I'm so glad to have found this site!
I've been fighting my weight most of my adult life. About four years ago, I started working seriouly on losing weight, and over the next two years, I lost about 50 pounds. That's slow, but I could live with it. And the weight has stayed off, thank goodness! But I still have a lot to lose, and I have gotten sloppy about it.
Then I met someone very much like me whose life has fallen apart in the last three months because of health problems directly related to her weight.
SO, i've re-committed myself to the journey, and I'm very glad to have you all for company
I'm at least as interested in being healthy as I am in losing weight, so I try to avoid things that are harmful for me EVEN if they are low calorie. I avoid white flour, refined sugar and partially-hydrogenated oils, and I eat organic, unprecessed food as much as possible. I grow a lot of my own food and cook most of what I eat from scratch.
And I'm just now getting back to exercising. I'm a walker. Before I quit, I was doing about five miles a day; yesterday 1.5 miles wore me out! But it's good to be moving again.
But because I'm trying to develop a "diet" and exercise plan that I can (and will) follow for the rest of my life, I lose weight slowly. Sometimes it feels as if all I ever do is worry about my weight, count calories or read low-cal recipes. I remind myself of the health problems waiting for me just around the corner if I don't lose some weight, but I've been hovering JUST over 200 pounds for so long (about two years now) that I'm beginning to believe it isn't possible for me to break that barrier.
I'd love to hear how each of you encourages yourself to keep plugging away when the going gets rough.