70 Pounds to Victory

I hit my goal today! 70 pounds! Much, much sooner than I thought! I'm going to write a well-thought out essay about my full experience hopefully this weekend when I'm a little more clear-headed and a lot less weepy but for now, Jenny Craig asked me to write something specifically for them and here' s what I gave them today:

I never thought I would be here: down 70 pounds with the drive and energy to keep going. I've lost 39 inches, I've gone down 4 dress sizes. I've seen the commercials and read the articles and heard people who have done this say, “I’m a new person,” and I always thought it sounded cliched but now I get it. I am a new person. I look at the old pictures of myself and I don’t know who that is – this is who I feel like I was always meant to be.

 Jenny Craig, and in particular my consultant, Jen, helped me get my life back in every single way. I can run 3 miles in a half an hour now – when I started this, walking 3 miles in an HOUR would have been a feat! I feel limitless. I feel completely unrestricted, like there is nothing I can’t do. That sounds so simple, but it’s everything. It’s like coming back from the dead. I was at the weight I started at, for almost a decade before I started Jenny Craig – I had completely accepted myself as overweight. I never thought I could be thin.

 Over the last winter, getting up at 6:00, before my husband and daughter woke up, while it was still dark out and sneaking out of the house so they could still sleep, I would drive to the gym in my freezing car and I was sure it would never get warm again. I was totally convinced it would stay dark and cold and I would stay in this purgatory forever, but I made it.  I wake up now and look at myself, feel my body when I’m getting dressed and I expect to wake up from a dream.

 The number one thing Jenny Craig did for me was make it impossible for me to make excuses. It was ridiculously easy to follow the program. The other programs I tried where I had to do calculations, etc. I wasn't ready to do the work. Jenny made it so easy that once I made the choice to enter their door, I had no choice but to succeed. And now I’m aware of what I’m eating, SO AWARE actually that I can and WANT to do the work. I love cooking again! I just cook healthier.

 The last five months have been absolutely life-changing. Nothing short of that. THANK YOU so much to Jenny Craig for this program and thank you Jen for every week making me feel like I could get there – especially when, even if I didn't show it, I felt certain I wouldn't.  The positivity and experiences you shared with me these last few months have meant more than I can express.

Back in January, about a month after I started on on the 70 pound path to victory I was briefly hospitalized for what seemed like my second TIA but thankfully actually turned out to be a Complicated Migraine 

Immediately after I got out of the hospital, I saw my neurologist and while most of the appointment was spent talking about the all you take buffet of tests he wanted to send me for, he also definitely scolded me for my weight.

"What's going on? You already have things working against you. You need to lose weight."  Just like that. Not overly harsh. Just honest. But I called Jon from the parking lot and cried anyway. He didn't tell me anything I didn't already know, he wasn't rude about it, and I was already six weeks into my program, but it was a reminder of how far I had to go. And in that moment, fresh out of the hospital, I was terrified that I had waited too long. What if I didn't make it?

This is my mantra this week. Every day I’m waking up sore and tired, and just, beaten. It’s all mental strength this week. Just breathing in, and absolutely willing myself to KEEP MOVING. I am refusing to let myself stop. Hopefully it pays off at Friday’s weigh-in.

This is Bandy (short for BodyMedia Wireless Link Armband) my newest and closest friend. It’s been a real whirlwind - we only met four months ago. But I’ve never met someone who taught me so much about myself in such a short period of time.

I take Bandy with me everywhere I go, but most people never see it. Bandy is a huge part of the success I’ve had over the last four months, and what it’s given me is such a simple thing I feel like a fool for needing it to help get it in the first place. Bandy gave me control.

I purchased my BodyMedia Armband through my enrollment in the Jenny Craig program. Specifically, I’m participating in Jenny Craig’s “Metabolic Max” program. I paid for the Armband up front, and I pay a monthly subscription fee to be able to sync my armband with BodyMedia’s online Activity Manager.

