Finally. A Before and After

I spent several hours last night going through the 3000+ photos I have on my iphone. Largely because all those pics were taking up more than a 1/3 of my storage capacity and that's just plain silly when I could download them to our home computer. Not just that but so much of Sophie's life is cataloged in those gigabytes and gigabytes of photographic memories. What if my phone died or was lost or stolen and all of those precious bits were lost? I would be devastated. So I began the task of culling, sorting and transferring them.

Among the many many MANY photos of Sophie were a few photos of me. Here's a funny thing I do: I take pictures of myself in outfits to see how I think they look from a slightly different perspective. I realize its a picture of exactly the same thing I'm looking at in the mirror, but you'd be surprised how often I decide not to wear something because of the photo. I do the same thing in stores as I'm trying stuff on, especially when I'm on the fence about buying something. The vast majority of the time I immediately delete these photos. I don't need a bunch of pictures of me looking in the mirror. Vain, much? But sometimes I'm distracted or in a hurry and I don't delete them. As I was going through the pictures, occasionally one of these funny pics would turn up. And I would laugh and delete them. But then the thought occurred to me that this might be the only way I was going to get a remotely accurate Before and After picture of my weight loss journey. So I saved one of the obvious befores and one that I took a month or two ago and put them side by side.

There's no way to sugar coat it, my before picture is painful for me to see. I recognize that I was not grotesquely overweight but I was bigger than I have ever been and I just don't even look like *me* to me. I carried so much weight in my face and holy smokes, those hips. Sometimes I think about going back through Facebook and my blog and pretty much every where else I have pictures from the last couple of years and scrubbing all of the heavier ones but I won't because too many of them are with Sophie or on vacations and I refuse to delete those memories out of vanity.

But the most important part is that after a year of busting my butt, literally, at the gym and following Weight Watchers, I lost 50 pounds. 5-0. POUNDS. And I'm pretty gosh darned proud of that. So I'm going to share the pain and the joy via my silly mirror pics that were never supposed to see the light of day.