I re-started trying to lose weight in late October/early November, I think - not long before the holidays. Currently I am down about 16 lbs from my non-pregnant high weight and would like to lose an even 100.

I started MFP last year and used it to lose what I called my "grieving weight" which was the weight I put on after my dad died and I spent some time not really giving a ****. I'm also 5' 2" so weight loss while staying out of "starvation" range (I know it's a bit of an overstatement but it's taken me a while to feel comfy with all of this) was slow going and I learned to make a lot of all new-to-me foods. I swar I went to a nearly all-squash-and-burrito diet!

I'm in the normal BMI range now and my goal is to stay here with close attention to what I eat and regular exercise. I am a good cheering squad person for MFP stuff since it worked well for me so far. Good to see folks here.

KJ, friends on here can be really supportive and are wonderful for pep talks. Feel free to add me! (Anyone is welcome too!) I'm here every day.

I've been trying very actively for about a year and a half. I spent a year building a solid layer of muscle, and now it's time to trim down. My body is super slow to lose weight without very drastic measures, so it'll be a long-ish slog. I've barely budged since doing this for about a week or so, and am now adding running to speed up the results.

I'm just trying to get back into the BMI below 25 (yes, I know BMI is a flawed metric, but my body shape means that it's a useful one for me). I did it *just* before I got pregnant.... 5 years ago. Put on a lot of weight during my pregnancy and have lost it in fits and starts - and gained in fits and stats - over the subsequent 4+ years, but never got back to my pre-pregnancy weight. I run as much as my job and family allow me, about 15-20 miles a week, but that makes me starving. Y'all know the drill

Last time I lost a decent chunk of weight (about 15lb, a couple of years ago) was tracking calories, so I'm hoping it will do the same this time. I'm 5'8", and I carry my weight pretty well, so I'm not trying to get skinny, but I have a family history of diabetes and I have been giving my belly the side eye for a while. No sign of blood sugar issues in me yet, but I'm big on prevention.

Having been a largely sedentary kid, except for the occasional hike or backpacking trip with the Boy Scouts, and then a college student with bad eating habits, I was significantly overweight when I started grad school in 1991. I walked a lot, but couldn't run more than a couple hundred feet without being winded. Trying to jog with a friend convinced me I needed to do something about my fitness, so I started swimming regularly. When my wife got an eczema that ruled out swimming for a while, we switched to running. I didn't bother dieting, but between exercising regularly and walking 2-4 miles a day to and from campus and shopping (and having the metabolism of someone in his early 20s), I went from somewhere around 180 lbs. (I'm not sure exactly what I weighed) to 137 in the fall of 1994. After some knee problems made running harder, and then getting a job in 1997, I started to put on about half a pound a month, until the summer of 2008, after my father's death, when I was up to the mid-220s. That shocked me enough that I started exercising regularly again (cycling, easier on the knees), but I found that while exercise alone seemed to stop the upward climb, it wasn't enough to lose weight now that I had the metabolism of a 40-year-old. I spent the next 4 years slowly fluctuating between 215 and 205, until this January, after reading about MyFitnessPal in Consumer Reports, I decided to give it a try and rigorously count calories.

So far it's working. The discipline of writing down what I eat has helped immensely in getting a sense of what my actual needs are and how they relate to the food I'm eating. MFP's tools make it easy to copy meals from previous days and then modify them as needed, and I find that the iPhone app's bar code reader is useful when eating prepared foods or entering a recipe. (I cook a lot from scratch, so I've created 31 recipes in 39 days.) I'm down about 7 lbs. from my starting weight in about 6 weeks. I have been riding my bike a fair amount (4-6 hours a week) and lifting weights to keep my muscles from disappearing along with the fat, but I've been eating to compensate for calories consumed in exercise, to avoid too great a calorie deficit.

I recently discovered John Walker's online book _The Hacker's Diet_ (Google will take you there), and while some of what he says about physiology seems speculative, his explanation of how to use exponentially weighted averages to compensate for daily weight fluctuations is well worth reading. His advice is to weigh yourself every day, but to then use mathematical tools to discover the trend that lies beneath daily fluctuation. It's the same principle as the skinny purple line on my Beeminder graph (https://www.beeminder.com/brianogilvie/goals/weigh).