ive lost almost 70 pounds from my heaviest weight and for ever, since i was first aware of my body being different than anyone elses ive always been overweight.
ive always had 30 pounds on all the other girls my age, and then once i hit high school all the girls stopped gaining weight and i didnt.
i remember the first fat joke someone made about me to my face, "that if i stepped on a scale i would break it" that was when i was 10 years old.

i remember in high school a friend of mine said "if i lost weight i wouldnt be 'crystalyn' anymore"

so 'fat friend' or 'fat girl' if you didnt know me was what i was destined to be, always.

and so most of my adolescent life and all of my adult life have been me being 'the fat girl.'


so here is to all of that, 68 pounds lost and a few shades of hair dye, a new style and a pair of glasses, i am no longer that girl.

of course im bigger than all the girls in my pilates class, but im no longer 'crystalyn'

my friend was right when she said that, i am a new person, a new confidence and a whole lot happier.



ps.
do you ever catch yourself in the mirror and youre impressed at how great you look?

my favorite thing to do these days.

heres to the new me, and to the new you, or the new you to come.

I used to avoid mirrors like the plague. Or look in at least mirrors that would only let me see my face. It's probably how I got so big.

Just started some dance classes and a zumba class and now I have to look in a big huge wall mirror the whole time, and I'm thinking that I'm not looking half bad anymore. Still have a ways to go, but I can see how far I've come, and I'm no longer the biggest girl in the classes. I can also dance with my roomies in my house and no longer feel too self concious about it.

I really wish how I knew I got so big. I NEVER looked in the mirror. And like Everlasting said, that's probably part of the reason how I kept growing. Even today, mirrors still lie to me sometimes. The only truth I find in how I look is in photos. I never accepted my big size until I saw myself in a photo, and even then I was in denial. But pictures of me today, aren't so bad. I'll gladly smile for the camera, but not without looking at the photo and "approving" it. However, mirrors and me, we don't get along very well.

I hear ya on that. My father saw me taking a full-body of myself one day with the 10 second delay on my camera, and he didn't get it. He sees it as vanity. I tried to explain... it's like my photo diary. I don't necessarily think I look any different when I'm just looking in the mirror... but when I look at pictures? Very much. So I take many pictures. Most I will never show to anyone but myself... but I have them to look back on, and to be proud of.

I was always told that if I thought I looked nice, I was being conceited. I also grew up in a house where you didn't really get compliments, my father's way of showing that he cared was to nit pick at some part of my appearance. Yes, he was just joking around and trying to show that he cared by joking around, but it just didn't give me the confidence I needed growing up. Now that I've dropped 50-ish lbs, I've learned to appreciate myself. I'll be at the gym, working out in the mirror, and think "wow, when did I get to look NORMAL?"

Its a nice feeling

I do feel like a "new" person, but I also recognize that I just never appreciated myself before.

its not vain to be impressed at your success and all your hard work.

i honestly don't feel any different, but i think it's because this is the weight that i've been at for my of my adult life. I gained the 60 pounds in about 6 months, and lost it in about 6 months, soo.. i think the changes have just been too fast for me to process. I definitely didn't think my body had changed all that much with the 60 pound gain, and again, it just came on so fast.

Good for you. I love the confidence that we gain from weight loss.
I've been on this journey for a few years now. I gained some of the weight back after a move and the start of a crazy new career.
However, I got back into my healthy lifestyle in June.. since then I've lost about 10 lbs. It's amazing what that has done for my confidence.
For the past couple of days I've turned and looked at myself sideways in the mirror and thought "wow my waist looks REALLY slim"

I don't know how I ever got back into my old habits. I felt like crap, yeah I ate lots of yummy food. I moved to a new, much larger city with lots of great restaurants. All of that great food really wasn't worth it. I gained about 15 lbs and it really effected me. Major drop in confidence, and I no longer felt comfortable in my own skin. I'm so glad to be back on track, and will forever remember that 6 or 7 months I fell off the wagon, and I will always remind myself why I never want to go back there.

Yeah, that's it, and it's actually a feeling I love. I look at myself and I think, "No one would look at you and think you were *particularly* anything"--fat, skinny, gorgeous, ugly, whatever. And that's not depressing, it's really liberating. I'm just a normal person who can move around unself-consciously in the world. And to the extent that that's true: yes, I feel like a new person, one who's not constantly thinking about how other people are judging her, all the time. I don't feel as much on display.