I did it!

Yeah, this post is a little late. I've been busy. Deal with it.

My weight loss challenge ended April 28th and I won. It felt unreal at first and I was (and still am) uncomfortable with the praise I received, but I'm extremely proud of myself, for several reasons that could've made my final month difficult.

• Midway through the challenge, my trainer (and gym co-owner), Aaron, told me that I had to reach 220 lbs as my end weight, which is three pounds more than the 70 pounds originally agreed upon. He claimed that he said all along that he rounded it to 220 from 223 to make it a nice even number to reach. So I had to contend with losing an additional 3 pounds.
• I weighed in for March late, on April 3rd instead of the first day of April. I had only lost 3 pounds in March, leaving me 9 pounds to lose in April, when I had surely expected to hit my goal weight by the end of March.
• I weighed in for April on the 28th, instead of May 1st, cutting my deadline by 3 days because Aaron would be on vacation starting April 29th.

So how did I do? I beat my challenge by 10 pounds, weighing in at 210 lbs on the gym scale! That means I lost 19 pounds in April, despite the reasons listed above. I lost more weight in my final month than any other month, even more than any of the first three months in which I averaged about 14.5 pounds lost per month.

Aaron was extremely nice to me (and proud of me) that day. He interviewed me with a video camera as I walked up to the gym that morning. Several gym members were there, specifically to see my weigh-in. One was even in his work uniform and stopped by just to see my weigh-in before going to work. I am not one to enjoy the spotlight whatsoever, not physically in front of people like that. I was nervous with sweat within seconds.

Aaron made an announcement to the gym to have everyone gather around. He played a 7-minute video projected onto a screen for us to watch before I would step onto the scale.  It was a slideshow of my progress, each month's photo of me without a shirt (slightly embarrassing!) along with workout shots of me with encouraging little captions, like "He never gave up," and "he never complained." I was touched. I can't recall the last time I received, and valued, such recognition from my peers. The slideshow was followed by a clip of a video my trainer's fiancee had taken as I was doing the last 100 meters or so of my final pre-weigh-in workout, a 1000m burpee bound, followed by an on-the-spot interview Aaron had me do.

Then it was time for the weigh-in. Other than my first month, Aaron had always made me face away from the scale so I could never see the numbers as I was being weighed; he would just tell me what it was. This time, he let me face the scale. It's an old-school scale, the kind most doctors' offices still use. I stepped on it, saw that the scale was set to 200, but that moving the weight to 220 made it too heavy. My heart did a somersault. When it was stopped at 210, I really don't remember my reaction. I only remember relief. My memory is actually sort of a blur from that point. I remember Stephanie, another trainer who had led several of my classes throughout the challenge, gave me a tight hug. There were a lot of high-fives and "great job" comments.

Winning that challenge was probably one of the hardest things I’ve had to do; it required so much focus and discipline. I'm not sure I ever had that kind of discipline with anything in my life. I only wish I could have that in other areas of my life right now. Now that I'm done with this challenge, perhaps I can focus some of that energy to improving myself in other aspects of my well-being.