Hi all,
I've been hanging around and posting for the last couple of days, and I thought I should introduce myself properly.
I'm 31 and 5'9, and in 2005 I lost a bunch of weight (from about 185 to 142) on a low-cal (1200-1300) diet with an hour of intense cardio 5x a week, plus a little work with weights. I lost it all in about 3 months and I kept the weight off for about a year and a half. I moved cross-country and stopped working out, and for a while I was maintaining like a champ. The trouble came when I noticed (or rather, others noticed) that I had started to lose more weight (as if by magic, because I wasn't going to the gym and I wasn't paying alot of attention to what I was eating. Aha! I thought. I'm "cured". Ha.) Anyway, I was happy around 142/143lb and did not want to lose any more weight--I was afraid that if I let my weight get too low, I would boomerang back to a much higher weight. (Irony alert!) So, in some kind of fog, I started to EAT MORE BAD FOOD. I honestly don't know what I was thinking. Anyway, before I knew it, I had to pull out an older and bigger bra, all my pants were starting to look and feel too small, and my tummy was becoming visible through my t-shirts. I finally soldiered up, got on the scale and found that I was back up to 155. I'm still in the same clothes, but they don't look as good aas they used to. In fact, they all look a bit tight
Of course, I am very disappointed with myself (-insert counter-productive spiral of self-loathing here-) but I finally decided to take positive action and lose those 10-12 pounds. I've joined a new gym (I didn't like the old, free gym--it's a college gym, and as a faculty person, I don't enjoy running into students while sweating and puffing) and I'm back to doing an hour of cardio, plus weights, 5x a week. I've been hedging on the calorie-counting, even though I know that if I reduced my calories to 1300 or 1400 I would lose the weight in just a few weeks, and I'm trying to just intuit a low-cal diet for myself. (Famous last words?) I might try to do a 1600 calorie a day thing, as long as I don't have to count obsessively. When I was aiming for 1200 calories a day, I was OBSESSED with food in a way that I'm not usually obsessed with food. I mean, obviously I like to eat, but figuring out how to not be hungry on 1200 calories a day meant, for me at least, constant scheming about getting enough food mass into my system, and constant planning of all my meals and snacks.
So that's me (or at least, my body). I'm glad to have found these forums! When I feel like slacking off from going to the gym, I just come here and read other people's stories and am inspired to put on my sneakers and hit the elliptical.
Cheers!
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