The Armband, is a heart monitor, a pedometer and a thermometer that collects over 5,000 data points about my body every minute. I wear the Armband everywhere. All the time. For the first three months, I wore the Armband when I slept. Wearing it when you sleep is supposedly so you can make sure you’re sleeping efficiently, but really it’s just to get you in the habit of Never Taking The Armband Off. I don’t wear it when I sleep anymore, but I wear it up until the minute I get under the covers, and I pop it back on my arm before I have my pink furry slippers on in the morning. 

So you wear the Armband all the freaking time, and then you sync it to your computer with a USB cable and each time up pops the BodyMedia Activity Manager which looks like this:

No, this is not my actual activity manger – sadly, I do not weight 122 lbs.

The targets are determined by the goals you set when you first set up the armband. They’re based on whether you want to lose or maintain, how much you want to lose, and – most significantly, your activity level: 

So then based how much weight you want to lose, and the activity plan you self-identify, the Activity Manager supplies you with a target amount of calories you need to consume each day, and a target amount of calories you need to burn each day. You can customize the target if you’re not hitting the target calories burned and consumed, or if you’re burning more calories than the target – you can adjust the amount of calories you’re aiming to eat each day.

Finally, the Activity Manager gives you a target date you’ll reach your goal weight by, if you reach the targets it has set for you every day between the day you start and the goal date. So it’s a road map – or really, it’s the yellow brick road, and all you have to do is follow it and You Will Get There.

And if you’re obsessive, like me, you might want the BodyMedia Display Device, which you can keep in your pocket at all times and allows you to check in on your progress towards your daily targets throughout the day:

  The Armband doesn’t impart any divine knowledge – it’s common sense that cutting your calories in half and exercising vigorously 6 days a week is going to make you lose weight. It’s not that I didn’t know that before, anyone who wants to lose weight KNOWS what it takes. For me, it was like I was living in the dark before – just eating whatever I wanted, assuming my life would work out eventually, or not, I was a passive participant in the way I looked and felt. The Armband turned the lights on.

Logging onto the stupid Activity Manager every day (and most of the time, two or three times a day) made me realize I’m in control. If I was ever going to lose weight and get healthy, it was going to have to be because of choices I made.

In the beginning, I would go to the gym and walk on the treadmill, and then I would go home and log on and see that I had barely burned anything and my heart rate had never gone up – I didn’t get any vigorous activity minutes. It was discouraging, but I couldn’t make any excuses for it, I just I knew I had to push harder.

But it wasn’t like I could just start running because I felt like it – I had to build towards it. So I started parking my car at the Patchogue Post Office and walking that extra 1/3 mile to and from work every morning, just to make sure I hit my target steps taken. I dusted off my Wii Fit and started doing the boxing every night to get my heart rate up, and I even did the yoga occasionally. I kept going to the gym every day, running a little bit more every single day. I remember the first day I ran a mile. I felt like Nike, Goddess of Victory on that old treadmill.

I wasn’t always fat. In a way, I wish I had been. It would make me feel less guilty about the time I spent overweight, because I would be able to tell myself, “I was born this way,” “It’s just how I was made.”  But when I look back at pictures of myself as kid, it’s clear that I was average, and that what happened to me, happened very slowly, and happened by my own doing.

I made myself fat. I know a lot of people don’t like that word, it’s too harsh, too negative – for example, I know whenever I tried to tell my husband that I didn’t want to be fat anymore, he would rush to assure me I wasn’t fat, until, when I had finally really committed to lose weight and get fit, I yelled at him, “I AM FAT, JON! But I’m not going to be anymore.” Because, to me, I was fat. The fat defined me. When I looked in the mirror, I didn't even see my face - my eyes went straight to the fat disbursed all over me.

I mean first of all, there are just the metrics of it – the weight that I was at in September 2012, was a dangerously high number (I’m not quite ready to share that exact number with the world yet, but I will tell you that my body was 39% fat when I started this journey, so suffice to say I’m not exaggerating when I say my weight was dangerously high). And I felt every one of those unhealthy pounds every day. The fat defined me.

