I won't even lie about the fact that I was dubious as fuck about keto when I first heard about it. It's counter intuitive to everything that diet culture teaches us. Stay away from fat, carbs are necessary for energy, you can't have too much protein.
Back when I was running, I ate the same thing every fucking day. I had a couple of hard boiled eggs for breakfast, a small salad for lunch, and then a big bowl of quinoa, chicken, kidney beans, chickpeas, and green beans. Then I'd go run my five miles and reward myself with a coconut water and lime popsicle. I looked like this:
To me, that is pretty much the pinnacle of aesthetic greatness for me.
Fun fact: this photo got sent back to me by someone's fiancee after I texted it to her fiance! Unknowingly texted it to an engaged man, but still...worst dating nightmare realized.
I feel like it's the best I've ever looked. I was...uh...27? 28? MAYBE 29? I think both of those photos are taken at around the same time, right when I went back to school. So six years ago (I shame myself hard enough for that, but in fairness, I DID change my degree path 20 credits before graduating with a business degree, and I also got set back by having a shit adviser that didn't advise me and then I got set back AGAIN by UH's requirement that you have to take 30 credits at their school to graduate from there. Years of set backs, but I'm still fucking plugging along, and I'm so god damn close to done I can taste it) would be the end of 2013, making me 29. I could be muddy on when those were sent, and I actually think that I sent them both to Dan, but I can't remember if I sent them to Dan when we were together, or when he had already moved and I was hung up as fuck. Hard to tell, That top photo got a lot of airtime. I thought my ass looked magical. Running certainly gave me a better figure.
Also, just to like, spoil the ending, yes. All of my mirror shots are dirty, or have a mess in the background. I'm not fucking proud of the fact that I'm messy, but I'm fucking messy. It's who I am.
After my accident, though, I couldn't run anymore. And it took awhile for my body to catch up. I was still as hungry as I was when I was running, but without the actual running part to "deserve" to eat the way I had been eating. Derek was so doting and so good to me, he really took care of me while I was healing. A good portion of that was cooking. He cooked so much delicious food, but I wasn't burning any of it off. So I started to put on weight.
A little more curve wasn't so bad, at first. A photo like this, that Derek took because he said he liked my shape, was kind of nice. Botticelli-esque, in my mind. But it didn't fucking stop there. I kept gaining weight.
I remember seeing a picture of me (that I can't find, I even asked Derek if he knew where it was, because while I do not want to ever see it again, I wanted to show my progress with something tangible instead of vague descriptions of my walrus seal adjacent shape) from an urbex photography trip we took and really seeing what my body had turned into.
Instead, may I offer you this artist's rendering:
I was fucking hefty. I needed something to change, and I didn't want to look like a finely dressed stay-puft marshmallow lady for my wedding photos, so I hired a personal trainer. I weighed 203 the day I started. with 6 months of training and following a really strict diet, I got down to 192 for my wedding day.
That's pretty close to how I looked on my wedding day. I was pleased with the weight loss, but I didn't understand why I couldn't lose more weight than I usually could. Allen used to talk about how if I did one day of exercises, by the next day I was super ripped. Obviously an exaggeration, but not that far off. I could drop weight whenever I wanted to, and easily. But that didn't happen this time, and I didn't understand why.
After Derek and I got married, we moved to Texas and I just kept on ballooning. Texas was a really fucking hard three years for me. I was devastatingly depressed, my marriage came so close to ending more times than I could count, I hated myself, I hated where I was, I hated my circumstances, I hated everything. I knew something was up, though. Everybody told me that my inability to drop the weight was age. That because I was in my thirties now, my metabolism was going to grind to a halt, I would just start accumulating fat and not be able to get rid of it. I believed that, at first, but then I looked at my lifestyle. I worked out every day, and on weekends, Derek and I were really active, always off doing something. I ate very healthily, I wasn't a processed, Oreo, fake meat vegan, I was a fruits and veggies vegan. I didn't overeat, either. I knew something was actually wrong with my body, and it wasn't just my age.
I was missing periods more than before, for longer than before, and I started getting all of these pains that I had never had. I happened upon some information about PCOS, and I was like, holy fuck, that's gotta be what I have. So I tried for three years to get my doctors to listen to me, and none of them did. I kept being told I wasn't a doctor so I couldn't know, or that my pain was just period pain, and my skipped periods were because I was obese, so I should just lose weight and I'd be fine. I went through four different doctors in this period, three because they just changed and one because I complained so violently about his dismissal of me that they gave me a new doctor, but it is frustrating to have doctor after doctor tell you that you're just fat, and you don't have PCOS without even bothering to check. I asked for ultrasounds, I asked for bloodwork, just to rule it out, and I never, ever got it. My last doctor in Texas FINALLY acquiesced to my request, though not because he believed me, but because he wanted to show me I didn't have PCOS. He scheduled me for a 2am ultrasounds, as well, and I'm pretty sure he did that to be spiteful. Derek disagreed, but I know what I know.
Of COURSE I have PCOS. Of fucking course I have it. I knew I did. It explained so fucking much. It was such a huge relief that when my doctor called me to tell me my ovaries were so fucking crazy covered in cysts you could barely see them, I cried after getting confirmation of something I had known for years but had been essentially told to fuck off about. I could do something about it.
