The Beginning of The End

I have twenty pounds to lose. I have had twenty pounds to lose for, oh, about eight years now. I'm tired of carrying it around. I'm tired of having a body that looks like this:

There is no good reason a triathlete, runner, weightlifter and former rower who has never birthed a child nor had medical issues contributing to weight gain should look the way I do right now.

OK that photo above is the worst photo, but I picked it on purpose. It shows LOTS of room for improvement. :-) It was taken this past Labor day weekend.

Here is another one of me from the same weekend, which is more normal and representative of how I look (and which is still not good):

So that is where I am right now. I know it's not terrible, but it's not how I want to continue to look. It's my starting point.

Here is a photo of how I would like to look:

Maybe I do not want to be *quite* as thin as the runner girl in the above photo, but I really love her muscle tone. I think without the 20 extra pounds I'm carrying, and with some pretty stellar weight training sessions, I can get very close to looking like she does!

Tomorrow I'm going to Weight Watchers (WW). I say this as if it is some big announcement, but the truth is that I have been going to Weight Watcher meetings for - oh, nine years now. I did lose 30 pounds with the help of WW back in 2003/2004. I have since kept the weight off - more or less - but I never made it to goal.

So... isn't the definition of insanity doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results? Well, yes - but in my defense, keeping up with WW for all this time definitely helped me to keep those 30 pounds off. However, I have 20 more pounds to go, which means that I need to do something differently.

When I go to tomorrow's meeting I'm going to stay after and discuss my goal with the leader - basically make it "REAL" again. I guess that is The Big Announcement. I'm not going to just observe the meeting as I have been doing for the past few years, I'm going to actively use the meeting to help me lay out my goal with the intent to REACH it by the end of this year.

It is time to put all my excuses and the blame aside and just get rid of these twenty pounds for good. This blog is a written account of Losing the Last Twenty Pounds - and this first post is the beginning of the end of my weight loss journey. Bon voyage!