Before

[Note: If you haven't yet read "My Story: How Raw Foods and Live Green Smoothies Changed My Life", I invite you to do so before checking these pictures out, to put everything in context. Thanks!]

First, let me show you a photo from before the whole Gee I Sure Got Fat debacle, to put things into perspective. Bear with me… I’ve always tended to be rather camera-shy and don’t have many personal photos to choose from. But I’ve got enough to tell a decent story here.

This photo was taken in February of 1998, about a year and a half before my trim-down in late 1999. I was wearing a size 8 Ann Taylor suit in the photo. The shot was taken as part of my being invited to participate in one of Oprah’s “Book Club” shows, when Toni Morrison’s book “Paradise” was feature.

I don’t have any pictures from when I trimmed down to a very athletic 4-6 in October 1999, so now we’re gonna go straight to Memorial Day 2004, just a few weeks before I turned 40.

In the following photos, I am actually over-joyed because I’d recently lost a bit of weight and was able to squeeze myself into those size 16 Ann Taylor pants! I was exactly 210 pounds at the time…  still 15 pounds short of my maximum weight, which I locked into by the end of 2004. Sorry for the blur — they’re actually freeze-frames from a home video.

That rear-end shot is just precious. And to think that tuckus only got bigger…

I passed these photos around at work a couple years ago, just for fun, and one very funny woman-lovin’ Jersey-Italian colleague of mine burst out with “Man! That’s a lotta cushion for the pushin’!

That’s me in the middle, here…

And here’s that rear-end shot… Classic!

Here I am that July… The weight is beginning to creep up.

And now we get to the end of 2004, New Year’s Eve to be exact. I was fully 225 at that point, and stayed at that weight until I started “going raw” 4 months later in April of 2005. I look at this photo and still go, “Wow. That was me???”

Continue onto “Photos: During Raw Transformation” to see a few pictures from during my raw foods transformation.

Or head straight over to “Photos: After Going Raw: The Transformation” to see, well… the happy outcome!