Saturday 31 December 2011

Tonight I Will Begin My New Story...


We will open the book. The pages are blank. We are going to put words on them ourselves. This book is called opportunity and its first chapter is New Year's Day.
-Edith Lovejoy Pierce

Tuesday 27 December 2011

Slim by Fifty! Day One......

Good bloody gracious plus tons of swear words too blue for even my blog!!! It is approximately 46 weeks to my 50th birthday - 12th November 2012. I cannot believe it, the last time I looked I was 28 and 130 lbs and suddenly I am 49 and a bit and well over 210lbs! WTF I am actually 217.2lb,! I do not know what happened but clearly I have eaten myself to an enormous arse somewhere along the way!

In my lame defense I was quite ill in my 30's and every time I went to the Dr's he put my rapidly fading health down to my progressive muscle wasting condition Muscular Dystrophy. By the time my under active thyroid gland was diagnosed I had gained 4stone in five months and was virtually bed bound, almost mad with poor memory and cognition and had lost lots of hair, half my eyebrows and was talking with such hoarseness that if I had been up to it I would have checked in case I had sprouted testicles! I was very very poorly and was very confused, kept falling asleep and was in a wheelchair 100% of the time! Only an annual visit to my neuro-muscular specialist was to save me; he immediately ordered tests and a dangerously under active thyroid was diagnosed. To clarify my hypothyroidism, a diagnosis requires the TSH to be creeping above 10 and by the time mine was diagnosed my level was 49!

The biggest pain with thyroid weight gain is that once diagnosed and treated you do not automatically lose weight, alas the treatment at best brings the thyroid up to normal speed whereas to lose weight the thyroid would need to be over functioning! I finished my BSc Health Science degree with more weight, less hair and still feeling very poorly! My weight by then was around 17and a half stone! Not that this is really a good enough excuse, I am still enormously fat regardless of the different causes. I cannot deny that food is my drug!

Zoom forward to today. My weight is stuck at 15 stone 6lb (217.2lb or 99 kilos), not too bad if i was around 9ft tall, actually I am 5ft 3 inches (161cm) giving me a BMI of  38.5. I only just miss the Morbidly Obese category by the skin of my teeth! Calculate your BMI HERE!

As with Miss World, here are my vital statistics! I use a Rosemary Conley Magic Tape Measure available HERE. It is a really good weightloss tool as it has a clip for each body part which you use for your first measure up. When you do your next set of measurements there are extra clips so it is really easy to track your progress.

Magic Measure®


Height ~ 5 ft 3 inches
Weight ~ 217.5lb
Waist ~ 120cm
Hips ~ 122cm
Widest Part of Stomach ~ 125cm
Over Bust (Under Arms) ~ 115cm
Actually this is bust on the tape but I find that measuring either under or over bust more accurate due to having saggy boobs! Does anyone else have this problem when measuring????

Other measure on the tape include:
Right Arm ~ 41cm
Left Arm ~ 38cm
Right Knee ~ 46cm
Left Knee ~ 49cm
Right Thigh ~ 61cm
Left Thigh ~ 62cm

I also joined Weight Loss Resources HERE and if anyone else is a member there then let me know and we can buddy up! My chosen diet plan for this month is 6 small meals a day - cos I am always hungry or thinking about eating!

OKAY! WE HAVE LIFT OFF!!!!

ps, I do have some pretty gruesome start pictures but to be honest they are so bad that I dare not blog them for fear of them going nationwide as super fat pics! Maybe when they become BEFORE picture! Here is a recent picture as a taster of my starting weight!
See you very soon!

ps, the decision to make my stats public was a kind of Name & Shame to give me a boot up the arse. I will never be this weight or heavier again so all these stats will be left behind!