My Before and After

I've always been a larger person. Over the years, I've heard so many adjectives. Fat. Chubby, Chunky. Thick. Plus Size. Overweight. Obese (this term only came from the height/weight charts though). I'm also nearly 6 ft tall. That means that no matter how much weight I lose, I will never be small. It's also means that all 300 lbs of my weight was distributed over a large frame, so to many people I didn't look quite that large. But I was.

When I was pregnant with my youngest, my mother died suddenly of a heart condition that no one knew she had. She was 57. Her own mother had passed away at the age of 56. I don't want to be a part of that trend, and I knew that the biggest threat to my health was my weight (I had already quit smoking in 2010). I got serious about working out at the gym and being more mindful about what I was consuming. I have a completely new relationship with food, am so much stronger than I ever was, and I've lost 88 lbs. so far.

Here are my before and after pictures:

August 2012 and April 2015

I realize that saying, "I got serious about working out at the gym and being more mindful about what I was consuming" doesn't say enough. But I want this post to be shorter, so I will post later about the steps I took to get where I'm at.