Weight Loss Goals

Hello everybody. I've decided to share my weight loss journey with my blog family.

I've struggled with my weight all my life. As long as I can remember I've been overweight. I've only had brief experiences with what it feels like to be thin. Those experiences were so brief because they were when I was young and went zooming past 80, 90, 100 lbs, on upward!

I started to pork up in 4th grade and from that point on my body inflated at an alarming rate. By the time I reached high school I was almost 200 lbs.

In my senior year, I began losing weight for ALL the wrong reasons! As most young girls usually do. I did, however, lose a significant amount of weight. (For those of you who are Facebook friends with me, check out my High School prom pictures. You will see a BIG --or SMALL difference depending on how you look at it-- in me from my Junior and Senior High prom pictures!!) I managed to maintain my weight loss through graduation and into college.

After high school I went away to college for a year. Where I gained the usually freshman 15! I only lasted a year in college before I longed to come back home. That first year back I met my husband, Pete. We married in 1992 and again my body began to inflate at an alarming rate. By the time I got pregnant for our first child in 1994, I was already well over 200 lbs.

After Zach was born I lost about 4 lbs. and then gained that back, plus some, soon after. By the time I got pregnant for our second child in 1997, I was over the 240 lb mark! It was all downhill from there. Over the next 13 years I would try diet after diet, only succeeding each time to lose, gain and gain some more!

When 2008 rolled in I weighed a whopping 263 lbs. That was when I realized I was less than 40 lbs away from weighing 300 lbs. That meant my health was suffering and it could mean I wouldn't be here for my children in the future. That scared the beejeebers out of me. It forced me to look at my chaotic eating habits and make a decision to take control.

In 2008, I joined Weight Watchers and successfully lost 70 lbs before financial reasons forced me to go it alone. Since dropping out of Weight Watchers, I have gained back 10 lbs. The 2009 holiday season was tough. I knew that if I was going to be successful on my own I had to find an online support group to get me through it.

I had searched for an online support system that was F-R-E-E for a while! Then I remembered a friend of mine, Erica, told me about a website she was a part of that had helped her lose over 80 lbs. It was called SparkPeople.com.

I was so excited to get started! Now I can log on, share my progress, my successes and my failures with a whole online community of people who understand my struggles and can share them with me. (Is that a run on sentence or what?? LOL)

If you're like me with a weight problem, a weight loss goal and looking for a FREE place to track your information, give you inspiration and helpful tips, come on over to SparkPeople.com and join me Anneshirley22. We could lose weight together!!