Newbie - Karen

kjs1228

Hi There!

My first time posting here so introducing myself. Paula is an old buddy of mine and we've been on this weight loss journey together for a bunch of years.

So my story. I'm 48 years old and live in Pennsylvania. Snowy Pennsylvania right now :-) I have a husband and a 13 year old daughter and 3 cats. Also moved my 70 year old mom in with us about six months ago( just supported her through a new hip she's doing great!) For work I'm a global customer care leader for a chemical company. We clean water. My job allows me to travel a bunch around the globe which is cool but also really challenging when you're talking about weight loss. Pretty challenging job with pretty long hours. And I just love to eat of course otherwise I wouldn't be on this board :-)

I had gastric sleeve surgery five years ago right around the same time that Paula did. At the time I lost about a hundred and fifty pounds within a year. Was in the best shape of my life :-) I was doing really low carb. Just cut out a lot in my diet and maintained it for quite a while. I've gotten off track and have gained about 40 lb back. Medically the past year-and-a-half have not been the easiest. Went through early menopause, had a partial hysterectomy, had breast surgery that turned out to be non-cancerous, and had skin cancer on my face.

So I'm pretty clear on some key areas where I went wrong. Got out of whack with not being able to exercise due to the various surgeries, let carbs carbs creep in somewhat although I still eat fairly low carb. Less than 30 net carbs a day. But maybe that's still too high? just started increasing the quantities and quite frankly started drinking too much wine :-) I blame it on the travel to Europe! But it really became more of a daily get done work and have one glass that turned into two, three, glasses :-)

So now I'm trying Keto. I really like keto and I feel a lot better eating this way, but I'm just not losing the weight I thought I would lose. I watch people losing huge amounts of weight and that's just not me. I know they tell you you don't have to count calories, but that just doesn't seem to work for me. When I don't count calories and eat the amount of fat that I think my body wants I end up around 1600 calories and I just don't lose a thing. I really feel like I need to stay more around 1,200 or less but again then I'm counting. I've dabbled with intermittent fasting with a bulletproof coffee in the morning to get me through. And I love how it makes me feel, but again I would expect that I would lose more weight. I am exercising at least four days a week and I'm trying to get that back to the six I used to do. Started to get back into weights which I love doing but I slacked off on. I miss my arms :-)

So really happy to be joining this group that Paula speaks so highly of. Would love advice, support, success is along with you gals! Right now I weigh 191 lb I would love to get down to 160 somewhere this summer. My sweet spot before was between 152 and 155.


Happy March and looking forward to being a lesser version of myself by the end of it! I hope to learn a lot from you all and offer my support as well!

Karen

tocannon

Good morning Karen,

So today made a week I've been on keto. First I love it, but what I've learned is its important to stay within the 75% fat, 25% protein and 5% carbs. I've lost as of this morning 9 pounds. If you haven't go online and Google keto macros and you'll enter some data that will tell you exactly where you need to be. Also what has helped me is YouTube. Look at Dr Bergs and Thomas Delauer they will help you on this journey. Hope this helps! You'll get there, we all will.

kjs1228

Sounds like you’re doing great! Happy for you :-) thanks for the advice. I’ll check out those YouTube videos as well.