MY 100-POUND WEIGHT LOSS | The Real Story | Weight Watchers | Weight Loss Success

[Music] [Applause] hi my name is kim and welcome to my channel thank you so much for clicking on this video i have lost 100 pounds and in today's video i'm gonna tell you a little bit about my weight loss journey i'm currently on the ww green plan as i work to get back to my lifetime weight but ww has been an integral part of this weight loss journey all right but there's a few things i want to get out of the way before i really dig deep into the story and there's some digging deep this is my story and how i perceive my story there's going to be a lot of talk about my mom and i really want to be respectful of her and what her life was like and what her relationships were with other people i recognized that i had a very unique relationship with her and that how i saw things might not be how everyone else saw things i also want to say that if i use words like fat i mean them in a body neutral way and that was a way that i described myself or saw myself i in no way want people to feel shame or frustration or any negative feelings about themselves when i use those words please be sure to subscribe turn on your notifications like and comment it would really help me as i begin to share my journey with you and help you along in your journey i want to be able to not only inspire but help people feel confident and ready to take on whatever goals they want to achieve i always kind of knew i was different even as a little little kid i knew that i was not like my classmates i think part of it was i went to a private catholic school and i was there on financial aid so i knew that i was in a different socioeconomic situation than many of those people but by the time i got in fifth grade i was beginning to recognize that my body didn't look like my classmates while some people might be eating carrots or trying to stay in shape for softball or volleyball i was eating mcdonald's and fried chicken so when i kind of look back at those childhood years i'm able to separate it because i actually went to a few different schools and so when it came to middle school i started a new school and while i still played sports there i played volleyball but we probably had the worst record in the district there is a time where i just remember my size what size i was in the situation so my eighth grade class was going to a science museum and everybody was so excited because this was an opportunity for us to be out of uniform and i was looking for the cutest outfit and i was struggling because even in eighth grade i was on that edge between plus size and juniors so i had bought the biggest pair of shorts from the junior section of kmart and i spent the whole trip like pulling them down and adjusting them i was just not comfortable in the shorts or my body and it's important to remember how far plus-sized clothing has come and how more inclusive clothing companies have become since 1995. and i still think we have a million miles to go but my options were super limited and so being forced to dress differently than my friends was also a huge reminder of just how different i was my body looked different i felt rounder i wasn't getting the attention from the boys and i struggled to keep up in gym class and even though i participated in recreational sports i was always what i called on the b team i was never good enough to be on the a team now some of that might just be that i'm not very athletically gifted but i think my size played a big part in that but i was also very aware that my family looked different and that came from my mom my mom was always kind of a big girl and so even as a young child when i felt like she was small she would have still been considered obese by modern day standards and by the time i got into middle school she would have been clinically obese even maybe morbidly obese but it never seemed like a problem because she could always do things that i wanted her to do she could take me shopping we could go to restaurants but when it came to doing other things like walking at a park or going bike riding she always tried to hang behind and so as i got older she got bigger now that's not to say that my mom didn't try because i know she tried there's the christmas where my dad got her the jane fonda step aerobics which that would kick my butt right now or the year where she became a member of bally's which must have been a thing in the 80s maybe 90s i don't know and she really wanted to go but she struggled keeping up a consistent routine and so by there was a part of me who was kind of embarrassed that my mom had to be in the handicapped section of the high school graduation because it felt like for me that was supposed to be for the grandparents and there was my mom um heavy struggling to walk and then there was a part of me who was honestly surprised that she was there and i can't remember how old i was but i distinctly remember standing in front of my house i was probably barefoot my brother and i love to play kickball in the circle like the cul-de-sac with no shoes on i don't it was it was the 80s you just did things and i remember being acutely aware of how my mom's size affected her health and i knew at that point that unless she made changes and made changes that stuck that she wasn't going to see me graduate high school or graduate college or see me get married and in a way i was really lucky that she got to see all of those things but the journey for her to see those was not easy at all in fact we had many many fights over the years about what i wanted for her versus what i'll say what she was willing to do or what she thought was possible and in the end it wasn't enough when we cue some animal house because we are going to college college was a big deal for me because i felt like it was a way for me to reinvent myself and this is a theme you might see a little bit later on so i went to a state school about