Hello Guys!..
My name is Bill I'm new here..I'm looking for a perfect weight loss program.. Is their anyone who could help me out here...?

Funny, but all those "rock bottom" events over 20 years never gave me any lasting motivation/committment. This time something just clicked and I was able to do everything that I needed to. Coming up on 50th birthday did give me focus, but I wasn't trying to hit a goal weight by that date, just wanted to be living the best life I could by that birthday and then kept going.

Pain and fear. They have motivated me when nothing else "sticks" longer than 4-6 months.

I started a year ago barely able to walk from Achilles tendinitis pain. I knew I was insulin-resistant and had PCOS, so the diagnosis of pre-Diabetes wasn't as much of a surprise as it could have been... but it was still a shock. Within six months I'd cut out most sugars and starches from my diet, and began walking ever-so-slowly 3-5 times a week, pain or no. Ibuprofen was my friend.

Now I'm down almost 60 pounds, and can actually walk up a flight of stairs. It's only one flight so far, but it's more than I could do a year ago without tremendous effort.

Fear and pain.

Don't underestimate their strength.

When my size 18 jeans were tight I told myself I refused to buy a size 20! I was 235 lbs at the time and was waking up with chest pain and everything. I was like what on earth am I doing to myself? I decided then to live for myself and not just for others and ever since then have never seen the number 235!

Hi, Bill, and welcome! :)

There's no such thing as a "perfect weight loss program," only the one that suits you best. For some people, that's calorie-counting. Others prefer to go low-carb. A few find success with low-fat. Lots like highly structured plans such as Jenny Craig or Medifast, while others prefer some structure in a do-it-yourself format like South Beach or Dukan.

The important thing is that the "perfect" plan for you is one you can live with happily. No diet works if you're so miserable on it that you dream every day of when you'll get to quit it. It just isn't sustainable.

Try posting this as a new thread in this folder (Weight Loss Support) and I'll bet you get a lot of good suggestions to help you pick a plan that works for you. You might also try some of the specific diet plan folders; sometimes reading through them will spark an "Aha!" moment (that's what happened to me reading about calorie counting).

Best of luck, and we look forward to seeing you around. :)

Once my son started sleeping, I started to be more active. (he was 4). But, I felt so horrible and then I started having my own sleeping issues. It seemed like a bad joke - my kid finally starts sleeping and then "I" can't sleep? Then the headaches I had always had started getting worse, and all the activity I had started, stopped. Who can exercise with a pounding headache.

I had that pounding headache FOR THREE STRAIGHT MONTHS. 6 weeks of it was waiting for an appointment with a doctor (moved - new patient). When I went in, days before my 41st birthday, I discovered I had terribly high blood pressure - 230/130. Then, after blood work, I found out I had a very low thyroid AND my blood sugars were out of whack AND my cholesterol was too high (228).

I was in shock. I have a 5 year old. My father had died of a heart attack at the age of 42 (and he was thin). I realized I was going to DIE if I didn't fix things OR I was going to be dependent on drugs to 'patch me up' and I know how that route goes and I didn't want to do that if I could fix it naturally.

Well, 3 days after taking BP meds, the headaches went away AND I started to sleep. WIth that, I had the energy to start healing my body. I started walking and eating right and 4 months later my BP meds are cut in half, my blood sugars are perfect, my thyroid is almost perfect and my cholesterol is fine (190).

I went from feeling like I just wanted to die to feeling full of life. I will NEVER go back to my old ways again. My life depends on this change and my children deserve a mother for a LONG time.

Nothing. That's right, NOTHING made me realize it's "finally time to lose weight." I've been a yo-yo dieter nearly all my life. I've successfully lost 25, 30, 40 pounds about 6 or 7 times in my adult life. And more successfully gained it all back plus some extra. :shrug: It's daunting!!!

But what I DID finally come to realize is that I cannot diet off weight & then go back to bad eating habits. This time, the weight loss is extremely slow. My body is fighting me at every pound. But I continue to fight back. And I won't quit until I have won this battle of the bulge. I'm determined to feel good, be healthy, and look my best. Some days are harder than others. I still have moments when I say WTF and dive head-first into a bag of Cheetos. Or a Hershey Bar w/almonds. Or a 2nd helping of whatever we had for dinner. The point is, I eat too much. Period. While I do eat healthy foods 80% of the time, the 2nd helpings, huge portions, etc - all these things contribute to weight gain.

So for me - no. There was no magic moment. Just a growing awareness of my fat belly, the uncomfortable clothing issue every.single.day. and the feeling that my thighs rubbing together may very well start a brush fire, which I'm sure would be incredibly painful should it ever happen. Yup. Being fat is no fun. And it pi$$es me off.

The pain in my feet, knees and hands. All winter I limped around, suffered with the pain at night from arthritis. I turned 48 and realized I was walking like my grandmother used to. My ankles and feet started to swell. Time to start doing something to help my cause.

Exercising for me is painful, slowly I am walking further and further but it depends on how I feel that day. Today has been a good day, I might be able to walk for half an hour this evening. I hope as my weight goes down I can do more.

This is pretty much how it was with me, too. I was trying on new clothes in October '08, a few months after my second daughter was born, and even though they fit (2-3x), nothing looked *good*. I have lived my life at and always been able to camouflage the little (or lot!) of excess poundage with clothing, and looked attractive, but I had finally reached the size where nothing looked attractive, nothing was hiding it, I was tired and heavy and felt awful. I couldn't be the mom I wanted to be at that weight, or the wife I needed to be for my husband. Losing the weight helped me regain my energy and vitality, as well as a healthy dose of sexy for my hubby.

