I will be a loser this holiday season!

Reason #1 (and only) I want a dog: The walks.

Three and a half years ago I got a bug up my butt to stop eating sweets, start "exercising", and lose weight. It started off slow. It wasn't quite a New Year's Resolution, but starting in January of '08 I cut off sweets. Cold turkey. I ate no candy, no cookies, no ice cream. Nothing. If there was a possibility that the food had sugar in, I didn't eat it. I cut myself off of coke, juice, tea, and any other sugary beverages. Surprisingly enough, just doing that alone, I started to see results. Well, people around me did. I usually blew them off like they were crazy. I didn't feel any thinner, but apparently it was evident to my friends and family around me that I was losing some weight.

So, once it started to warm up, I decided to speed up the weight loss process and started walking. Religiously. I got home from work, changed my clothes, and headed off for my walk. My walks usually lasted and hour and a half to two hours. I walked rain or shine roughly four days out of the week. I started off walking to the park that's about a mile down the road from my parent's house and I would walk around the track they had at the park. That bored me. It was a struggle to walk around the track for an hour or more at a time. So, instead of walking to the park, one day I started walking and kept on going past the park. I pretty just mapped myself out a big circle around the South side of Lafayette. Round trip it was around a five and a half mile walk. It was a pretty good exercise routine and it worked for me.

Eventually it started getting colder and I stopped walking. I kept up on the no sweets though, and I still watched my portions and kept up on not eating as much as I did before I started trying to lose weight. So even though i only exercised a few months out of the year, by the end of it, I had lost a good deal of weight. I wasn't a die hard who weighed in every week or anything, so I don't really know what I started and ended at. I lost roughly 40-50 lbs though. I felt really good about myself.

But then in April of '09 I ruined it all. I ate a small piece of cake on my 25th birthday. From then on it all went down hill. Basically, I stopped watching what I ate, I stopped exercising, and I started eating sweets again. I haven't gained all my weight back in the past two and a half years, but I've gained back enough to be really disappointed in myself. I can see the gain in my body and the way my clothes fit. The most depressing moment was this past winter when I had to buy myself size 18 jeans because my other jeans were too tight. When I started my weight loss quest I was pushing a size 22. I was in a size 20, but some were getting tight. At the end of my weight loss, I was pushing a size 14. Depending on where I found the jeans, I could wear a 14, but really a 16 was the most comfortable. If I had kept on going and lost another 10 lbs or so, I would have been comfortable in a size 14. But even though I'm not in a size 22 anymore, anyone with weight problems can understand my disappointment in having to go out and buy a size 18 after being so close to a 14.

So, where does the whole dog thing come into play, you're wondering? Well, I've lost all motivation to walk without a purpose. Before when I was walking to get in my exercise, it took nothing for me to get out there and walk for hours. Now, I spend more time putting off the walking than actually getting out there and doing it. So, maybe if I got a dog and had to get out there and let him exercise, I'd do better getting myself back into shape. That may not be the case, but at any rate, I need to get my butt back in gear and take off the pounds that I've put back on in the past couple of years plus some!

Before - December 2007

Mid-Way - July 2008

After - December 2008

After + - July 2009

As computer literate as I am, I'm very computer illiterate. Ideally all of those pictures would be lined up and the same size. I'm actually kind of anal about stuff like that, but I don't know how to go about adding multiple pictures to this thing and actually having them go where I want them to go. Oh well, you get the point. You can see the slight transformation I went through in a year and a half in the pictures above. And granted, I'm nowhere near where I was when I started, but you can also see in the picture below that I'm also nowhere near where I was before I fell off the wagon.

Now - July 2011
I know that's not now as in September, but it's as close as it gets
 because I totally slacked on pictures in August!!