I had already gone vegan, though, and the things I read about medicines like Metformin made me terrified. So I tried to go the natural route. I started taking herbs and supplements and I started exercising more, but it didn't fucking matter, I just kept slowly gaining weight. I felt ugly and unsexy and this was when Derek was skating the line of infidelity which didn't help my already fragile self esteem. I wanted to do something to reclaim myself. This coincided with wanting to reclaim my body after being raped. I wrapped that up with my self esteem and decided that a boudoir shoot was the right thing to do.
It wasn't. I felt so fat and ugly, and I can tell where I was photoshopped because I am also a photographer and I also know my body. It kind of made things worse.
I know I am bigger than my comfort zone in those photos. I know where I was photoshopped (yo, aint nobody's ass fold THAT neatly into itself, that's a shop job if I ever fucking saw one), and while I know that's meant to create a fantasy image, all it did was tear me down into a deeper hole of despair than I was already in.
I stopped looking in the mirror altogether. I just avoided it. I hated seeing my fat face, I hated seeing my fat, bloated body, I hated seeing myself. I missed the skinny, fit girl I had been before my accident.
There were whispers about keto in my PCOS community, with a lot of women saying that it wasn't effective and it was a bullshit fad diet that didn't work for them, so I never considered it.
When we got out to Hawaii, I had to go in for a physical. I weighed 221. Two. Twenty. One. And I started bawling when I saw my weight. When my doctor came in, I told her I was so frustrated because I cycled approximately 20 miles a day, I was a whole food vegan, I was active, but I couldn't fucking lose weight, what the actual fuck? And she said, get on the keto diet. I balked, and she very firmly told me to try it for three months and talk to her about it then.
So I did. November 1st, 2018 I started the keto diet.
By the time Derek went to Pacific Partnership in February of 2019, I had lost 25 pounds.
Unfortunately, I didn't take photos of myself the day I started, and looking back on it now, I deeply regret it. I went into this expecting to fail, I think. I also hated my body so fucking much that there was zero fucking chance of me taking a photo of my body with a gut like I had.
But here's how I looked 5 months in:
25 pounds down and I could FINALLY look at myself in the mirror again. I wasn't wholly satisfied with what I saw, but I couldn't believe how long it had been since I could just...look at myself. Look at myself long enough to put on makeup, even. I hadn't put on make up in AGES because I didn't feel like I deserved it.
Here I am, four months ago:
This is at 192, exactly what I weighed on my wedding day, which is low key why I took the picture. The first reason was to send it to Derek, no doi, but the second reason was because I wanted to see if I felt like I looked different. And I did. Me at this 192 was not me at the 192 I was the day I got married. I am more fit here than I was then, this is with cycling every day and working out every morning before I even had my coffee.
When I hit 187, I was so fucking EXCITED. I stagnated at 192 for months. I got really frustrated about it, and I kind of believed I would never break 190 and maybe this was just the body I had to get used to.
But I hit 187.
I was lamenting that the bulk of my weight loss had happened in my lackluster titties, which is why I'm pointing to my side boob. But I made sure to take photos of myself at 187 because I no longer had to suck in, I didn't have to find a good angle, I could just snap a photo and be done with it. My face always looks stupid, I'm not good at selfies or doing something great with my face while taking a body image. That's why I cover my face with my phone when I can get away with it.
I stayed at 187 for a couple weeks, too. Fluctuating between 187 and 190.
Here I am, fluctuating. But in a pencil skirt.
I couple weeks ago I hit 180. I've lost 42 pounds on keto. FORTY TWO FUCKING POUNDS.
When I started this, I wanted to get back to 160. That's the weight I am in the very first picture in this blog. I have 20 pounds to go, and then I will be totally fucking happy in the skin I'm in. Ideally, I'd like to get to 150 and be super ripped, but number one, I just don't have the physical dedication to working out, I like being kinda lazy after my lazy girl work outs and my cyclings to school and back, and number two, 160 may not even be reasonable for me, so 150 could border unhealthy. Derek wants me to stop now because my doctor said 180 is a fine weight and I shouldn't dip below 170, but uh...nah, man.
I've been at 180 for a few weeks, going up to 185 at the usual time in my cycle, and I am fucking DESPERATE to break the 170 ceiling. I will celebrate so fucking hard when I hit 179 or below. I haven't weighed myself in about a week (I was 181, in case anybody is curious), but I don't think the scale would be in the 170s because I just gorged myself on big fat food day, and while the days following it have been active as fuck, I DID have a week where I kicked myself out of ketosis for a potluck we had at the house, and I'm betting that was not a great week on my body. I didn't help my weight loss cause, and then I felt absolutely terrible for a week, week and a half.
This was taken five days ago, at the 181 mark. I don't give a fuck that my bathroom is dirty, I am fucking busy all the god damn time, and I will clean my bathroom after my finals.
Do I miss real people food? Yes. Do I miss being a vegan? Desperately.
The flip side of that is I do not miss being fat. I do not miss how I felt, how I looked, the misery I went through. I do not miss any of that, and I will trade looking this way and feeling this way for bread any fucking day.
I want to do another boudoir shoot, I think I mentioned this in a previous blog, but I want to reward myself with that if I get to my goal weight of 160. I have this awful pouch of skin from having children. It isn't fat, it's just extra skin. I want to get rid of it surgically so fucking bad, but I may just have to deal with it. I am really, really hoping that I can update this sooner rather than later with a photo of how I look when I break the 170 barrier. Just in time for Consumeristmas, maybe??
I fucking hope so.
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