My Weight History – Part Two

Published January 17, 2021 | By Shrinking Kelly

For Part One of this story please click here.

At age 26 years old, I married the love of my life in a fun ceremony in Las Vegas. I was also the highest weight I had ever been at that point in my life.

I was over 300 pounds at that point but I don’t think by too much. My mother in law had to make my dress for me because at that time getting a wedding dress for my size was just way too expensive and they all looked like crap anyway.

You would think that seeing the way that I looked in those wedding photos would be enough for me to try and turn it around, but you would be wrong. For the first time in my life I was happy and in love in a healthy relationship and I didn’t care what I looked like. My husband didn’t seem to care so why should I? I continued to eat whatever I wanted and put on weight.

I can’t tell you what my weight actually topped out at because our scale broke and I was in no hurry to fix it. Why they heck would I want to see that growing number? I was happy right?

If I had to guess, I would say I was probably 350 at my highest. The pictures may look bigger but I’m also only 5’4″. To be honest it could have been a higher weight but for some reason 350 feels right. We will never know on the weight, but I can tell you that I wore as size 4-5X.

I’m honestly not sure when I got the first motivation to start losing weight again. However, I can say that according to old journal in 2004 I started making better decisions and over the course of three years, I lost about 50 lbs. That sounds about right as I got married in 2000.

From that journal, I then lost 60 to 80 pounds doing Atkins/low carb. It was pretty quick but I can’t say how quick because I suck at journaling (you will learn this if you stay tuned).

Same purple dress as above only 80 lbs lighter.

After that it was a pretty big yo yo fest of losing and gaining weight, but I am happy to say that I was always trying rather than not.

I feel like I got into the best shape of my life (other than when I had an eating disorder) when I was training to run my first half marathon in 2010. I had gotten into doing a bunch of 5k races and even a couple of 10ks but when I heard that they were going to have a 1/2 marathon in Vegas, I knew I wanted to do it.

The main reason was of course: Vegas! But the second best reason was that it was all flat. They basically ran us down the strip, around downtown and then back up the strip.

I was very nervous about how I would fare during such a long “run”. You see, I wasn’t a runner, I did all my races at a very fast walk. So I trained. I still would never call myself a runner, but I was averaging a half run/half fast walk in all my training times.

I finished the marathon within my goal time and was quite pleased with myself.

We also renewed our vows that year for our ten year anniversary and I was quite pleased to have photos that didn’t make me cringe as much.

I would complete three more Vegas half marathons but I’m sad to say that I never trained nearly as hard for any of the others as I did for that first one. Once the initial fear of the unknown was over, I realized that I could have basically walked the whole thing and been fine. At that point, the laziness kicked in and I put in the bare minimum. I’m still glad I did them, because even the bare minimum of training is better than nothing at all.

Over the next few years there was more yo yo dieting and flirting with fitness but the end result was gaining weight back.

In 2017, I decided to start a youtube channel to hold myself accountable. I had seen similar channels and watched them for motivation, and thought…Why the heck not?

It really worked for me for awhile as shed almost 40 lbs and was feeling good again. Working out and eating right is a winning combination for me (go figure).

I’m not sure when it went awry that time. Part of it was that I got so into making over the top videos (green screens with fun backgrounds) that were a pain in the ass to edit and so it just lost all of the fun aspect it had before. So I slacked off, on both the videos and the diet and exercise.

That brings us up to current.

I’m back on my channel and I’ve started this new blog to get myself back in check. Here’s to much needed success in 2021!