A geek girl's guide to losing weight

I suppose an introduction is in order.

My name is Madigan and I used to be really fat.  I'm still kinda fat, but not nearly as bad.  I've always had this desire to go from looking like this:

 

to looking like this:

Preferably before Comic-Con

But every time I started a diet or exercise program, I'd do it for about one-tenth of a second before giving up.  I tried all the gimmicks.  I'm pretty sure, at one point, I made Jenny Craig cry.  Thanks to my complete lack of will-power, this was me in April of 2011, all 230 pounds of me, plus an automatic weapon:

I was in Vegas. They let you play with guns there.

Shortly after that picture was taken, I reconnected with an old friend.  And, by reconnected, I mean we started sleeping together.  This friend of mine is one of those impossibly attractive people.  The kind of person whose insane good looks will cause normal looking people who have never been self-conscious a day in their life to start reassessing their decision to leave the house that morning.  Or ever.  So, given that I was regularly sleeping with this freakishly hot man, I decided that maybe I shouldn't be such a whale anymore.  

I started with a diet.  And, by diet, I mean I just stopped shoveling so much food down my throat.  I didn't stop eating anything I loved or switched to living solely on "shakes" and bars that taste vaguely of kitty litter.  I ate exactly the same stuff I always did.  I just ate less of it.  Far less.  And a crazy thing happens when you ingest fewer calories... you start losing weight.  

So that was going pretty well.  I lost a good amount of weight with diet and I was certainly getting some excellent exercise from my interactions with the aforementioned hot fellow.  But there was still no getting away from the fact that he was basically an Abercrombie & Fitch poster and I was still shopping at fat chick stores.  Predictably, our several month entanglement ended thusly:

To be more accurate, imagine Adele's "Someone Like You" playing in the background

So that happened.  And it sucked.  And I don't want to say that the only reason it didn't work out was our severe differences in looks.  Hell, that may have had nothing to do with it.  I don't know.  I don't care.  Because it was my catalyst.  It was the point at which I decided I don't want to be fat anymore.  I don't want to feel that nervous and unattractive the next time a ridiculously hot person wants to sleep with me.

On a side note, I won't use this fellow's name or put any pictures up of him because I do care about his privacy.  Those of you who know me know who I'm talking about and those of you who don't know me, well... I guess all I can say is thanks for reading the ramblings of a fat nerdy girl endeavoring to become less fat.  But, back to the guy, caring about his privacy is the extent to which my caring goes.  If you'd like to know how I feel about the guy himself, I'm going to direct you to my close, personal friend Weird Al Yankovic*:

 *Disclaimer: Weird Al is not actually my close, personal friend, but wouldn't that be awesome?

Instead of handling things like a crazy girl would, I decided to parlay my sadness and frustration into something productive.  Eating less was going okay, but I wasn't any stronger and I wasn't getting close to Slave Leia in any kind of hurry.  So I took my emotions out on a poor, defenseless treadmill.  

And that brings us to now.  I've only been at this running thing for about six weeks and it's hard, but I'm sticking with it. In addition to my goal of looking half-decent in a Slave Leia bikini by July, I have acquired a new goal: run a marathon.  Maybe not this year, but sometime in my future, there are 26.2 miles with my name on them.

This blog will be my repository for my experiences going from fat chick to hot nerd girl, along with whatever nonsense happens to float from my head to my keyboard along the way.  As I'm figuring out all this weight loss stuff along the way, my experiments will provide some information about what works and what is pants-on-head retarded, should anyone else wish to embark upon a similar endeavor.

Thanks for reading and stay tuned for my next entry, "Run Away, Run Away!"