Yesterday was my first day in the 140s and today I whooshed right to my goal! I'll post my "official" goal story in the goal forum later, but I wanted to say thank you to everyone. The quick stats - 268 to 148, size 26 to a size 8/10, M in a little over 4 1/2 years.
I'm not sure this is the end of the road for me or not, I plan to keep to my schedule and plan for a little longer and there are going to be some maintenance challenges for me to work through. I start training for a half marathon tomorrow and I'm in the beginning of a 6 month strength training program, so I'm anticipating some more changes to my body and I think that determining a maintenance program that is compatable with my long term plans and my current training program will be very challenging for me. I'd really like to stay at my current size (8/10) because I've never been smaller and I'm afraid smaller will be too foreign to me and too much pressure to maintain. Unfortunatly, I'm not sure it's totally up to me. Strangly with my activity level, I think the amount of calories it would take to maintain my current weight will be more than I'm comfortable with and would lead to relapse. Does that sound insane? I'm toying with some ideas of how to maintain my current weight during my training without adding actual food; like maybe some recovery protien shakes after workouts. This would be something easy to eliminate when I'm not training or add back if I decide to train some more. I'm getting a little ahead of myself, but I always like to plan ahead
with my typical weight loss trends I'll probably lose another 1-2 lbs this week then stall out through TOM, so staying on plan is probably the best course for me right now. I'm not sure why I'm getting into a this detail, I guess it always been helpful for me to right down the plan and I wanted to own up to my ambivalence about reaching my goal and the fact that the journey just doesn't end when the scale says so. All that's really left on a weight loss level are vanity goals and a few emotional ones. On a health and fitness level, well that journey is never ending.
So any of you who feel like this process is taking too long, just remember that as long as you stick with your plan you will reach your goal! Good luck everyone!