Joyra:
I see where you're coming from, lol. My mom's a fitness instructor, who yo-yo'd in weight for years and years... but in the past few years, she cut out wheat, and ka-pow. 135 lbs, and a size 8. And me, her 21 year old daughter, rocking the 160s and squeezing into size 14s. It's *supposed* to be the other way around. :p But I'm still proud of her. And we have the same body type EXACTLY, which tells me it's possible for me, too.

Cecelee:
I wouldn't worry about losing yourself. Yes, maybe from the start photo and the finish photo they look like two different people... but you have to remember that it's a gradual change. None of them woke up the next morning as a new person, they just slowly watched their bodies slimming out, and their faces gaining definition... and the person in between the start and the finish is still them--- just with ever-growing confidence, and a sense of accomplishment!

Meredith:
Lol, I love it. I feel the same way about my body over the past few years. Fat in general, but just at different degrees... 176 was on the high end for me, and now I'm a smaller fat at 152, where I fit back into store's normal sizes. :D

I think the same thing every morning when I wake up and am greeted by rolls of fat. In the book Secrets of a Former Fat Girl, the author says that a huge part of weight loss is seeing yourself as someone who can lose weight. And why can't you? You're obviously here because you want to do this and we're all here to support you. Give yourself one day at a time and when the day is over, let it go and start a new day. Before you know, days will turn into weeks, weeks will turn into months and months will turn into years that you've been living healthy. Stick with it!

Ya know, that really struck a chord with me just now... I think that is a really important point!! Personally, it took me a long time before I could overcome the feeling that being fat is just who I am "meant" to be, and to have the audacity to think that I could actually DO something about it. You know what I mean? Like, I've been fat for sooo long that before I started my weight loss, it had never really occurred to me that I wouldn't be like that forever. I saw all the future life happenings ahead of me - finishing college, getting a career, maybe getting married/starting a family, growing old, etc - and I saw myself being fat for all of them... For the rest of my life. Of course I was constantly dreaming of being thinner, but it felt more like a pipe dream, like the only way I would ever actually be thin would be if a genie granted me three wishes or something. Honestly, I never thought of it as something that I could do. And now it's really kind of mind-boggling to wrap my head around the idea that I'm not going to be fat for the rest of my life--I'm relatively young, so if I keep the weight off (and I WILL :s:), by the time I "grow up" (lol like that'll ever happen), I'll probably have been a healthy person for longer than I was fat! Heck, there will be tons of people that I meet in the next chapters of my life who will never even know that I was once morbidly obese (unless I tell them)! Weird, huh?

I kind of went off on a major tangent, heh, but this thread is really making me think. I'm so glad that we can all bounce our thoughts off of each other like this. :chin: