Wake-Up call

Hello Everyone - For years I have struggled with my weight. I am 5'9 and up until I had my first son managed to maintain a healthy weight and lifestyle. After I had my second child, I became very depressed and to make matters worse I was extremely stressed from the demands of my job. As a result, I turned to "food" as my comfort and six years later, I am at the heaviest I have ever been. I tried over the 6 years to try just about every diet fad and while I did shed pounds, I gained it all back. I even did the Master Cleanse and lost 30 pounds but boy was it brutal gaining it all back. I gave up. Well in July 2012, I decided to make a change towards my health and well-being. I resigned from my stressfull demanding job after being there for 14 years. I knew it was the right thing to do and I am so much more happier. I took a job working for a much larger company; however, they are big on "work-life-balance", something my last job knew nothing about. I am now able to spend great time with my wonderful husband and boys and get back into doing things I use to do, like volunteering for various organizations. Anyway, there is one thing about my new job that is no help to me becoming healthier and that is, we are required to have "lunches" with our customers on a regular basis. In the beginning I thought I would be okay but when I got on the scale and saw that in one year I gained 20 pounds, I was devastated. I continued to do the yo-yo diet thing with no luck. My husband tries his best to motivate me but I still continued to fail miserably. Two weeks ago (October 18th), I had my physical appointment and was shocked to learn that I am now 220 pounds. The doctor sat me down and showed where I was extremely high-risk for having several things such as diabetes (both parents are diabetic). My conversation with this new doctor was scary but it was the reality check that I needed. My previous doctor who retired never talked about my weight so having someone discuss some things I needed to consider was cool. She recommended this website and told me to not focus on the exercising but moreso to get control of how many calories I am consuming each day and use this site as my daily reminder. She gave me a goal of 6-8lbs to lose by Dec 19th. So today marks the beginning for me to stop with all the diets and to really spend time making smarter choices towards becoming a healthier me. I love walking so today I walked 3 miles which took me 50 minutes and burned 330 calories. This is a great start of a day. Now all I have to do is think smart at lunch and order salads without all the added stuff as I learned that even salads are not all low calorie. I went into baja fresh and one of their salads with the mango was 930 calories..I was shocked. Never again can I have it. I hope everyone have a great day and week.