three hours away from my family with no intentions of going home except for the holidays and after really struggling to find a graduation dress for high school i knew that prioritizing my health was going to be important and as luck would have it the student rec center was literally across the street from my dorm and so my first semester of freshman year i lost weight while people were supposed to gain the freshman 15. i did intramural water intramural inner tube water polo that is a mouthful and i can tell you that i was not very good at it i did the elliptical i ran on the treadmill the numbers though like didn't mean a ton to me i don't think i truly understood what i was doing and i definitely didn't understand what i was doing when i went to step aerobics one of the girls down the hall taught at the student rec center and i was like i'm sure i'll go to your class and then i probably died i was able to go home for christmas just a little bit lighter and so i remember it being a huge deal that i could buy a size 14 pants at old navy to wear to that christmas now those changes i don't think really stuck because it wasn't something that i did for me it was something i did for a result and so throughout my college years i started to put on the weight and put on the weight and by the time i became a junior in college i was about 230 235 pounds and there's a few pictures of me at this time and i i was not happy with the way i looked but i also was not in a place to make changes i was editor of the student newspaper i was working long hours and i was eating not the best way i had people on my team bribing me with mountain dew i didn't make time for myself to eat healthy so i was often getting carry out from this i mean delicious pizza place but still not very healthy um that would deliver to our college newspaper newsroom and because i was so busy i was not prioritizing exercise in fact i'm pretty sure i got more parking tickets than any person on the planet that year because i was driving literally less than a mile to the newspaper when i probably could have walked from my apartment so at the end of my junior year i was actually just in a really rough place i didn't get the fancy internships i had wanted and i was going back home with no real plans i was hoping to get one of my restaurant jobs back i was going to be living with my grandma and i was going to be away from all the things that i loved so once again i decided to try to make some changes and i will say i did what i will call the grandma diet i ate cottage cheese and tomato slices i'm pretty sure every lunch also included frozen corn i mean cooked warmed up any frozen corn out of the bag and in that summer i was able to go back to school probably 30 to 40 pounds later and so i worked to maintain that weight loss and was able to graduate college wearing about a size 18. and while i was starting to get a little bit healthier my mom's health i think was really starting to take a turn for the worse i was in middle school when my mom was first diagnosed with diabetes and she was on insulin pretty much right away and so she was insulin dependent and continuing to gain weight and by the time i had gotten to college there were a few health scares she had gone into the hospital with some heart problems but she also really struggled with mental illness and i still now am trying to figure out how much of her weight was because of her mental illness or did her weight affect her mental illness but i i feel safe saying that my mom probably wasn't very happy why she wasn't happy i don't know part of me thinks maybe she was just kind of born that way but i also think that she was limited in the things that she could do and couldn't do the things she truly loved even though she was always trying to find outlets so my mom was a tremendous baker and could decorate the most beautiful wedding cakes she made candy and one of my favorite traditions was making christmas candy with her she could crochet she could knit she can embroider she could sew she could do all of these things my mom could do all these amazing things things that i still struggle with but she couldn't take care of herself at least not not the way i wanted and it was a real source of contention in our relationship sometimes going months without talking after a big blow up but then there were times where she promised me that she was going to lose 100 pounds that year and then she didn't and so her weight continually crept up but then again so did mine so my 100 pound weight loss story doesn't actually begin when i was 21. so after graduation i moved off i started a new job in a new city and i was lonely i did not like my job i didn't like my boss i had probably the creepiest neighbor on the planet i had a long distance boyfriend who had probably stopped loving me at that point i worked nights at a newspaper my hours were fine for me but they were terrible for making friends and there were people i kind of liked at the paper that's not fair i liked them but they weren't people i hung out with they weren't people i went to the bar with or dancing with or even really out to dinner with and so in this 14-15 month stretch i put on probably close to 70 pounds i ate out by myself i went to the movies by myself i did nearly everything to myself at night on my nights off what did i do i called my mom and i walked to get ice cream and that was probably the most exercise i got i had developed some very poor eating habits at this time my typical meals were restaurant foods that were large portions high in fat high in calories high in salt all those things one of my favorite meals was the steak and shake dinner which was a double cheeseburger fries chili and a milkshake and no i'm not going to pop those points up on the screen but as the months went on i just was unhappy and the unhappier i got the more i ate and the more i ate just the more i spiraled and i wouldn't even say what i was