Weddingbee Blog

I was rooting around for some pictures of myself for this post, when I realized that beginning sometime after our wedding, I didn’t take a lot of pictures anymore. A lot of it had to do with being unhappy with my weight.

To understand me a little bit, I will say that I’m not obsessive about my weight. On a daily basis I don’t care that I’m overweight. I don’t think about it, don’t obsess over it, it really doesn’t bother me. Aside from feeling bad for my husband that he only outweighed me by 15 pounds but was 10 inches taller than me, I truly enjoyed my life. I love healthy food (fish, veggies, all that good stuff) and while we did (and still do) eat out 3x a week and my portion sizes our OUT OF CONTROL, I can’t say that I have a particularly bad diet, nutrition wise. That being said, I didn’t like having a lot of pictures taken of me. Only when looking at pictures did I realize how much weight (25 whole pounds) I’d gained over the last few years. That’s rough for my 5’2″ frame, as I started out squarely overweight, and zoomed right up into obese (according to BMI calculators).

YEAH YEAH Wii Fit, I’m OBESE. And you’re an inferior gaming console. TAKE THAT.

So, simply, the solution was to stop taking pictures. Weight problems solved.

But that’s boring and detrimental to blogging. Plus, even more dangerously—I don’t go to the doctor. I was so terrified of getting weighed in (I avoided scales like the plague) that I haven’t had a physical in quite a few years. BAD. BAD.

So one day my friend Robin wanted to join a gym and wanted a buddy. I already belonged to a gym (Berkeley YMCA) but I rarely went. I was nervous going in because I’m extremely lazy and gyms never really do it for me. My typical gym routine consists of wasting a bunch of time getting ready, wasting a bunch of time driving to the gym, wasting a bunch of time puttering around the gym for 45 minutes, and so on.

So, we joined Gym Class Oakland (GCO), specifically, the “Health Club” program. My friend described it to me and I went into it kind of blind—she mentioned that included in the price of the 6 week class were hour long nutrition sessions once a week. In my mind I thought, “well, if I don’t have time, I can just skip those.” Because, seriously? Who really needs nutrition counseling. I know how to diet. Eat less fat, eat less carbs, eat less. Duh.

But, if it were only that easy, wouldn’t I just be thin, and not clinically obese? Hmm. Maybe.

We dove in head-first. The workout classes were small and the nutrition counseling was for the most part 2-on-1 (my friend and me). A lot of the information I learned was common sense, but honestly, it just feels so different when someone is speaking to YOU about YOUR diet specifically—not just a general population “here’s what you should be doing to lose weight” kind of speech. She asked us what a typical week for us looked like, what we considered our diet weaknesses to be, and then she worked with us to basically fix what was broken. I know there are many ways out there in the universe to get personal or semi-personal nutrition counseling (nutritionists, Weight Watchers, Jenny Craig, school clinics…) and if I can put my finger on ONE thing that’s really worked for me, I have to say it’s face-to-face nutrition counseling for seven weeks, once a week. I felt like I was too educated, too athletic (or athletically inclined, at least), ate “healthy enough” that I wouldn’t benefit from it. But I was wrong. I won’t go into too much depth because really—I truly believe now that dieting is a PERSONAL thing. What works for me won’t always work for you, and vice versa.

I started out working out 3 days a week (one hour at a time) at GCO. Then I bought an extra pack of 10 sessions and some weeks I would go 4 days, mostly out of frustration that I wasn’t seeing DRAMATIC results. I live in a reality TV world, and as silly as it sounded, I expected like a 10 pound drop in the first two weeks. They could do it on the Biggest Loser ranch, couldn’t they?

I never took any official “before” pictures because…I didn’t actually expect to lose any weight. Wohh wohh wohhhh. When I hit my first 5 pounds down mark, my trainer would say, “try not to focus on the scale, but how your jeans fit.” Woman, I haven’t fit in my jeans in two years. Once I outgrew my jeans, I put them away and invested in a wide line of stretch pants and leggings. (Leggings+me=BFFs and ever and ever.) So, I had to go 8 pounds down to even entertain squeezing into my last pair of jeans before I gave up jeans with no stretch, which I did, here, for blogging purposes. Because muffin tops are totally, totally in right now. (I wore these jeans, muffin-top free, right around my wedding day three years ago.)

Weight: 157 pounds/8 pounds lost (March 13, 2011):

Consider this my before picture…because I was too pessimistic to take a real one.

Slowly but surely it started coming off. I finished out my 7 weeks of training/counseling and headed off into my own world of calorie counting and going to the gym on my own after that. The first month was really touch and go emotionally—I’ll talk more about that in another post now that it’s squarely in the past.

So if you can take one thing away from this post, it’s personal nutrition counseling. Consider it. It works. And it works for your long term lifestyle, not just your quickie “I need to drop 15 pounds stat” type-deal…although for me, it’s actually worked for that, too.

Next up I’ll detail what the bootcamp was comprised of (it’s not as scary as you’d think) and what I got out of those seven weeks.

Have you spoken to a professional dietitian or nutrition counselor?