[dkr102030]

I ran across this forum and the title stopped me dead in my tracks. I thought "Hey, who are these 3 fat chicks who started a forum?" Thus, my past couple of hours have been reading through many different parts of the site and finally decided to register just for grins. I am not really the forum type. I'm not really the "Here I Am, Help me!" type of person but, Here I am, help me, if you feel drawn to digitally converse with me on a hap-hazard basis.

I just turned 65 about a month ago. I still work full-time as an executive assistant, which means I do everything (duties as assigned). My work pace us slower as I age. I have adult children, and several adult grandchildren, and several teenage grandchildren. I even have one great grandchild. None of them live close to me. I have a second husband for the past 36 years. I am a born-again Evangelical Christian first and foremost. Everyone who knows me knows my motto is "Faith, Family, Friends" exactly in that order. I have been blessed in my life and will be the first to say I do not know why, especially when I have watched others suffer. My health was perfect up until last year when a brain tumor was found. But praise God, it was removed and benign! Fast forward nine months and now I have a foot problem going on. Oh dear, I am falling apart. I try to warn my younger friends that once 60 hits, LOOK OUT! There is plenty more I could put in this paragraph but I will stop here, for now.

As far as the weight part of me, there is too much! I started having weight issues when I hit puberty at age 14. I gained roughly 25 pounds from eating everything in sight. By age 16 I weighed 160 pounds. Of course none of the boys bothered me. I was alone while all of my girlfriends found the loves of their lives. I dropped 30 pounds in one summer before my Junior year of High School and the boys noticed. I married one at age 19 and divorced him at age 28. My entire life has been a series of weight gains and weight losses. My grandmother tried to tell me it was all because of my German heritage. Big bones. During the times of my life I was at my lowest weight I was generally living off of coffee and cigarettes. The cigarettes are gone except for the minimal cheat once in a while but the coffee is still a staple as is the sugar, the carbs, the meat, the food in general. My latest diet was with Nutrisystem for 3 months which resulted in a 10 pound $750 loss which was gained back within 2 months of going off the plan. My body is so fine tuned to weight loss that even today on a daily 1000 calorie plan I lose nothing. My fat cells hold on to every little bit of containment! They know we are in famine mode again!

I am at a point in my life where I want to just hang it all up and quit trying. No one is looking at a 65 year old white haired grandma. My husband doesn't care how I look. He loves me for the inner me not the outer me. (His words). My family and my friends say the same.

I am very tired of the weight battle and being at the 200 pound mark is the highest I have ever been. My closets are filled with 3 different sizes and the largest size is getting tight so I am at the point where I have to do something. Lose weight or buy bigger clothes.

I know I am not alone in this decades long battle. I know that if I would exercise on a frequent basis I could lose some weight. I know I am not a consistent person. I do things for a while and then I quit or move on to something else. I don't have a group of family or friends to support me in an exercise program. On weekdays, I slowly get out of bed, go to work, and come home exhausted. On weekends, I clean a part of the 2500 square foot home we own, or work in the yard, read a book, watch a movie, take a nap, go to church and get ready for my office job (sitting at a desk in front of a computer) on Monday. My activity level is sedate, which I why I weigh 200 pounds. I am honest about why I am overweight. Even one of my doctors last year, who is also overweight, told me that I would feel better if I lost 50 pounds which I totally agree with. She did not have any answers on how to do that.

So now that I have spilled my guts all over this 3 fat chicks forum in this introduction I wonder if there will be any kindred spirit who will respond to me with some helpful advice or at least an "I hear you!". If not, I at least got to put my thoughts on a page instead of bottled up inside my overactive thought pattern.

[Old Biddy]

Hellooo! I liked FrankB's advice to start small. So many of us of a certain age have gone through all the dieting and what-not and of course we know exactly why we are overweight. My highest was 192 and I'm 5'3 so I thought, "What the heck am I doing?!"

I have been on the Medifast plan, but also made the commitment that I'm not going to eat the foods that seem to trigger overeating, which for me are bread, potatoes, pasta and rice. I tried lowering portion sizes on these things for years but just couldn't do it, so I made up my mind and just stopped eating them. It was a shock to the system the first week, I can tell you. Ha. Now? I don't miss those things at all.

Having a relatively modest and not silly goal for a target weight helps. Viewing the weight loss as a life style change also helps. That way, as FrankB suggests, there isn't so much pressure to get to a certain point by a certain time. I've found that by changing some things the weight comes off. Slowwwwly....but it's coming off.

I wish you good luck! This forum isn't too active, but there are some terrific people on here with lots of experience and advice.

[Harve]

Hello, new here. Well, kinda. I was on here before and lost 100 lbs in one year.

I did that by strict calorie counting, no processed foods, lots of exercise, and for the most part healthy eating. When I reached my goal weight, same as my new goal is, I went back to "eating regular" for maintenance. I put the weight back on in slightly over a year!

This is some 8 years later and I have to do it again, this time for my health. As I started out this time I had no idea of how I was going to do it. I cannot exercise as before, my feet, knees and back will not allow that.

I have type 2 diabetes, obese 259 lbs as of three weeks ago, current weight unknown but considerably less, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, some arthritis and susceptible to gout.

I, like a few who posted on here thought that weight loss was simply a matter of taking in less calories than was needed for weight maintenance. I took a fresh look at diets, looking into Atkins. Reading up on it and learning how this thing of eating all the fat you want but severely restricting carbs worked, I have decided to do more or less keto/Atkins type diet. That took a lot of research and learning, but it seems well worth it. I started curtailing my eating a few weeks back as I continued learning what was what with this type of diet. I think I have the hang of it for the most part.

I am lucky in that I don't care that much for sugar nor sweets and already ate little of them in helping control type 2 diabetes. I have been losing desire for meats for some time, so I had to put them back in my diet. After researching I learned which vegetables to eat and which not. I am not that happy about giving up bread for the most part along with pasta. But it is going easy.

I went back to eating eggs and bacon. My breakfast each morning is 3 eggs fried in the bacon grease from my 3 crispy slices with jalapeno chilies.

I was surprised that breakfast alone knocked out hunger for most of the day.

I don't know how much I have lost but my shirts have a lot of room left over now.

My maintenance calorie amount is about 2500. I have been keeping my total intake down to about 1300, some days a little more, some less. Over a thousand calorie daily deficit and no hunger. The no hunger is the part I like best.

The result of this so far has been lowering my glucose way down from what I was. I was seldom under 140 and up to 250. It now dips to under 100 and except for shortly after a meal it has been down between 100-135. Blood pressure went down from 175/80 to 135/65.

This was a long post, but it lets you know a bit about me and has me started on 3FC again.

I will try to post a few times a week

Harve