doing was emotional eating it was just coping because i didn't know where i was going i thought i had this boyfriend and we were going to get married but i didn't even think i wanted to marry him to be honest i thought i loved journalism and i spent my days getting made fun of i thought i was this independent strong woman and i spent my nights walking to get ice cream talking to my mom so summer of 2004 it's time for me to make a big change and lo and behold i get another reset another chance i have a new job in a new city actually a new state and i am no longer with the boyfriend who didn't really love me and i don't know that i really loved him but i was going to turn this in to a new me and so i wasn't sure where to start but i knew i was going to start somewhere if you don't know where to start what better way than a new year and so 2005 i made a new year's resolution to lose the weight so i joined the ywca i made changes to my eating and the pounds started to drop i was actually becoming that new person i thought i wanted to be this person i thought that would be just created because i was in a smaller body so i ate salmon salmon's still delicious i eat a lot of salmon i did the elliptical and i don't know it just kind of worked things started to click i was creating a lifestyle i had people at work who liked me i got to hang out with them on the weekends i was feeling more confident in myself because i looked a different way i feel like so much changed in 2005 i changed the way i ate i changed the way i exercised i could finally run that mile that i didn't run in high school and i was beginning to feel more confident in myself and that changed the way i moved in my daily life the way i interacted with people the way i was able to shop for clothes i finally could leave lane bryant and shop in straight sizes now let me say that there's nothing wrong with shopping with lane bryant especially now their clothes are super cute but for me that was so important because i had spent so much of my life really struggling to find clothes that fit my body it made me feel good in my body and i just wanted to feel like the person i thought i was supposed to be and so i did all of the things and i lost 20 pounds then 30 pounds and then 40 and i was finally under 200 pounds and so in the time between 2005 and august 2009 where i feel like the meat of the story begins i lost 50 pounds and then i lost 20 and then i gained 20 and i lost 20. and i had always been what i would call quote unquote lucky that i never really got above that 200 mark again but i was really creeping up close now an important part of my story is that in that time frame i met my now husband and he was a guy that i really never thought i would be with he was thin and athletic and handsome and i never felt like in those earlier days that i deserved that kind of guy and even kind of when we started dating i was still in a larger body and might not have been seen as traditionally attractive to many men so i hate to say that being in a larger body affects how you date but it affects how i felt about myself and then how i interacted with guys and so even if a guy liked me i might not have let him because i didn't feel good about myself my life was on this forward trajectory my mom was continuing to slide into a deeper depression and worse and worse health by the time i got married my mom was basically at her heaviest and weighed 600 pounds and we've seen the shows my 600 pound life doctor now but she never had that intervention she never had somebody to tell her those things or to help her because yeah i might have bugged her but i don't think we're it just yeah i don't know so at the wedding we we had to make accommodations for my mom at this point she was struggling to get around we were getting married in this beautiful old catholic church which had a ridiculously long aisle and my mom honestly didn't think she could walk the entire aisle she especially without her oxygen tank and she didn't want to be able she didn't want to have the oxygen tank with her as she walked down the aisle and i know that i was probably pretty immature and selfish because i know that i was concerned with how everything was going to look and then the pictures and how it made me feel and i'm sure that was super hard on her because she she couldn't be there for me the way she probably wanted to be and she wasn't there for me the way i wanted and it led to some not so great months you know weddings can bring people together they can also bring people apart actually weddings can bring people together but they can also break people apart and the three months following my wedding were probably one some of the most stressful in my entire life with my relationship with my mom all right so this this is the part where the story really takes a turn so we can all just take a deep breath because this is where my life changed and i didn't expect my life to change at 27 years old but i believe it was a monday and i was getting ready to head into work when my grandma called me grandma only called if it was an emergency and that day it was an emergency my mom's heart had stopped she had been transported from her home to the emergency room via ambulance and she had been resuscitated but was currently in a medically induced coma i didn't know what to think because we had had scares before she had been in the hospital before she was diabetic and there was a i hung up the phone i was like okay i'm gonna go to work and then i was like why would i go to work and so i made a three-hour drive um from where i live now in indiana to my family's home in ohio and that started a 15-day process of saying goodbye to my mom so without getting into the medical nitty gritty we her body was basically drowning she suffered from a condition called lymphedema and if you have watched my 600 pound life you are familiar with some of this where the body is just so filled with water and so