Ivana is finally slimming down

I had been overweight most my whole life, and was afraid to diet. I completely distrusted diets, and was afraid that any effort to lose weight would end in frustration and misery.  A natural skeptic, it was hard for me to view an attempt at losing weight as anything but a ticket to an unhappy world of body and food obsession.  Always self confident, I had convinced myself that I could be healthy while still remaining true to the fat me. Over the years, though (see graph below) I kept consistently gaining weight, until I could delude myself no longer in thinking that I was living a healthy life. I got to the point where I had a complete disconnect between my vision of myself, and pictures of myself (those before photos are typical of 10 years of photos of someone quite alien to myself.) I did a huge amount of research on food, nutrition, and dieting, and after doing some self assessment, I joined Weight Watchers in October 2007. It seemed to provide the structure I needed. I reached my goal weight 53 weeks later, and now I am trying to maintain. It is of the utmost importance to me to keep this weight off, now that I have realized the untold benefits of living in this new body. At age 38, I am discovering within myself so many things that were previously buried under all that fat.

We enjoy producing some of our own food. We have a great house in the city with a 45'x45' yard, within which we grow vegetables, herbs, a large variety of fruits, and a few hens, for our own eggs.  (The picture at left was taken on lucky 8/8/08 when we discovered the first eggs our hens laid!) But the yard is shaded by a large redwood tree, so I rely on the University District Farmer's Market for a greater variety of produce.

My version of Weight Watchers involves simpler, real, minimally processed foods, and I steer clear of artificial sweeteners and the strange chemistry that is fat free cheese. I love the philosophy of the Slow Food movement, but have been too Slow to join them in any traditional capacity. I continue to track all my food, and exercise a great deal, but my challenges in maintenance are more mental, as I guess is the case for most people who've ever had a weight problem.

I grew up on a farm, currently work as a landscape architect, once worked as a cheese monger and was once an exchange student in West Germany (that dates me, eh?) So for more about all that, and how I got here, go to "more about me".

214 lbs, size 18/20, right before joining WW. 182 lbs, size 12/14, Chinese New Year.      163 lbs, size 8/10, Grand Canyon       149 lbs, size 6/8,with new haircut (and hen!)

This just shows that even if you don't have a lifetime of yo-yo dieting, you can still wind up with a problem. I have spoken with a lot of women with weight problems that have 4 or 5 sizes of clothing in their closets: this was never the case with me. I would go up a size maybe every 6 years, so things would wear out of go out of fashion before they became too tight. I also noticed, as I was losing, that sizes have changed a great deal. That "size 10" I wore back in 1984 would be considered a "size 6" now, a sad commentary on our collective girth.

BEFORE:Summer 2007, around 220 lbs, size 18W. I was not particularly camera shy, but I never looked at these photos longer than a couple seconds before squirreling them away. For about 15 years, I had a major disconnect with how I saw myself and how the camera saw me. When I ask friends now, "Is this what I really looked like?", they confess that yes, the camera did not lie. I was the one lying to myself.

Early success! 10 weeks later, I begin to look like myself again: Late December 2007, At 193 lbs, squeezing into a size 10/12 skirt:

And wearing size 14 jeans: