Brooke Birmingham is the picture of how hard work and dedication to losing weight can pay off.

Unfortunately, she ran into a situation where her weight loss picture wasn't welcome.

Brooke, a 28-year-old blogger from Quad Cities, Ill., has lost more than 170 pounds over the past four-and-half years, which is beyond incredible. She chronicled it all on her blog Brooke: Not On a Diet, and it caught the attention of Shape magazine. They wanted to feature her weight loss triumph in their Success Stories series. You know the ones. Just regular people losing weight in incredible ways, and Brooke's story definitely deserved to be shared.