Twenty-three days ahead of her target, Linda Andras fit into the size 10 dress she wore on her wedding day nine years ago.

It was a goal she set five months earlier, while weighing 200 pounds and wearing size 16 clothing.

Tuesday morning, during a biweekly ritual with Niagara this Week, Andras took her wedding dress off the wall and took it into the office at her Curves fitness franchise on McLeod Road.

It was supposed to be a check to see how far up the zipper would go.

She was expecting it to get stuck a couple inches from the top. Instead, it went all the way up.

“I’m ecstatic, I cannot believe it,” an excited Andras said after exiting the change room.

“I feel like I’ve reclaimed my being.”

She had joked to employee Jo-Ann Caron to “pretend like this was my wedding day and it had to go up. I heard it go zip and said, ‘How much further?’ ”

Caron confirmed it went all the way up without force.

Andras, 42, set out on her weight loss journey at the end of May after two decades of battling the bulge, from an eating disorder in her 20s to, as she puts it, simply forgetting to take care of No. 1 in recent years.

She decided it was time to take control and set a goal of getting back down to her wedding day weight of 145 pounds and fitting back into her wedding dress by her ninth anniversary on Oct. 3.

And she did so very publicly, with biweekly updates in Niagara this Week. Weeks ago, she passed her target body fat percentage goal.

Andras weighed 162 pounds on Tuesday, still short of her target weight, but she’s not giving up on getting into the 140s.

While she is a size 10 again and fitting into clothes she wore in high school, the strength training she’s been doing for the past five months has helped her pack on muscle and feel fitter than she did back then.

“I feel leaner than I ever have in my life.”

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Linda’s Tale of the tape

presented in the following order: start; current; goal

Weight lbs: 200; 162; 145

Body fat %: 38.5; 31.5; 34

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LINDA’S FAST FACTS

Biggest challenge: Being busy and trying to have healthy food choices available.

Favourite food: Greek salad with chicken breast. “It’s so simple” and can be prepared quickly.

Latest discovery: That muscle is five times more dense than fat “helped make it feel like I’m more on track than the scale is telling me.”