The Weight of 200 lbs

I've been doing a lot of reflecting on my weight loss and low carb lifestyle recently.  Lots of things swirling around in my brain, and I wanted to take a moment to put some to paper (so to speak).

The biggest thing that's been weighing on me (get it? weighing?  I'm so punny), is the approaching feat of weighing under 200lbs again.  It has been a long time since I was there.  Even when I lost a lot of weight in grad school... and then promptly gained it back (thank you Ross), I never got past the 200lb mark.  I think the lowest I hit was 201 or 202.  I had plateaued there, and then life happened.  So yeah, it's been a long time... maybe the beginning of my sophomore year of college?  So that makes it what, 2005?  Yeesh.

I'm still pretty far from that point, but of course getting closer everyday.  I've been trying to decide when I make that a mini goal.  Right now it's not exactly far enough away in my mind to be a long term goal, nor is it close enough to be a mini goal, but I've been so excited at the prospect that I want to set a date for myself.  My problems with that are the following: 1) I set the mini goals to purposefully be attainable.  I may have to work a bit to reach them, but they aren't supposed to be impossible.  The idea is that by reaching them I give myself a psychological high five.  So if I were to set a date now for passing 200lbs, I'm afraid I won't make it, and it will be hard to handle.  2) I haven't publicly shared my starting weight.  Not that sharing actually bothers me, but weight to me really is just a number, and my starting and ending weights don't matter so much as the pounds I lose in the middle, and how I look and feel.  But let's get real, for those of you who know how much I weighed before I started this, it's definitely a number that turns my cheeks a little red.  By setting a goal of being under 200lbs, it would be easy enough for my readers to eventually extrapolate my starting weight, current weight, etc, and I'm just not sure I'm ready for that.

Which I think means that I have my answer, it's not time to set that goal for myself, other than knowing that sometime soon, I want to be there.  But I can't seem to shake the fact that I want to set that deadline for myself.

I've also been thinking a lot about my struggles, or lack there of.  Sure, losing weight in itself is a battle, but all I've really seen is success.  I have a few wonderful friends who are on their own weight loss journeys and not seeing the same success that I am, and sometimes I think "all I do is complain when I'm doing well that I'm not doing well enough" how does that make others feel?  I've had a few people tell me that I have inspired them, etc, but it's my friends who are struggling, and not giving up, who inspire me.

And lastly, I realized on my drive home from work tonight, that when I reach my goal weight, I will weigh 35% less than I used to.  That's 1/3+ of me, gone.  Pretty crazy huh?