Hello again MFP! I've missed you!

Last year at around this same time I joined MFP and stuck with it really consistently for 5 months. During that time I lost 30 pounds. In May I wound up moving in with new roommates, and actually found it harder to track my calories because I was eating more home made foods than I was eating out. Combined with other life changes MFP kind of feel to the wayside.

The good news is that when I weighed myself at the start of the year, I had only gained 5.6 pounds from the last weight that I had recorded on here. Taking into account that your weight can fluctuate around 5 pounds a day, I'm just taking that as saying that I really didn't gain much of anything since my hiatus. Which is awesome! The bad news is that since it has been so long since I've been active, most of the people on my friend's list have disappeared. There are one or two, but my home page is pretty quiet and I'm kind of tired of looking at myself.

So, this, I guess, is a call for new beginnings and new friends! I promise I'll do my best to help you stay on track and motivated if you do the same for me.

A little more about me:

I'm a dude who likes dudes, so gay guys are extremely welcome, but I'm not really going to turn anyone sane away.

I don't even see anything inherently bad in eating fast food, so I would never call you out for not following some sort of really strict diet. The biggest thing that I learned when I started this last year was that small changes lead to massive results and are less likely to cause frustration to the point of quitting entirely.

On the flip side of that, I did a whole lot of research about weight loss and the social and psychological factors that contribute to obesity last year, and what I basically learned is that even though losing weight is really simple it's also hard. Really hard. Not only are you fighting against your own body and mind's natural processes and instincts, but you are also combating corporations who use those processes and instincts against you in order to make more profit. There is a reason that there is a direct correlation between poverty and obesity and it has absolutely nothing to do with "the poor are lazy" or similar nonsense. Some might say that by looking at external factors that contribute to weight gain I'm looking for excuses for my own failings and something easy to blame for messing up, but I don't see it that way at all. It makes me realize that losing weight is in a way an act of rebellion and I take that much more pride in every pound lost, because every pound lost means that I fought against all of those factors and won. Which would also mean that I would be extremely proud of you, too. So I will give you all the kudos in the world for coming in under your calorie goal, losing any amount of weight, exercising, and just logging in repetitively. I'll notice if MFP tells me that you haven't been around in a couple of days, and will probably send you a PM asking if you're doing okay.

Wow. That got a little ranty, but really all I'm saying is let's be friends!