It’s a little hard to see, but I am getting smaller.

This is my favorite “little black dress”.

It’s a classic Jones New York dress that is made with impeccable quality and fit me perfectly when I bought it 7 years ago. But I weighed more then than I do now.

I wore this dress to church a couple weeks ago, and my good friend pulled me aside and told me that that was the last day I could wear this dress — my favorite dress. (It looks like a gunny sack on me now — and because of the way the dress is constructed — completely lined with top-stitched princess seams — it would cost more than it’s worth to have it altered)

So I had to memorialize my dress and have this picture taken.

I know I’m still tubby, but officially, I have gone from a size 22 to a size 16.

Not bad, eh?

Well, it would be better if I had some size 16 clothes… but I currently have one pair of jeans that actually fit correctly. I also have a pair of size 14 black jeans that my friend, Gwen, passed on to me after she lost weight — as an incentive for the future.

That future is now closer than before. Woo hoo!

I am just a little over 5 feet tall. I stopped growing when I was in the 6th grade, to my consternation. But because I’m little, I love little surprises more than big surprises.

I’m going to share something with you that has taken a lot of courage for me to share, and I know you’ll understand why in a moment.

It’s no secret that I’m not exactly skinny, eh?

Here’s a family photo from ten years ago (You’ve seen the most current one on a recent blog post. We haven’t changed much…):

we’re all a little chubbalicious here.

(Check out the picture of Robin on the left — he grew out of his baby-fat phase.)

Speaking about baby fat, I didn’t always look this way. I lost my baby-fat in junior high and weighed 95 pounds, soaking wet, in high school. The day I got married, my wedding dress was a size 5, which in today’s uber-skinny sizing, was the equivalent of a size 0.

Babies — all three of them, helped me to get to a not-so-zaftig look. (Zaftig means sexy-curvy auf Deutsch) There was nothing zaftig about me. I constantly battled the losing weight/gaining weight yo-yo of life until 1989, when I started Weight Watchers for the first time.

I was soooo good and so diligent. I started out there at 180 and was within 5 pounds of goal weight… when I found out I was pregnant with Robin! Well, I was SO happy — it was a good pregnancy because I was really healthy but my craving in the last trimester for Baskin-Robbins Jamoca and hot fudge shakes and tuna sandwiches did not help a thing. Like the heart wants what it wants, the pregnant body wants what it wants too.

Kirsten started out losing weight at the end of October this last year, and by February she had lost 5 dress sizes. I started her weight loss routine and lost 16 pounds, but I started traveling a lot to teach and Quilt Market and nothing is a quicker weight loss killer than traveling and not being able to control what you eat. so… I climbed up and added 7 pounds.

Enter WebGuy, who was inspired by Kirsten’s weight loss, who has lost over 100 pounds since the first of February — that’s the equivalent of losing a small size adult like I was prior to babies! And he looks fantastic, I’ll tell ya. Just check out his Facebook picture.

Contrary to popular belief, NOTHING inspires you more to lose weight than to see current pictures of yourself. NOTHING. And certainly not pictures of you being thinner and looking great. When you are so over-weight, it’s hard to visualize ever looking like that again and eating your emotions (happy/sad, mad/glad) always outweighs the desire to be thinner. At least in my family, with my genetic makeup. My mom and sisters would agree.

This picture:

Yes, Cambria is darling, but it’s my chubby legs in this picture that I saw and thought “I didn’t know that I looked like that…” that gave me pause for thought.

And, this picture…

… when I saw this picture, I just about passed out. This is my favorite top. It doesn’t look like how I think it looks on me — it makes me look FAT. : (

These two pictures have motivated me to lose weight more than any skinny pictures ever would.

(I will post some of those next week. I will have to scan them because I have no skinny digital pictures…)

Immediately after this last picture, I decided that enough was enough – if Kirsten and Guy could do it, so can I. And, I decided that traveling is no excuse. After all, I make the decisions for myself and I CAN be in control. That was at the end of August.

So… Today, after 30 days of making that commitment and after 20 years, I finally have a cause to celebrate… for the first time since I was expecting Robin, I weigh…. 199.7!

I am under 200 pounds for the first time since I had Robin.

©2011 Annie Smith   All Rights Reserved