wickedqueen.net

Awhile ago, someone on LiveJournal mentioned the National Weight Control Registry, which is a study associated with Brown University Medical School “developed to identify and investigate the characteristics of individuals who have succeeded at long-term weight loss”–here defined as people who have maintained a 30 pound loss for one year or more.

Despite having regained a bit of weight in the past two months due to first being Full of Blood Clots and then, a week after they finally let me go back to the gym, catching the Death Flu, I am still within five pounds of my original goal weight, which I reached on December 13, 2005–coincidentally closely following Clot #1; I only missed about a week of gym time for that one. Anyway, my study consent forms arrived with my held mail today, so I got to initial a bunch of stuff and provide evidence that I did actually lose all that weight.

They offer two options: you can get your doctor’s office or whoever to provide documentation, or you can submit before-and-after photos. If there’s one thing I have ready to hand, it’s photos of myself–admittedly quite a few more “after” shots than “before,” as Matthieu has commented on in the past, but definitely enough “before” shots to prove that I used to be fat.

Although not, actually, the worst and most horrible of “before” shots, which for some reason my father had on his website for MONTHS after it was no longer accurate, until he finally listened to my desperate pleas and took it down. I don’t know what happened to that one. I looked like Jabba the Hut. It would have been PERFECT for the purpose of demonstrating how fat I used to be, so I am actually kind of sorry.

Anyway, here are the photos that are actually getting sent:

Before:

(October 7, 2004)

(June 2005)

(Christmas 2004)

AFTER:

(December 2005)

(July 25, 2007)

(July 23, 2006)

The Christmas 2004 one is probably the worst of the lot, mainly because that was when I weighed the most (178 pounds when I, inexplicably, decided that it would be a good idea to weigh myself like two days after Christmas). It’s actually pretty encouraging to be looking at those old-old photos, since I’m actually only about five pounds over my preferred weight at the moment, and while that’s worse than it might initially sound because I’m also down quite a bit of muscle from being benched for so long, on the other hand, I do not look like Jabba the Hut. My face is still pretty much the way it looks in my “after” pictures, for one thing, rather than all chipmunky.

My gym is closed until January 2–I did get in some cardio and probably some strength-training shoveling snow this afternoon; I could only do so much since no one has been in residence for over a week and people have been walking on the sidewalk, packing it down, and eventually I got very, very tired of hammering away with the edge of the shovel to remove 1/8″ of snow from the walk. I put down salt. Come January 2, I will be doing 5-6 days of weight training a week until I am back to my former glory:

My biceps have really suffered. But I will get them back into shape.

This entry was posted on Saturday, December 29th, 2007 at 4:46 pm and is filed under media content, exercise, bodies, weight, photos. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.