Warden of Chaos

And so it begins.

My little girl will be 8 weeks old on Saturday. I've been given the all-clear for exercise. It's time to make my health a priority.

I used to think I was always a big girl. I was forever on diets and convinced I would always be fat. I grew up in the time of Allie McBeal needing to have her size 0 suits brought in and breasts were considered too big if they created a lump in your shirt.

All through high school, I was an athletic size 8-10. I hovered in the 130 range, was on the swim team, and had leg muscles for days. But everyone told me I was fat. I had large breasts, needing a bra starting in the 4th grade, and hovering close to a D by the time I graduated high school. I had large hips, a small waist, and a round booty. Now adays, not only would I not have been called fat, I probably would have had the guys drooling over me.

But in the early 90s, I was more JLo than Kate Moss, and Kate Moss was who the boys wanted to date.

When you have enough people tell you that you are fat, you start to believe it. I went away to college and didn't care any more. I had a serious boyfriend (who eventually became my serious husband), so who did I care to impress? I stopped even trying to diet, stopped exercising, and WOW, I became fat.

You're surprised, I know.

Seriously, though, this time I actually was fat - a little over 200 pounds. Fast-forward a decade, past college graduation, several job changes, a wedding, and you find me, at 28, pregnant at 250 pounds.

Thankfully, I seem to actually have a woking metabolism when pregnant, so I don't gain much weight - 5 pounds with the first, 10 pounds with the second, and a loss of 8 with the third.

Between babies and life stress, I was back to yo-yo dieting. Right before my third pregnancy, I reached a whopping 298 pounds. A good 50+ of that, I found out, came from a medication I was taking. Just when I switched meds and lost about 8 pounds, I found out I was pregnant. That was in October of 2010.

So here it is, almost August of 2011, and I'm down to 260. A lot of weight came off after my daughter was born, thankfully, but I have a long way to go. I'm a Facebook addict, so I'm hoping this social weightloss site will be the same, therefore making me accountable to my health.

In a very condensed nutshell, that's how I got to where I am. Now I'm going to dust off the issues from my past and only look forward to images of better health and much cuter clothes!

Kate