You see some of these reality shows (which I absolutely love btw) about weight loss and everyone has a sob story “my dog died and then … my cat ran into the street and died, then I ate myself into oblivion because I was so depressed” Well not me, I got fat because I love food, I love to cook and exercise hurts. There isn’t any tear jerking moments in my life that would cause me to reflect on why I gained weight. I like so many other moms, had babies, lost weight right away and a year later found themselves heavier than they were when they gave birth. 4 kids later I was topping the scale at 260+ pounds. I honestly have no clue how much I weighed when I started my journey because I avoided the scale like the plague. I avoided all cameras and only looked into mirrors at a certain angle that made me look thinner. I was in denial about what I really looked like and I was just not motivated to change. I started a diet every Monday and by Tuesday I would be eating crap again. What changed? I started feeling and looking really old and I saw my fat butt on a video husband took of me on Easter day (who was warned under penalty of never having sex again to avoid me like the plague on video) We were playing Easter games and I was walking with a hard boiled egg between my knees and looking like a bloated version of my former self. I saw myself from behind on that video… and almost threw up in my mouth at the sight, no more denial for me!! The fact that I was morbidly obese was staring me in the face.
But how? I had tried every diet in the book and some worked for a while and then I would drift off back into my old habits and forget what my motivation was. I needed something that would keep me accountable every day, where I could track my progress and see what I was eating and what I was doing for exercise were working towards a goal I was always a very analytical person and felt that if I broke it down to just numbers that I could easily handle it. I found several websites, some were better than others but the first thing I did was make a spread sheet on excel, I did the calculations and figured out how much I had to eat, exercise and drink to lose 3 pounds per week. I programmed the sheet to keep track of my “calorie deficit” or how much I had to be in the negative for calories to lose that much weight. I also programmed it to take into consideration how much I was exercising. I ended up with a calorie deficit of about 1500 per day (more to come on that)
At first I just ate what I was normally eating and just made small adjustments to my diet such as portion size and started exercising daily. I started reading every book I could get my hands on, reading articles online, subscribing to newsletters, watching you tube and saturating myself with information about diet, health, exercise, whatever I could find. It soon became not only about losing weight but also gaining my health and vitality back, balancing my work and home life and balancing my hormones so I would be interested in having sex with my wonderful husband again (yeah he wasn’t so keen on the diet until I started getting as horney as a teenager, then he was all over it) The very first step I took towards health was cutting out the crap. The junk food, any white, refined, sugar laden, non food item was nixed. Then I began sticking my toes into the world of raw food fairly recently and feel so much more vitality and energy when I add them to my diet.
My diet and lifestyle soon changed radically to the point where my kids now say I've become a health nut… me a health nut? How wonderful!!!
If you want to start tracking your progress my favorite calorie tracking website is
Calorie Count at about.com
