I begin the journey

I've tried every diet known to mankind. Im not sure I could even list them all here. I did the Atkins diet back in the 70's and every decade since then!

I've done the Cabbage Soup Diet, The Carbohydrate Addicts Diet, Fit For Life, Weight Watchers, Tops, Weigh Down, Scarsdale, The Shangri-la Diet, The T factor Diet, The Rotation Diet, NutriSystem, Eat More Weigh Less, Eat right 4 your Type, Rosemary Greens Diet, The Cambridge Diet, The Prism Diet, The Pritikin Diet, Rice Diet, Stop the Insanity, Sugar Busters, The Mediterranean Diet, The Ornish Diet, Be Lean, The Zone, Fit or Fat, The Slim Fast Diet, Green Tea, Hoodia, Solo Trim, Richard Simmons Deal A meal, The Beverly Hills Diet, The Lo Glycemic Diet, Bob Greene, South Beach, and I’m sure there's more that Im missing.

In my teen years I fasted for 10 days, ate for three, and fasted for 10 more days. The thinnest I have ever been as an adult is 119 pounds. To reach that weight I ate 4 icecream sandwiches and 4 cups of coffee a day. Yeah, dumb, I know. I’m a diet guru! There is very little I don’t know about how to diet and how the body works. If a doctor knows it, than I know it. No, really, that’s pretty much true. I get a kick out of people telling me that I need to drink more water. Do they think that's a new thought to me? Or they tell me that I'm eating too many simple carbs? Uh, yeah, I know that. I haven’t stumbled on a new, amazing, enlightening diet fact in years.

You see, in spite of all the money made in the diet industry, no one can improve on the real way to lose weight. The only way to lose weight and to keep it off is to count calories and exercise. All of the above diets will not work if you don’t watch the calories. Actually the one I lost the most weight on was The T-factor Diet. I lost 50 pounds on that the year I got out of college. I had gained from cafeteria food. I'm not one of those people that was overweight as a kid nor am I one of those that was slim as bean pole as a kid.

I've always just been a healthy weight pretty much until I had Tink 11 years ago. Even then I managed to lose over half of the hundred pounds I had gained going through invitro and the subsequent pregnancy. I gained those hundred pounds in 13 months!! It was horrifying! I lost about 60 pounds that first year after her birth. Then the weight quit coming off.

With that 40 pounds still sitting on me it was time to thaw the embryos and get about the business of having Peter. To help ensure a successful pregnancy I was given a shot of 2cc's of progesterone every day for 80 days. Do you see what’s coming? Progesterone is the fat hormone. I delivered Peter at the exact same weight I was when I delivered Tink. This time it was going to be much harder getting the weight off. I was now in my 40's and I had a C-section that left me incredibly exhausted and in incredible pain. Having a baby in my 40's was an entirely different story than my first one that was born when I was 22! Oh my, that's fodder for another post altogether!

Well once again I managed to lose about 60 pounds of that weight before Peter was a year old. Then something happened. Don’t hold your breath cause I don’t know what happened. But I started to gain weight. This past January 2008, I weighed myself. I weighed only 4 pounds less than my full term pregnancy with Peter! Peter was 11 pounds and 2 ft long at birth! And here I was not pregnant, and weighing almost the same!

I did some soul searching. I am turning 48 this year and I have a 7 year old and an 11 year old. How am I going to meet their needs if I remain overweight? How much am I shortening my life? I did some research. With the added weight I had a 62% chance of getting cancer. Let’s see, I had a 5% chance of getting pregnant with a frozen embryo and I did. Yikes, that 62% is high! My knees have started to hurt. I have three herniated discs in my lower back that cause me continual pain. If I lost the weight it would be easier on those discs.

I have IBS. Yep, IBS, is linked to being overweight. I’m not going to try the new diet pill Ali. I have my own built in Ali. It's IBS. It does the same thing. If I eat too much fat I get diarrhea. I don’t need a pill to help that along. So I looked at the whole picture. Then I went to the doctor. I had complete blood work done. My blood work came back perfect. My blood pressure is consistently 170/80. My cholesterol is in the 180's and has never topped 200.

The doctor hitched his chair closer to me and prepared to get serious. Here is what he said that changed my life. He said, "Mrs. Darling, I rarely see numbers like this on an obese person. You either have good genes or you are somehow staying active despite a 40% BMI. According to the charts you are morbidly obese. According to the blood work you are healthy as a horse. I see in your chart that you wrote that you have been overweight for ten years."

Now he leaned in closer and this is what he said, "Mrs. Darling, if you stay overweight another ten years these numbers are going to look drastically different. Not only will you be almost 60 years old but all the problems of obesity will be yours. You have to do something now! You're going to have to be very proactive when it comes to your health or old age will not be pretty."

I came home and thought and thought about that. The time for all the silly diets was over. I was no longer a young woman. My body had gone through incredible abuse with all the invitro and now I was abusing it further. I prayed and read and prayed some more. This was no longer a beauty issue. It was my life I was fighting for. It was my future!

On January 7, approximately 8 weeks ago, I began to take charge. I count every calorie that goes in my mouth. I've started to drink water. I hate water. I'm up to about 4 cups a day. That's a huge improvement over 4 cups a month! The result is that I have now lost 19 pounds! Yes, I've lost that in 8 weeks but the first weight always comes off easy. My loss has slowed down to about 2 pounds a week the last three weeks. But I will persevere. My weight is lower now than its been in four years!

In January I had 97 pounds to lose. As of the first of March I have 78 pounds to lose. I wont be filling this weblog up with all my diet woes or triumphs. Instead I will do a diet post every Tuesday. I will post my loss and update you all on how I’m doing. Because I don’t like water I am also going to post how many ounces of water I managed to consume that week. Hopefully the amount will continue to climb until it gets where it needs to be. I will also be accountable to you all for the amount of exercise I do in a week’s time. I’m only pledging ten minutes a day right now. I know that’s not much but it's a pledge I can keep. Big grandiose schemes have got me nowhere in the past. So there you have it. I need you all to help keep me accountable! If any of you want to join me you can. You can check in with your losses every Tuesday in the comments. We can do this!