I'm not all the way there yet, I've stumbled many times and taken many breaks to just tread water, but it's still 60 pounds gone for good, and a massive improvement over how I was.

I worked at losing weight from 10/08 on, but I found the plan that fit the best in 05/09 and have been on it, through trips and pregnancy and any number of holidays, since then. It's the way I am, now :)

I think this kind of "weight loss epiphany" is a myth. Not that it can't happen (maybe even frquently), but in the general assumption that it must happen.


I don't mind "What's different this time?" (because obviously something is different, because my weight loss is bigger and longer lasting than any other I've had int the past), but I'm actually a bit tired of and annoyed with friends and family asking variations of this question. "What made you finally decide to lose weight?" or "When or How did you finally get serious about weight loss (implying that I was choosing not to lose weight or wasn't serious about weight loss in the past)?

I first "realized it was time to lose weight," when I was 5 years old and my parents put me on my first diet. In the 40 years since, I've spent more time on diets than off (I just can gain weight faster than I can lose it).

I've been on the traditional diet roller coaster for most of my life. Reduce calories to the point that I'm starving all day - lose weight, feel good about the weight loss, but miserable about the 24/7 hunger - weight loss slows - feel resentful and miserable about feeling tired, hungry and miserable and not getting enough weight loss to feel it's worth it - feel that slow weight loss is a failure = to weight gain - decide if that's so and I'm going to be fat forever I might as well get to eat what I want - eat what I want - feel guilty - eat even more - regain it all and usually a little extra - feel bad - vow to change - diet in the same way I did before (repeat the cycle).

What changed? A few things, but the biggest was finding a way to stop "rabid hunger." For as long as I can remember, I've been fighting hunger 24/7. Even when my stomach was full to bursting, my brain was still telling me that I was hungry - very hungry. During PMS/TOM the hunger was so out-of-control that I could think of nothing else.

I've made a lot of changes, but three stand out (and they were accidental discoveries).

The first were discovered around the same time - refusing to crash diet, and going on birth control (which I'd resisted for many years because of the association with weight gain).

The combination almost magically stopped my rapid weight gain. My hunger was diminished greatly and the weight loss just stopped. But it wasn't enough to get the weight off, just enough to stop the weight gain (sure wish I'd discovered this in my mid-teens instead of my late 20's to early 30's.


The third monumentla change was discovering low-carb. When my doctor recommended it, I thought he was nuts. My experience with low-carb dieting had convinced me that low-carb was unhealthy and potentially dangerous. However I gave moderately low-carb eating a chance and found a middle-ground that allowed me to lose weight without experiencing the horrible side effects I remembered in the past. (I had essentially done low-carb dieting as a crash diet. I wasn't eating enough calories and cutting carbs too low, to the point that my blood sugar was crashing. Eating more frequently and a bit higher in carb was the solution. No more headaches, light headedness, nausea, and fainting).


There was eventually a mental change, but it started with finding (purely by accident) a way to lose weight that wasn't so miserable that going off the diet seemed more sensible than staying on it.

The mental change wasn't about deciding to lose weight, it was a decision to ignore what "everyone said and did" about weight loss and finding what works for me even if it was the total opposite of what "common sense" dictated.

That was my error for more than 30 years - using "common sense" that was mostly wrong. Assuming that my problem was willpower (because that's what everyone said was the cause of virtually all fatness) and not physiology.

I certainly had one of these epiphany moments. In June of last year I participated in a work related blood drive. I've donated blood many times in the past and never had any problems. This time, however, I was at one of the heaviest weights I've been. I almost passed out while donating and felt horrid for hours afterwards. This put the idea in my head that maybe it my weight was gettin gout of hand. The real kicker was 2-3 months later when I received my cholesterol results in the mail and the number was 200. 200 is the very tippy top number on the scale of normal. Until that point, I had not seen any drastic correlation between my weight and health. It scared the crap out of me and here I am trying to lose it.

When my boyfriend stopped looking at me the way he used to. :(

This past weekend - none of the clothes I had fit, chair too tight, cannot get up and down stairs without a major over haul, waking up everyday feeling like a failure

When I went to my doctor. He has always told me to lose weight and exercise, but I was not ready for that. When he told me I had diabetes, I finally got into the mindset to get serious about losing the weight.

A few things.

1) when I got back my blood work results after not having any done in over 3 years and it showed high fasting blood sugar, high LDL, low HDL and high cholesterol plus inflammation. I realized I was literally killing myself and I am only 37.

2)My beautiful 3 year old son who has the healthiest relationship with food I have ever seen in a person was starting to request French fries and chicken fingers "the crispy ones mama not the ones from the oven" :( I realized that even though I had been awesome about exposing him to really healthy whole foods from the time he could eat solids I was also exposing him to my poor eating habits.

3) my wonderful husband who is also eating himself to death (he has gained 95 lbs since we met, I gained 80 lbs) I knew that I had to help him to eat healthy and be active. I knew that if i was committed to myself he would commit to help me. We both quit smoking 11 years ago and we did it together.

I am not depressed about my weight like I have been since childhood, I am motivated. I am determined to lose this weight and to live like the healthy person I want to be. I am also learning to have compassion for myself and to love me. I have already seen huge improvements in my health already in only 2 mons! Our bodies are amazing!!!!