Weight just a moment! in Weight just a moment!

I’ve gained and lost a lot of weight over the years, and been some variety of “fat” (“overweight,” “obese,” or “morbidly obese”) most of them.

In high school and early college, I ran around 270 lbs. I was super-enthused when I got back from my study-abroad in Belgium to discover I’d dropped to only 240 lbs. – all the walking, I suppose. But it wasn’t because I was eating well, and I quickly returned to my “normal” weight.

My last semester of undergrad, I ballooned up to 290 lbs. and stayed that way through graduate school:

I blame the stress of trying to get into various graduate schools. I’d actually made some progress on the eating-healthy front, but that kind of smashed it. That state persisted through the next several years, including our wedding. While this is one of Emilie’s favorite wedding pictures and remains in our living room for that reason, I don’t have words to express how unflattering I feel this picture is:

Ultimately, I crossed 300 lbs. before I decided enough was enough.

In 2009, I started losing some weight, and in 2010, I enrolled in a weight loss program through work and my gym. Insurance paid for a portion of it, in the hopes of reducing my future health-care expenses, but we paid a good deal as well. My lowest weight, quite possibly from the day this picture was taken, was 193 lbs.:

I’m very proud of that. Unfortunately, over the last two years, I’ve regained a portion of that. While my current weight (222.4 lbs. this morning) is still among the best of my adult life, I don’t like that I’ve regained over a quarter of the weight I lost. I’m in the ironic position where people look at me and say I look fine (even doctors), when I know that my healthy best is truly so much better. Here’s what I look like these days:

I joked at one point that Emilie’s goal was to weigh less than me for her entire pregnancy, and my goal would be to weigh less than her at some point before the baby’s born. I think she’s going to win this one – if I were still at my 2010 weight, I could guarantee I’d win by the time the baby comes. And it’s a little galling.

So call it an early New Year’s resolution. Along with switching from gym to having an elliptical and a few other things at home, I’m going to try to get back into tracking what I eat. Most especially, I’ve had a hard time going without soda for more than a couple days, and I’m taking another stab at kicking that habit.

One of the things that helped before was the online accountability of posting how that effort was going. If it worked in 2010, maybe it’ll work in 2015.

Starting point: 222.4