My name is Raina Cepel. I'm 23 and I live in Missouri.

When I was a teenager, I always thought I was fat, but I usually wasn't. (This is hardly a new story, I know.) There were a few times that I struggled with my weight, such as when I got a job at McDonalds and when I went on vacation, but it always seemed to even back out eventually when things went back to normal. I really have no idea what I weighed during this time or how close it was to "the right weight", but when I look back at pictures I can see that I was at a pretty good weight most of the time.

My weight problem really started when I came to college. All that dorm food with all you can eat just packed the pounds right on. I probably gained the freshman 15 two or three times. I know at the end of my freshman year, 1999, I was around 190. The next year, I got an apartment off campus. With no car and campus about 2 miles away, my weight dropped back down, probably into the 170's. When I met my husband and he started driving me everywhere, the weight piled back on. When I got married in August of 2000, I was probably around 200. When I went on birth control pills the weight went up another 10 pounds, and so did my blood pressure. At this point I started swimming and doing tae-kwon-do. My blood pressure went down to normal levels, and I lost that last 10 pounds.

So I officially started my diet in the summer of 2001 at 208. I lost throughout the fall, stalled a bit, lost some more in the late winter, and ended up with a low weight of 178. Then I got pregnant, and had a miscarriage, and got depressed, and the weight loss pretty much stalled there. At the moment I'm back up around 190 and trying to get going again. Even though I'm still down 15-20 pounds from my top weight, I am still feeling really awful and I can't wait to get back down there again.

Even though my weight has done some yo-yoing through the past year and a half, I am confident that I have made some real lifestyle changes that will prevent me from ever going back to where I was before. I've switched to lower calorie versions of many foods. I'm always aware of how much I'm eating, even when I'm not eating as I should. I exercise much more regularly. This is really important, because I don't think the weight is going to be just falling off as fast as I would like. For one thing, we're trying to get pregnant, so my weight loss journey may be stalled for a pretty long period at some point (hopefully in the near future). For another thing, I find that I just can't keep eating so little every single day. It's just not sustainable for me. I can do it for a while, but not long enough to lose all this weight. Eventually I want some time off. So I try to give myself a free day once a week or so, and even though I can still lose weight while doing this, it does make it slower. I know I can do it though!