I Don't Need To Diet

At the end of January this year I was 5'2" and weighed 235lbs.  This was the heaviest I had ever been.  Ever. And I looked like this:

The white & pink caption reads: "January 2010. At 235lbs/107kg. My highest weight ever."

These pictures horrified me so badly that I immediately decided that I HAD to do SOMETHING about my weight.   I signed up for Spark People, started reading The Spark, keeping a food journal and doing Walk Away The Pounds DVDs.   I lost six pounds by the end of February.

At the beginning of March, I got sick.  I wound up in hospital with a particularly powerful strain of food poisoning.  I dropped five pounds in a 48 hour period.    For a few weeks afterwards, I still wasn't feeling 100%.   So I used that as an excuse to not keep my food journal or exercise.    By the end of April I had gained back the weight I had lost.

At the start of May, I decided that I needed to get back on track and get serious about my weight loss.  I started exercising/food journaling and being an active member of the Spark People community - which helped to keep me accountable.  Toward the end of June, I had lost 13lbs.   And then I got the flu.  And I told myself that I could 'take a few days off' from exercising.  A few days became a week, which quickly multiplied into two.  Those two weeks became five and before I knew it, I was back to my bad old habits of eating junk food, not exercising and making excuses for both.    As of today, I weigh 217lbs.  I am proud that I haven't put any of the weight I lost back on, but I also recognize that I am in danger of heading down the Excuses Path because I have stopped doing the things that make my weight loss possible: exercising daily, tracking what I eat and being an active member of the Spark People community, which helps me stay accountable.

  I have  also come to the realization that I can no longer afford to live on this weight loss roller-coaster.  Bottom line, the thing I want the most for myself is to live a healthy, active life and to lose the excess weight that I have carried around with me so unnecessarily since I was 14.    I'll be 31 in November.  I've already lived half my life as a fat person, and I refuse to waste any more of my life living like this.  I was once a healthy girl at a healthy weight, living a healthy, active lifestyle.  That's why this blog is called 'Healthy Girl Redux' - because I've done it before, and I know I can get there again.