you could see on one leg just significantly bigger than the other you could see it red and irritated and strained and sore and her body had i want to say 40 liters of water on it and no matter what they did they just couldn't pull enough water and that water had caused significant damage and we withdrew care and my mom died on march 21st 2009 so one of the things that i struggled with i mean you struggle after any parent's death is that i was mad i blamed her because i just thought well if she had just done one thing just done one thing maybe things would have turned out differently i was a newlywed i wanted to have kids eventually i wanted my mom there's so much for my mom i don't know and i think i knew that then and i was like if she couldn't take care of herself for me i just yeah but then i realized something and it took me a few months i wasn't taking care of me either because while i had lost a significant amount of weight about 50 pounds that 200 pound mark again that was creeping up and just for some reference i'm five foot three and that's not very tall so 200 pounds on my frame is a lot for me and so i was again beginning to feel uncomfortable in my body i was developing some bad habits or habits that did not make me feel the best about myself and so summer 2009 comes and my husband and i want to get a dog and lo and behold we adopt i adopt's not the right word we inherit basically my mom's dog and one of the things i my grandma and i always said is if my mom would just walk things would be just so much better if she walked even walk to the end of the block and back take one of those dogs and just walk and so we adopt this dog and i was like i am gonna walk that dog cause she didn't and so adopting the dog became part two of the story we have part one with my mom and me being mad part two is the dog and me being a little just like i'm gonna one-up you and so i'm gonna walk the dog and part three was my best friend joined ww my friend had decided that she wanted to make some changes and we have lived many miles apart since college but you know it's funny when you see somebody else doing something for themselves you suddenly think huh if she can do it i can do it and even though i had never been overly competitive i suddenly felt this like competitive urge because if she was going to do it i had to do it and i had to do it just as good as her or maybe a little bit better i'm really sorry patty i love you so much i do so false fallish fallish i joined ww and i was literally just squeaking under 200 pounds i am now walking our siberian husky his name is denali and um trying to go through the grief grieving process of losing my mom and over the course let's see probably a year i lose the remaining 50 pounds um i actually got to a point where i was able to say i was half my weight i got down to a weight that was probably a little unhealthy for me from the mental side as well as the physical i i lost my butt and a girl well i don't even know if i have a butt now who cares whatever but ww all of these things come together one time i can't say that ww is the only reason i lost weight i can't say that my mom dying was the only reason i lost weight and i can't say it's walking the dog is the only reason i lost weight but i think everything came together to like this perfect storm of things where i was able to finally make the decision like everything just clicked and not to say it was easy i had to undo a lot of things i had to learn how to eat again i had to learn basically to find joy and exercise and that was not always easy especially because to me and walking is like the best exercise i know it is but i just found it to be kind of boring and so eventually i did couch to 5k and started running and so that's how i lost 100 pounds but honestly the more removed i get from it the more i think the story is that i've kept it off and i don't want to say that like look at me and look at me i kept it off but the numbers show that people really struggle to maintain a significant weight loss our bodies rebel against us studies show that your gut biome like remembers being quote unquote fat if i was sitting next to somebody right here that would be kind of weird but if we both weighed the same amount and were the same height and had the same body composition but she had never struggled with uh obesity she would be able to eat more calories per day to maintain her weight than me i am always going to have to work harder than somebody who hasn't weighed more than me it can be challenging to continue that momentum when you're not seeing the scale reward you there is no reward for staying the same weight except that you don't have to buy new clothes it's not exciting it's not fun you're just like i guess this is it and then you see somebody next to you at a restaurant eating a cheeseburger and you're like i would like to eat the cheeseburger with the bun and the fries i would like to go out and have the big thing ice cream and just not think about it i mean i honestly think there's never going to be a time in my life where i'm not i'm not focused and that's really hard because one there are going to be people who think that's disordered and i get it um and i i would say to those people that you don't understand the mental trauma that comes from a journey like mine because not only did i grow up in a larger body not only was i made fun of not only did i have people driving past me and calling me shamu i remember being in that ice cream line when i was fresh out of college and people commenting behind me about the size of my butt i remember all those things and that that just doesn't leave you mentally you aren't always able to look in that mirror and go okay i'm okay i'm fine no one's no one's gonna look at me because my belly is the size no one's gonna look at me because my arms jiggle and they do but no one's gonna see me the way i do and it's it's just so hard to undo it and so the