In The Beginning

What am I?

I could start with the easy stuff. I'm a woman, 42 years old, a mother of a toddler, a happily married wife, a professional engineer, a non-native Texan, a jill-of-all-trades.

Or I could try something a bit more personal. I love reading and playing video games, I'm hooked on reality TV, I love chocolate and all things bready and sweet. I hate exercising. Put all that together, and you get a middle-aged mom who's chronically overweight and probably flirting with diabetes, if not cardiovascular disease or metabolic syndrome. Okay, I'll say it. As of this morning, I weighed 219 pounds, and I hate it.

I pretend it's not that bad, because hey, at one point, I weighed 265 pounds. But a couple years ago, I got down to 165, and now I'm back up. why? Probably because I didn't lose weight a very sustainable way. I did the Medifast plan, and it worked. It worked great. But I was always hungry, and toward the end, my hair started falling out. Eeek! So I tried to eat sensibly, limit my calories to 1200 a day and do some moderate exercise, including weight lifting, which is the only exercise I like.

But after a few months, the weight was up to 185, then 190. Then I got pregnant and everything went out the window. I tried so hard to eat carefully during the pregnancy, and did okay til the very end. The first year was so stressful, and I turned back to food to cope. I never did lose the baby weight and I added another 5 pounds on top of that.

I finally said enough is enough. I found Marks Daily Apple, and he made a lot of sense. I've always thought that we evolved a certain way for a reason, and the human body is a smart thing, independent of our brains. What Mark was saying passed my BS test, plus I've always been most comfortable eating on a low-carb diet. I've just never had the motivation to stick to it for more than a few months, especially when Christmas and the holiday baking season came around.

Now I've got a better reason for sticking to it. I don't want my little boy to grow up having a fat mommy, or having him watch me struggle with weight or get food issues from me. I have to fix this and soon!

Anyway, this is my personal place to detail my ups and downs, the struggles and successes, links to interesting articles, recipes and anything else primal that strikes my fancy. I've given myself a goal of 50 pounds in one year. So far, I've lost 7, so this is another place to be honest with myself.

I'm doing this blog for me, but if anyone else finds it, I hope they find something useful. Feel free to leave comments, and best of luck to anyone reading this. Especially me!