I'm 39 Again!

When I turned 40, I weighed 140 pounds. When I turned 50, I weighed 150 pounds! I'm going to be celebrating my 51st birthday in a couple of weeks and my dream was to be 139 pounds or lighter. I hit that magnificent milestone after my run today! I haven't weighed this little since I was 39 years old, twelve years ago.

I married at 18. I was 97 pounds on my wedding day. I should note I'm only 5' tall. Within the first year of marriage, I finished growing, up to a whopping 112 pounds. I made it back down to 114 after my first pregnancy, twins, ended quite sadly. I went on to have two more gestations, with plump 9 pound singleton babies to take home. After my last, I made it down to 119 pounds when I was 30.

I yo-yo dieted and walked and joined gyms many times over the years. Never loosing more than 11 pounds by dieting. Never loosing any weight at the gym.

At some point in the last fifteen years, I decided I was tired of it all and accepted I was a fat mom. I bought bigger clothes from QVC. Size small fits a fat lady, by the way. It's a shame what their clothing manufacturers do to support the obesity epidemic. But I do love their clothes, they drape nicely and make me feel pretty. It's just they are helping to keep American and British women in denial about how fat they really are by marking the clothing two sizes smaller than industry standard.

I've never been an athlete. I was always the last one picked for teams. "Oh, all right, we'll take Sherry." I was treated for pigeon toeing as a child, through elementary school. Ugly brown high top shoes. A metal apparatus to sleep in. Physical Therapy. I had to look down when I played outside, lest I trip over the cracks in the sidewalk. My beautiful sister, Beth, was forced to wear braces on her legs for the same condition. She'd take them off and hang them on the stair rail. Sadly she passed at Thanksgiving of Lung Cancer. She was a non-smoker.

Anyhow, last year it finally sunk in that runners were skinny. People who ran lost gobs of weight, quickly. Runners were happy. Runners ate whatever they wanted and then burned it off running. Runners got high running. Runners got injured.

So, I set about to read all I could about the sport. I decided to take it easy, lest I become injured and that would set me way back. So I signed up for a 5K in Disney World. Then I "trained" for a year. Ha ha ha! I run at turtle speed on the treadmill. I got fatter. After a year of "training" I completed the 5K, walking most of the way, just under the maximum time before they pick you up and put you on a bus and don't let you cross the finish line. I did complete the race! I did it! I became an endurance athlete in February this year.

In May, we returned from a trip and my husband signed us up for a Marine Corps 5K, the very next day. No training! Had I realized the first two-thirds of the course was uphill, I never would have done it. But guess what? I did do it! I finished in the nick of time again!

I weighed 152 pounds the morning of the race. That was 7 weeks ago. I'm now 139 pounds, a net loss of 13 pounds. Most of it came off the first three weeks due to better eating habits. Now the pounds are coming off very slowly, but they are being burned off from exercise. I'm following Jenny Hadfield's Couch to Half-Marathon Training Plan which I pulled out of a magazine. It's a Walk/Run method. I'd first read of this alternative from the Run Disney website's coach, Jeff Galloway. I have no intention of running a half-marathon, but I figured the training would be good for me. It's forcing me to run further and faster.

It took me 11 days to lose the last two pounds. So frustrating. But I did it!

My pie in the sky dream weight is the 112 pounds I weighed on my first anniversary. I know I'll feel good when I get into the 120's and I'll look fantastic when I dip below 120. So as long as I can settle somewhere in the one teens, I'll be smoking hot and healthy.

Stay tuned for further updates. And get off the couch and Walk/Run!