Who's THAT?

This is my journey so far.

One of my students when I come into the classroom instead of saying "Hello" or "How are you?" he thinks it's funny to say "Who are you?" I don't know why.

The point is this: sometimes, I look in the mirror and ask the same question.

Who is that? 

I mean, I know it's me. Most of the time. That isn't to say that I haven't caught the reflection in a store window and couldn't figure out why I wasn't in it. The amazing, yet scary, thing right now is that I'm starting to look the way I always thought I should look. There is this weird dichotomy between what I was used to seeing in a mirror for ten years and what I believed to be the person trapped inside.

Like most adults, my peak was in high school. Unlike most adults, I actually only had about 2 years of peak because mostly through high school I was still overweight until I dropped weight one summer and kept it off until halfway through my first year of college.

Just before graduation.

Poor choices and lack of exercise in college and the following years my weight crawled up over 250 lbs (>113kg) and stayed there for more than 5 years. I don't remember exactly when it got that high, but I know it had been there for a while. I was complacent with my weight because other people would tell me I looked good. And despite protests from my doctor and continuous cholesterol and diabetes checks, I always came out safe. After 2-3 years of regular diabetes checks I started to refuse them because I don't like needles and they never came out close to positive. My only major health problem is that I have PCOS, which I have known since high school. It isn't caused by weight, it's caused by hormone imbalance  I had no reason to be unhappy with my weight...other than I didn't really like how I looked.

Christmas 2008

Recently I have gone back through old photos of me and I have a hard time believing how much I have changed. I know that in 2006-2008 I was over 260 lbs and wearing size 22 clothes. There were a lot of other factors keeping me there, stress, lifestyle, willpower, etc. It took some major changes in my life and friends and family introducing the tools to me to help me get to where I am going now.

One of the most major changes was moving abroad. I hope to get into more depth about this later, but most of us Westerners have a strange logic about living in Asia. We think: Asians are small and skinny. If I'm living in Asia and live like they do, I will become small and skinny too! It's wrong.

3 months after arrival in Korea: still 250+

I dropped about 15-20 pounds after moving to Korea just because my body needed to adjust to what was going on. I did walk a lot more because...well you walk a lot more when you live in the country and don't have a car. However, it was still more than a year before I was straight up in size 18 jeans again.

This is where looking at old photos starts to get strange.

I started Weight Watchers and doing exercise routines on and off in June 2012. I am not perfect and don't always stick to my diet, but in the 8 months since I started I have lost about 48 pounds.

Team vests given on arrival...the biggest they had didn't fit me.

My friend on the left there gave me those pants...they're already getting loose.

This post is simply to show how far I've come. It's an odd feeling to look back at where you were after a long journey with losing weight. I think it's also important. It's painfully obvious that it's possible, just by looking at me here. The most important thing is to know my own history so that I never repeat it.

Edit: I was told I should include pictures from my trip to Tokyo last weekend, so I will.

Kyoto August 2012

Tokyo March 2013