Hi, I'm Michelle. I'm about to turn 35, happily married for 12 years, and mom to two great kids, 8 and 4. I live in the Denver area. I'm currently unemployed but work in education. (I'm not a teacher, though, other than the online history class I teach.) I have struggled with my weight my whole life, although I didn't enter the range of morbidly obese until my early 20s. Through grade school and high school, I wasn't horribly overweight, but I was a little bigger than most of my peers. The lowest weight I got down to in my adulthood was 199 in early 1999. (Ha, I never realized how similar those numbers were before.) Unfortunately, in the intervening decade, I've yo-yo dieted myself up to my highest weight ever - just over 300 lbs.
I discovered this forum about a month ago and have mostly been lurking. I knew I wanted to get started with getting healthy again, but I wanted to wait through the holidays. Maybe that seems like a cop out, but I know me, and I know that's a recipe for disaster. Luckily for me, my bday and my hubby's are both in the next week and a half, so that's the point where we declare the holidays officially over. We won't face any major holiday/celebration temptations again until Oct, when our anniversary and my son's bday happen back-to-back. By then, I hope to have the strength to not give in to temptation.
In the meantime, I'm trying to get myself psychologically ready. (We've chosen Jan. 17th as our start date. Hubby is losing weight with me. He currently weighs a bit less than me, but he's got a lot to lose, too.) I've been down this road enough already - I know how tough it is. And I'm at my all-time highest weight ever now, so it's not going to be any easier. So I'm saying a farewell to some of my favorite foods and planning recipes, work outs, etc.
Right now, I do not have a goal weight. What I have is a goal
time. My goal is for all of 2011 - starting on Jan. 17 - to work as hard as I can to lose weight. To attempt not to splurge (my usual downfall)
at all. To stick to my exercise schedule EVERY week, no excuses. At the end of the year, I will then re-evaluate what my goals are for the following year. At that point, I may set a final goal weight, once I see how comfortable I am in my skin at whatever weight/size I have achieved. I also may think about re-welcoming, on a limited basis, some of the forbidden things into my life. I may not, but the point of my setting this one year goal is so that my brain doesn't get overwhelmed with "forever" and go into sabotage mode. All I have to think about is this one, short year.
My plan is to start out strict about food but ease myself into exercise. At my current weight, I can't walk up a flight of stairs without getting out of breath. I know that exercising an hour per day, 6 days per week, is just unrealistic. So I've set myself a graduated goal to get up to 30 min per day, 6 days per week, by April and go from there. I am going to be stricter with my food, though. I know from experience that a) I respond best to a low carb diet, and b) I lose weight quickly that way at the outset. I figure if I can quickly drop 20 or 25 lbs (and at just over 300 lbs, that's not unrealistic for me - it comes off fast at the beginning when you're this big), that will help not only to motivate me, but also to give me the boost I need to start exercising more intensely.
So anyway, that's me and my plan in a nutshell.
I look forward to getting to know all of you better!
Starting soon
