I am on the opposite end of the stick, here. I have lost 40 pounds in the past year. Last year, after I decided to lose the weight (again, btw ), I ended up being sick and endured a very harsh and stressful medical diagnosis. During that period of time, I was not focusing on losing weight, just on getting through that period of time and being healthy and still on this Earth Once things got easier, I started going back to meetings (I do weight watchers), tracking all my food, and exercising. I would like to reach my goal by the end of this year.

Good for you, Lori! Most people wouldn't have been able to lose any weight, let alone 40 pounds, with such a difficult year. Me personally - I would have had a huge pity party for myself and probably gained 40 pounds. So color me impressed!

I bet you will reach your goal this year.

Thanks Meg! It was very hard, and there were times when I was still trying to lose weight and was COMPLETELY stressed out. My mom and my husband finally encouraged me to forget tracking for a while if it was stressing me out more and just to make sure I was still eating healthy food (and not junk!). The best thing was that I didn't gain more than 5 pounds back when that happened, and I had taken off about 3 months from going to meetings. It really did make a difference with the stress and when I went back I easily lost those 5 pounds in a couple of weeks.

In fact, if anyone else is having an extremely stressful time in their life, I would recommend switching to maintenance of their current weight until that time passes and then go back to losing.

Feb 2006 I was at my highest weight of 230 and as of sep 2006 I had lost 35lbs but I got complacent and picked up about 5 lbs over 6 months, once I realized that I was going down that same road I have sort of got back on track and over the last month I have lost about 3lbs which puts me at my current weight of 198.

January 06 I weighed in at 196. By June 06, I weighed in at 163. I lost 33 pounds in 6 months. Then i took almost a year or so off and gained back 7 pounds. Now i am back at it again, and have only lost 4 pounds. You could say that losing 33 pounds, i dropped 2 pants size because my 16's were getting too tight and i refused to go buy a new wardrobe (sp??). so, i started eating less and moving more. Hopefully, i'll be able to do that again and drop the other 33 pounds i want to. It does seem to be a little harder this time, but on the plus side, the measureing tape IS going down!! :-)

I once lost 30 pounds in two months .... guess what happened to 25 of them?? I've learned a lot since then.