January 2, 2012 - I rededicated myself to my weight loss goals.
My goal... needs a background story to make sense.
High school was a blast for me. I loved my amazing, hippie school. I had awesome friends and a great life in general. Until my junior year of high school, I was underweight. I was highly active with marching band and working out at the gym. My parents were always great about making sure we (my brother and I) ate healthy meals. We were required to eat breakfast before we left, we had healthy meals packed for us each day (though we begged and begged for lunch money to buy french fries and Dr Pepper), and we came home to a healthy meal. I was 5'3" and doing good to hit 100 lbs soaking wet, wearing army boots. I didn't have a care in the world... until my junior year.
Something happened. I couldn't explain it. Without giving up my active lifestyle or proper eating habits, I went from barely 100 lbs. to 164 lbs. in 3 months. On top of this ridiculous weight gain that took me from a junior size 1 to a women's size 14, I was having horrible mood swings, my body temperature would never get above 96.7 degrees, I was always cold, kept having horrible headaches, my monthly female occurrences were far from monthly and nearly non-existent, and the list could go on forever. Long story short, at the age of 15, I was diagnosed with hypothyroidism, and my weight loss has been a struggle ever since. From that point on, I was in and out of my Endocrinologist's office monthly working on finding the right combination of thyroid hormones to help me lose weight and get back to "normal".
The summer before my freshman year of college, I started Weight Watchers with my mother. Over four months, I was able to lose 9 lbs., which brought me down to 155 lbs., but after that, I hit a plateau and wasn't able to get below 155 with Weight Watchers. My thyroid had it out for me. Over my four years of college, I would fluctuate between 155 and 150, with eating relatively healthy and working out often. While in college, I would continue to work with my Endocrinologist to tweak my thyroid medication. It wasn't until after I graduated college that I was able to reach my most significant weight loss of 27 lbs.
With a new medication combination and three months on NutriSystem, I was able to reach 137 lbs. just in time for my wedding in January of 2007. Since that point, I would fluctuate between 137 and 127 through 2008, where I evened out at 131, and stayed there for 3 years, which gave me a total weight loss from 2000-2011 of 33 lbs.
In the spring of 2011, my husband changed jobs and, with that, changed health insurance. My new health insurance required me to send away to Medco for all of my prescriptions. So reluctantly, I moved them over. Unfortunately, even though Medco adamantly claims that they adhere to providing the best generic medication available and promise to administer name-brand medication at the doctor's request, they refused to provide my name brand synthetic thyroid medications and instead substituted for extremely low-quality generics, even at my doctor's requests to provide me with the name brand medications I had been taking for nearly 12 years. So for four months I was on inferior medications and all the work I had done in the last 12 years was slipping away. I went back up to 143.5, and all of my low thyroid symptoms returned. It wasn't until my doctor had his legal team write Medco and demand that they change my medication or face a lawsuit that they agreed to change me back.
I was placed back on my normal medication in September 2011. And, since that point, I have been teeter-tottering between 140 and 143.
So, now that your caught up... back to my goal!
Though I will never reach a weight loss of the original 64 lbs. due to age, height change (5'5" now), and the fact that it's probably not acceptable for me to weight 95-105 lbs. now, now that I have about 3.5 months worth of constant, quality medication in my system, I am ready to continue my weight loss to a safer goal of a total of 40 lbs. from my original weight gain, thus bringing to 120-125.
With all that said... that brings us to January 2nd, and my friend's request for me to start a blog!
