For as long as I can remember, I have been big.  Always the tall girl and, in my mind, always overweight.  I recently went through a box of memorabilia and was looking back on pictures from middle school and high school and thinking back to how I felt heavy then.  Believe me, I wasn’t skinny, but I also wasn’t as big as I thought I was.  Funny how your mind plays that trick an it becomes a self fulfilling thing.
   So after being tired of being fat, Dee and I found the Dukan Diet (basically lean protein and veggies) and lost a bunch of weight really fairly easily and quickly.  Did you know you can lose weight without working out!?  You totally can.  I know I’ve written about this before and if you really want to read more you can go back to when I was gung ho on that “lifestyle change” and go from there.  It did work, but after we started to add in carbs and fruit the weight started creeping back on.
   I can’t tell you how extremely frustrating it is to be down 65 pounds and then watch as it starts to come back.  I jumped in to Weight Watchers and the “No S” diet (I really wanted that one to work!) and back to no carbs and so on and so on.  Nothing seemed to work anymore.  Even back on Dukan for awhile and that didn’t work anymore either.  So, while it was great to lose all that, it messed up my body and it is basically trying to get back to the weight it was before.  That sucks!  It’s disappointing, it seems like there is no way to win.  It is constantly on my mind and if I hadn’t seen someone for awhile, they always seem to look at me funny, as if to say “whoa, what happened!?” and that feels crappy.  I don’t know if that’s what they are really thinking but that’s where my mind goes.  I even had one person come up and ask if I was going to go back on that diet that worked so well – really!?!
   I was about to jump on the no gluten/dairy/soy/sugar bandwagon again, I actually did it for 3 awful days, and then talked with a friend who has counseled a lot of women who have gone through the same thing.  All with the same, frustrating results.  We have talked about this before, many times, and I do respect her advice – just in the past I had something that was working so well so I didn’t stop and listen when she told me it wouldn’t last.  How could it not!?  We are all looking for that miracle weight loss and I had found it, but I realize now that it’s not just about will power and eating healthy.  There is truly one proven, scientific way to lose weight and it’s slow.
   So, today I start fresh.  Headed on a long, slow journey that I will stick with and will pay off.  I will change my thinking from “all carbs are bad” to a basic “you get this many calories each day” approach.    I started with www.calculator.net where you put in height, weight, age, gender and activity level and it calculates how many calories you get each day if you want to lose a pound/week (and other options).  I also found a great app (Nutracheck) that will keep track of my foods, basically an online food journal and keep me accountable to myself.  From just starting it this morning, I realize that a lot of my calories came from my morning latte.  Even without the sugar it was 90 calories!
   Here’s to the tortoise – slow and steady!