365 days counting calories; hardest and easiest thing ever

Sometimes people ask me what I did to lose weight. In theory it's pretty simple; calories in, calories out. That's all there is to it. On the face of it, it seems fairly simple. And it is, from a logical standpoint, but humans are rarely logical. We feel and crave and want and admire. We are lonely and eat, or depressed and eat, or happy and eat. It's so much easier to stay inside and play whatever game I'm on than to drive up to the gym. For many years I chose the wrong thing. No one made me fat except me.

That's not to say that there isn't a lot of misinformation out there. I've learned a bit of this during the past year, especially. I used to think juice was healthy, that wheat bread with those little seeds in it was the best, that bread in general wasn't too bad, that a salad was excellent even when drowning in ranch and cheese. And so on. I've learned a bit about nutrition now.

What I've learned most is that I can. Now, a lot of people will say that's not something really to learn. They'll say "well of course you can," not knowing the dark places being fat and depressed will bring you. But once you pass your first hurdle, once you overcome your first challenge you see that it's really true. I was afraid of running because of all my jiggling rolls for so long, but then as part of a body challenge, we had to run a 5k. I did it. After that I knew that I could do anything because I already had done something scary and hard!

So there's the message I'd like everyone to take from this, as cliche as it sounds: YOU CAN. You may think you can't, and you may dream of waking up skinny, thinking it's only a dream. It isn't. You are strong, stronger than you think. You are alive. YOU CAN DO THIS.

Now on to the pictures.

This was the month I joined MFP.


At my highest weight, a year before joining MFP, I was 260+ pounds.


Side view.