After about 3 weeks, things just "clicked". I knew right then and there that I was in it for the long haul.
Something was different this time. I'm not sure what it is, and maybe I don't even need to find out.

I began journaling my progression in August 2007, so click on my blog to check up on me!