Hi everyone
I loved the name of this forum and was looking for somewhere to join in :-) I have been doing Weight Watchers for 9 weeks and have lost so far about 9 kilos, although I have to say most of that was the first 6 weeks, I havent lost anything in the last 3! Oh well..... I hope its ok to post weights and stuff in kilos. I originally come from New Zealand where we use metrics, and now I live in the Netherlands which also uses metrics, and I can only do kilos in my head, although as a child we used the english system, so it all got a bit messed up for me as I was growing up :-) Now I am just used to thinking in kilos....

Ok so I live in Holland, and before I moved here I was skinny :-( I think the climate change, getting old, different foods, having another child... cooking family food again... well those are all my 'excuses'! I had been big once before just after my first child but for various (stressful) reasons I lost all the weight simply by not eating as I was too stressed to eat at the time. Now I just eat when I get stressed instead! Blah! I was thin for years then I moved here. Now its time to get rid of the almost 30 kilos I whacked on. I still cant believe how I could do that! I guess I was in denial too long.... My goal is to be at least half way there by the time we take our next family holiday in NZ in July this year. But with the progress I have been making the last weeks I dunno. I think its a plateau, and when I think more I realised this is the weight I was for a long time before I had my son, so maybe it means I have to work a bit harder to get started losing again, my body is apparently more comfortable with this weight than my brain and my clothes are...

I have started a blog, also to share with my NZ sister in law who is also trying to lose weight at the moment. I dont know if anyone else is interested, but I am also posting some of my daily menus and recipes that I enjoy that also fit into my daily points allowance, so anyone else is welcome to check it out: weight4suzy.com (and no I'm not selling anything at all!). I will try and put it in my sig... I always enjoy reading other peoples blogs too, its often inspirational and sometimes helps a lot to find others sharing the same ups and downs.

I will be lurking often here and will post if I have anything to contribute :-) Its an amazing forum, and I look forward to getting to know everyone!

Suzy

Hey Suzy,

Great to meet you!

I've lived in the Netherlands for a while as well.

Good luck!!

- Hannah

Do you mean good luck 'because' I live in the Netherlands?! If you lived here too you might know its very hard to find anything 'low fat' in the supermarkets.... Weight Watchers brand food is non-existant too unfortunately, I would love to be able to buy a few of their ready meals to microwave occasionally when I dont feel like cooking everything from scratch...

However, it is getting a bit better, I can now buy low fat Philly cream cheese... and lean beef... *sigh* I read on this and other forums what people are eating and buying and I wish I could find those things here easily too, sometimes its quite a mission to a number of different places to find all my ingredients. Although when you look around, dutch people generally are not really overweight - although they say thats becoming more a problem here too now. Maybe its just all the bike riding they do! (even though apparently that never worked for me :-) )

I think it's because contrary to popular belief outside the Netherlands, people did indeed stop wearing wooden shoos. ;-)

But of course I wished you good luck on your journey, not because you live there... I thought it was pretty nice actually.

And by the way, 'low fat' is not always good... Many "diet foods" are advertized as "low fat", but are often high in sugar and/or starch, or generally just consist of a bunch of processed stuff.

It's always best to go for whole food sources. Fat isn't really bad in itself.

It's not as simple as the fat you eat is stored as fat.

Fat is actually an essential macronutrient that all of us need for health.

I'm not saying you're free to indulge in fatty foods, just that you don't have to fear it either.

Like I said, best is always to choose whole sources of food...

Anyway, "good luck" again!!