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Senior Member
Thread Starter
Join Date: Jan 2007
Posts: 311
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How U doin, from NJ
Good morning everyone! How are you? Came across this forum doing a search and liked what I saw, so here I am.
My story:
I'm 37 and have battled weight since I was 7. At 10 I was 5'1 and 110 pounds and in gymnastics and had baby fat, so began my diet wars.
By age 13 I was about 180 pounds, swore I'd never go over 200, but that happened in the blink of an eye. By age 16 I was 240 and 270 by graduation. I didn't understand where the weight came from. I wasn't eating at McD's or having sugar sodas, or even getting seconds at dinner. At 13 I was active, riding my bike miles and miles every weekend, but along with everyone's focus on my weight (which was moderately overweight at the time) and with older men's focus on a womanly figure at such a young age, I continued to balloon.
My adult years included LA Weight Loss, calorie watching, over exercising, Atkins, consideration of weight loss surgery, and most recently Jenny Craig.
At my worst I weighed somewhere near 340 at 5'6 (the scale went bezerk as much as I did). When I got that high, I can tell you I definitely was not eating well. I ate all sorts of crap then. LA Weight Loss got me down to 268 and into good habits (lean protein, veggies, low sugar fruits, but I stopped losing and then lost my commitment. I managed to stay around 295 for a couple years, but then when I hit 314 (this summer) only 3 years after LAWL, I got scared and started Jenny Craig and got down to 295. And that's where I am today. However, I started to maintain on JC when I should have been consistently losing. And yes, I was holding to the diet to a T. So, now I'm tired of paying to lose when I don't and am looking for a better way.
While of course losing 19 lbs is great, that's not my goal. I'd love to be 140, something I haven't been since I was a preteen. More importantly, I'd love to end my war with my body.
I've struggled to find what works for me for nearly 2 decades. See, I'm not like those who can nix the junk food and then lose a ton. No. Because I'm generally not eating that junk food. My body holds onto my weight like a mother. I even find I regain while dieting and adhering to it 100%. And that creates a vicious cycle where I begin to want to trash it all and enjoy what I see the rest of the world enjoying.
But, I try to cut myself slack, give myself a treat, and then get back on the wagon.
So, here I am today, back to considering my options and what will work for me. I have completely nixed the idea of WLS as having spent 2 years monitoring my intake and exercise, I can tell you that the lap band won't work because they'd likely have me at my current intake and that's not working on its own (I eat 1700 calories and maintain). And I won't do the gastric bypass which would definitely work because of malabsorption and starvation, and I'm not willing to replumb my intestines.
Yes, I've had my thyroid tested--result is sluggish but not requiring medication. So, now it's a matter of trying to find the absolute right mix of calories food types and exercise and try to retrain my metabolism to work in the way it seems unwilling to.
For a moment I considered medifast, but I know that's me just reaching, wanting the weight just to come off, but I feel the price, a further compromised metabolism, will only cause me worse difficulties. As it is, I can't say I ate myself to the 300s because 300s were found on only 2000 calories day. I also can't blame inactivity because I've been a workout fiend for a decade.
I just think that dieting brought me to this journey. I honestly think if no one had focused on the baby fat at age 10, I never would have become this overweight. But as most folks come to know, when you restrict your calories, while you might lose weight, you train your body to work on less so that eventually you have to do less and less to just maintain. And so people can regain what they lost without really trying. And that's not what I want for myself.
So, here I am deciding to try Body for Life. I started running recently and got from 298 to 295. I'm hoping that the program's approach to food will retrain my metabolism and make it the effective machine it should be. Right now I'm just running 20 minutes every day, and walking another 40. I'm planning on adding 3 days of strength training once I replace my Bowflex with free weights and a bench (never got results from Bowflex). I will soon be stocking up on EAS protein per the BOL program online.
My hope is that I can get 10lbs off each month and by December 2007 be 195 lbs.
I'm eager to share this journey with all of you.
Starting 314/Current 295/Goal 140
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Hello & Welcome from one Jersey girl to another!!!
