Well, here I am again. I blew it all (albeit slowly), and now that I'm getting things back under control again, it's time to get the weight under control once and for all.
I did a little digging on the forums and even found my original thread back when I started out the first time around:
http://www.3fatchicks.com/forum/showthread.php?t=30134
I stopped ("fell off the wagon" doesn't quite apply, but it will do) around summer of 2004. I had gone from around 340 lbs in August of 2003 to about 265 lbs by then. Slowly the good habits died away, life got hectic, and it crept back up on me again. It wasn't some sudden shock either, I knew it was happening.
But it was a rough time as well. Stress is basically what got me in the end. My company was bought out and my position was on the clock, though nobody really knew when the time would be up. At what may very well have been my final weeks, the company who wrote the software I maintained at my company offered me a job. So I packed up and moved cross-country, dragging my jobless little brother with me, himself hoping to find a better job market.
Here I am. Thirteen hundred miles from home for the last year living in a part of California way out of my league (both in society and finances), but getting settled in.
I've always fought my weight, but cholesterol and blood pressure were never my bane. In fact I usually was on the low end of normal for my blood pressure. But sure enough, the genetic cards for both are stacked against me, and they finally caught up. I ended up at the doctors for a mild case of food poisoning (always fun!) and had my first real medical checkup in years.
Up to 320 lbs, blood pressure 150/101, cholesterol at 212. Of course my excuse I made to myself on my blood pressure was I had just jogged around the building finding where my brother parked, but it's a sorry excuse. At least my choloesterol was nowhere near as bad as I thought it would have been.
Enough is enough. This weekend I bought new tupperware and a salad spinner to start taking salads for lunch to work, and a good pair of walking shoes. This evening I hit the exercise room at my complex for the first time and left an exercise bike after 1.5 miles with my legs wobbling so badly I nearly fell in the pool on my way back to my apartment (the poor gal in there on a treadmill probably thought I was drunk!). Tomorrow I'm not taking my bus transfer home, I'm going to walk the last couple miles. When I get home, I'm digging through my storage boxes that I still never unpacked from my cross-country move and I'm finding my Atkins books again.
The phrase "never again" comes to mind, but absolutes aren't always a good thing. Perhaps "try harder" would be a better credo this time.
I'm back!
You sound ready to dedicate yourself to getting back in control. Good luck with everything!
