I am not going to scold you about your social life, don’t worry, I’m just so thrilled to see you back here and to see you thinking about taking care of yourself instead of all the others in your life.

It’s funny to see your discussion about planning (and the comments by the wonderful RubyJean on this topic too). I’ve been realizing over the past several months that all the media yammers endlessly about “diet and exercise” for weight loss, but in fact I think that “planning and motivation” are AT LEAST as important, and maybe even more important.

I also think that you can find a less stressed way to plan. Planning for weight loss at its most basic is just thinking through your day and coming up with some workable solutions to make the not-worst choices. And even just one better choice per day can add up to the courage to make another on another day, and so on, until some of those conscious choices become new habits, and slowly you can build a healthy lifestyle that is natural and fits YOU instead of it being imposed on you from outside.

If you don’t know about how to eat healthily to lose weight, then I support a nutritionist (or any of a number of online diet programs or books). My situation is different — I know perfectly well how to lose weight, it’s just a question of getting myself to actually DO IT that’s hard. Maybe a dietitian would help you.

I’ve read several studies showing that people do better starting weight loss programs when they focus on either diet OR exercise, but not both at once. I think it’s considered to be too many changes too fast, and people end up rebelling. So I’m very much in favor of you only thinking about the diet, and even only small steps at that. When I started back losing weight last year I ONLY thought about the diet side for several months. Eventually I felt like adding in exercise and I did, but I think if I’d tried to do both I would have failed because it seemed like such a huge time commitment and I was tired and already the diet side was quite a lot to manage.

really, really glad to see you back my dear!