The Day of Reckoning

Shhhhh......  This was supposed to be posted on 4/20/15, but I forgot to push the "publish" button...  ugh.

205.5.  You've got to be kidding me.  Haven't I done this before?  When.... maybe 2006?  I began 2007, at a weight of 230, on my way to losing 80 pounds.  I started that by cutting carbs so that I could control my blood sugar.  I swore I'd never see the backside of 200 again.  Ugh.  Why did it seem so much easier then?

With my grandson, Strong, at 205.5 pounds.  Yikes.

My lowest weight was in 2012, when my son, Jackson, was dying of cancer at age 29.  I got down to 146.  For some, with a height of 5'2", you are thinking that I was still overweight.  That may well be, but I felt good in my body.  For all of the external stuff I was going through with Jackson, I at least felt good about my control of food.  SOMETHING I could control.  I was walking regularly and watching my food.

Since he died, 2 1/2 years ago, food has become a source of comfort.  I never realized that I used food that way.  Maybe because I had never felt such loss before.  Before he got sick, so many things mattered and seemed important.  Since, not much seems to matter and so I saw my weight creep up and up and up.  "It's understandable," my friends would say.  "You shouldn't be worrying about it now."  Jackson was so proud of my fitness level.  He, like me, had always struggled with weight.  It contributed to his disease.  Why have I been unable to control it?

I have definitely tried to address it for at least the past year.  And yet I am about 11 lbs higher this year than I was in April of 2014.  I must be doing something wrong.  I've tried everything under the sun.  Low carb.  Counting points, a la Weight Watchers.  Fasting two days per week.  Eating as much as I want, but for only 8 hours a day.  The trouble is, I want to be able to eat as much as I want.  Period.  Never going to lose a pound that way!

Yesterday, I was on Pinterest and someone pinned a blog called Runs for Cookies.  It is by a girl named Katie who lost 125 lbs through diet and exercise.  When reading her blog, she talked about feeling like she was starving by only eating 1200 calories per day and that she wasn't willing to give everything up.  She lost the weight by simple calorie counting.  She played around with eating as many calories as possible but still losing weight.  She built in calories for dessert every day.  She didn't eat yogurt, because she hates it.  She only ate the foods SHE wanted to eat.  It made perfect sense to me.  I found another blogpost that had a similar message. 

So I am going to try it.  I downloaded the MyFitness app for calorie counting and keeping track of my exercise. My goal is 159, which is 46.5 lbs away.  MyFitness says that I can eat 1630 calories a day and lose about 1.5 lbs per week.  We'll see.

I'll add more about my exercise soon.