The Numbers

Exactly 12 years ago today I attended my first Weight Watchers meeting. I had just graduated from college, and was living with a girlfriend in a college town, looking for a teaching job, as well as a job to tide me over til the school year started. My recollection is that one day out of the blue Robin said something about going to Weight Watchers. I don’t even remember what it was, more than likely, since we’re a lot alike, it was something to do with a pair of shorts not fitting or something. So I went with her. I wasn’t particularly down about my weight at the time—I didn’t particularly enjoy clothes shopping (this was back in the day where most mall stores went up to say, size 14 at the most, and I was more an 18/20, and destined to shop at Fashion Bug and Lane Bryant), but other than that, I wasn’t lamenting my weight. I should have been.

I was 5’10” and weighed 225 lbs!!! (This is 20lbs less than I weighed in 1993. When I went for my physical my sophomore year in college, I weighed 242lbs. I don’t know how, really, but lost close to 20lbs without really noticing or trying. )

Back to 1995. Robin and I jumped in with both pudgy feet and we both lost about 20lbs in about three months. I think a lot of it was just moving out of the dorm (and the all you can eat buffet with soft serve ice cream machine), the fact that the summer of ’95 was one of the hottest on record and that we had each other for support.

I stayed right around 200lbs for the next seven years or so, give or take 10lbs. Again, I wasn’t really too concerned or obsessed. I was happier fitting into size 14s, but had summers (and winters) where my clothes were more like 16s. Then at a Fourth of July picnic in 2002 my friend Alisa was VERY upset. When we finally got her to spill the beans, it was because her husband had made a comment about her weight. After we got over being mad at Jack (who in general is a very kind, very smart man), my friend Sharon and I, being the pals that we are, promised Alisa we’d go to WW with her if that’s what she wanted to do. Sharon had also done the program before, with great success. I knew that I could lose more weight—I had recently blamed my khakis for shrinking myself.

I’ve posted before about the “zone” I was in the last time I did WW—how I planned my meals, exercised religiously and got into the best shape of my life. And weighed, for the first time ever, the weight on my driver’s license.

Today, 12 years after my first WW meeting, I am proud to say that I weigh a FULL FIFTY TWO and ONE HALF pounds less than I did on June 5, 1995. That means that today I weigh 173.5lbs….and only have 3.5 pounds to go til I get back to my driver’s license weight.