I can’t really tell when I started to gain the weight, it just happened. Sometime during college, I guess – but I know how I kept gaining it. For the last 8 or 9 years, I’ve eaten with complete reckless abandon. Fast food and junk food like I was living every day in freaking Willy Wonka’s Chocolate Room. I didn’t realize that’s what I was doing until now, but it’s the truth. I mean, it’s not like I was weighing myself throughout college, my weight wasn’t even something I considered until recently. It wasn’t until a few years ago, when I tried to play softball for the first time in years that I realized: I can’t run 50 feet without losing my breath immediately.  And I knew it was a big problem. So I did the only reasonable thing.

Absolutely nothing. I let it get a lot worse. I think the skill of long-term self-ignorance is something human beings have developed over millions of years in order to survive. Look we don’t always have the right tools, the time, and most critically the mental fortitude necessary to improve our flaws – and if we weren’t able to make ourselves ignorant about those flaws while we build up the courage we need, how would we continue to live in the meantime?  So I ignored the growing problem for a more few years, packed on a bunch more pounds.

So I wish I could make my story really exciting and point to some inciting incident, some great A-Ha! moment when I realized I had to take my life back and lose all the weight I had so wantonly gained throughout adulthood.  

But it didn't happen like that for me. I just grew up. I won a gym membership back in September, which was probably the little bit of kismet I needed. So I just started going. And no, I didn't like it at first, of course not. I went two days a week for about six weeks and then Hurricane Sandy hit and we were bumped out of our house for two weeks, and I fell right off the wagon. (What do you expect? At this point, when it comes to my weight – I was a professional excuse maker!) Naturally, I didn't bother starting back at the gym before Thanksgiving, and then I went away for my wedding anniversary. But that trip brought its own stark reminders, we hiked through national parks and I could barely catch my breath. I couldn’t go back to being ignorant.

We came home from our trip, and I knew I was ready to dive in. Really commit and change my life. But I didn’t know how. My best friend came by for a visit one night and I was lamenting about how I wanted to lose weight, but I didn’t know how – again, professional excuse maker. She mentioned Jenny Craig, and the convenience of it and how it had worked so well for her mom. I tried to come up with an excuse to avoid trying it. But I came up empty. So I called and scheduled a consultation for the next day.

108 days later, I’ve lost 51 pounds, my body fat percentage is 27% and I’m not stopping.  The Jenny Craig plan is absolutely a massive component of my success.  Obviously it’s a diet, but it feels like a GPS – you follow their foolproof instructions and you arrive at your destination, weight loss without torture. Everyone always asks so, yes, the food is good. No, it’s not Del Fiore’s pizza or my mom’s baked ziti – but it’s totally fine, I’ve been eating it for 4 months and I’m not sick of it at all.

Do I have days when I’m hungry? YES. Of course I do. I was probably eating more than 3,500 calories and burning less than 2,000 at my lowest valley, and now I’m eating about 1,000 and burning at least 3,000 – so yeah, I have days where I’m looking at Charlotte munching on Pirate’s Booty a little ravenously. I consider those hungry moments penance for all the times I ate junk when I wasn’t hungry at all. Now again, I know a lot of people would say “don’t punish yourself!” And thank you, that’s nice. But if I don’t own up and take responsibility for the terrible habits and bad decisions that got me to a point where I needed to lose 70 pounds, I’m putting myself at risk for ending up there again.

I don’t think of it as punishment. I’m re-teaching myself how to eat. Besides, I have developed a lot of tricks to help me with those rough patches, and I’m going to share some of those soon.

I go to the gym six days a week now (Sunday is typically my rest day, though sometimes I rest on Saturdays instead), and I go like the Post Office - neither snow nor rain nor heat nor gloom of night stays this Amy Keyes from the swift completion of her appointed workout. By the time I reach my goal, I’ll be in the best shape of my life – without question.

Today, I’m 19 pounds from the goal I set when I first walked into the Jenny Craig office. It was December 7, 2012 and I said “70 pounds in a year.” And I remember the consultant said that should be possible.  

Three and a half months later and I’m only 19 pounds away. I’ll probably revise my goal once I hit 70, I’ll probably want to lose another 15-20.