A lot of sad things happened as I went from an average size 10 young woman to a morbidly obese “Oh no, nothing in this store fits me at all,” woman. Clothes became a tremendous problem, embarrassing moments happened by the boatload, and things I never gave a second thought to became a problem.

One such problem was my wedding rings. They were a size 6.5 and like everything else on my body, my fingers got bigger as my weight increased. At first the rings were just a tad tight. You’ve seen people with rings like this. It looks like the rings are sitting between two pillows. That’s how mine got. Then one day, as I was looking at my hand, I got concerned that I couldn’t get the rings off anymore.

So I pulled, and tugged to no avail. I remembered that cold shrinks things so I stuck my hand in ice water and then slathered lotion all over my finger. Imagine my relief when I was able to extract my finger from the too tight ring. My knuckle was bright red and painful for the next hour. I remember looking at those rings with extreme sadness. “I’ll never be able to wear them again,” I thought.

Fortunately, at some point I had been given a deceased relative’s wedding band. Oh, did I mention that the deceased relative was a MAN? Yes, I had a vintage gold band that was enormous – or at least looked enormous when compared to my original wedding band. I was actually glad that I had that back-up band to wear and it fit my fat finger perfectly.

So for about 8 years I wore that band, forgoing the wearing of my original wedding ring set. Why didn’t I just have my set re-sized? Well, two reasons. First, the size difference was so great it would have been difficult and expensive, and secondly, I held onto the original sized rings because I had a slight hope that I might actually be able to wear them again.

As I lost weight a lot of physical changes took place throughout my body. And one of them was that my fingers shrunk back down to size. You can probably imagine my happiness when the big, huge, thick wedding band I had been wearing became too big and finally started falling off my finger. I was thrilled to finally be able to wear my wedding set. And believe me, I had tried it on many, many times during my weight loss year!

Rings are a little thing to be sure – but I’ve held onto that gigantic wedding band as a reminder of how far I came, and where I never want to return. Do you have any jewelry related non-scale victories? Or is there a particular item you can’t wait to wear?