farther you get removed from that that success it's hard to stick with it and so one of the big things was the running and so i credit that a lot maybe that's like the fourth supporting actor in my story because i had to learn how to build a life that wasn't revolved around eating foods that were bad for me or hanging out with people who didn't support my healthy habits because you're going to have people who don't know how to to be your friend if you're not you know partying or drinking or eating they just don't and so that's where running came in and so again that's where denali comes in because i told you i find walking to be boring and maybe i was just i was bored with route but denali and i would walk and i would walk him a little more each week because one of the big things of ww at the time was eat smarter move more and so every week i was like i'm gonna make my walk a little bit longer so instead of a mile and a half it became two miles and two became two and a half and two and a half became three and i think i kind of stopped there because at that point i was like what is going to make walking with denali more comfortable because i was looking toward winter and winter walking for an hour seemed like the worst idea but of course it could be at that time i also thought leggings from the target junior section where appropriate workout gear again can we just give like a little hand clap for how far workout gear has come in the past 10 years because there were not cute options for me when i was in a bigger body and there weren't as many cute options for anybody then that's just me what do i know um i wasn't shopping at lululemon or athleta then so i began couch to 5k and then on thanksgiving day that 2010 and 2009 uh i don't know what year it is whatever um i ran four miles on thanksgiving day and i remember that being such a huge deal because there was a race in my city that was four miles and i had thought i wonder if i could do it but i was so scared of signing up for something and failing that i wouldn't do it so my husband denali and i ran four miles and i literally thought i had won a marathon that day i was so excited i called my family i was like i ran four miles today i ran four miles today and maybe they thought i was like totally weird which i mean i am but i know they were just a little bit excited because i think i was able to make the changes maybe they had wanted for my mom and that four miles allowed me to see that i am capable of more than i give myself credit for and that was one of the things i learned in the wwe meetings because my i went in going well i'm german my whole family no i shouldn't say my whole family that's not fair i'm german my many members of my family are overweight i am just not meant to be in a smaller body so even though your bmi scale says that i should weigh this i really think that this is going to be a good goal for me and the smallest goal or the smallest the weight highest weight that i could be to hit lifetime was 140. and my leader at that time said are you sure that's what you want i was like well i can't be any smaller than that and she's like why i was like well i'm german i i'm big boned i don't see people in my family that look smaller like that i'm also like the shortest one in my family i really unless you count my hair i am a natural redhead like i really didn't look out in the gene pool i have like the most gorgeous family and i'm just like short i'm this big so she goes don't sell yourself short and by being in a smaller body or a larger body that doesn't you know set my value but i was not allowing myself to see beyond what expectations i had set for myself she wanted me to be able to raise the bar and be my healthiest self and yes that was a particular number on the scale and i think we just need to be honest that with i know ww has changed a lot but especially then the number on the scale was indicative of your success in a way with the program so that's my weight loss story and i think what i want people to take away from my story is that you don't have to be the person that you think you were supposed to be that you don't like you don't have to let your circumstances define you i think i spent way too many years thinking about what how my mom's weight affected me or how my weight affected how other people perceived me but i had to shake loose the perceptions i had made about myself and make the changes regardless if i thought i could be successful or not because i think there's a lot there's a part of me who never thought i would achieve that success that outward success on the scale and i and by the numbers i did i'm by no means perfect i have days that are hard i have weeks that are hard earlier in 2020 i had months that were hard but i learned valuable skills and valuable information about myself that taught me that i could come back that you don't have to just start a weight loss journey on one day and be done at six months later you can constantly rebuild yourself and every time you make a change you learn something a little more and you can start to give yourself a little more credit and a little more grace and you can be the person you want to be for you thank you so much for watching be sure to subscribe turn on your notifications like and comment it would all go a long way in supporting this very new channel i look forward to sharing more with you adventures in eating and fitness and eating and good night

Channel: Kimberly Truesdell

Views: 20,469

Keywords: weight loss, weight loss transformation, weight loss motivation, weight loss support, weight loss tips, weight loss goals, weight loss community, weight loss check, ww green plan, 100 pounds down, 100 pound weight loss, ww blue plan, ww purple plan, blue plan ww, green plan ww, purple plan ww, weight loss journey, weight watchers, weight watchers success, ww success story

Id: BZRhNbV7ioY

Length: 37min 29sec (2249 seconds)

Published: Mon Feb 08 2021