Cassie's weight loss v2.0: Electric Boogaloo

Hello everyone!

I've been using the MFP app on my Android phone off and on for a few months but never really checked out the website before.

I've been overweight to various degrees since I was a pre-teen. In 2007 I lost 40 pounds using the Richard Simmons Food Mover program and the Hacker's Diet ( http://www.fourmilab.ch/hackdiet/ ). The following year unemployment and raging depression forced me to go back on anti-depressants. The one I was on had fatigue and weakness as a side-effect; I went from being able to bust out 25 pushups to barely being able to manage 10 and I was tired all the time. I was so discouraged I stopped working out.

Shortly after that I got a job doing collection calls. I hated it and almost as soon as I was hired I was trying to find another job but I couldn't. I am NOT the kind of person who can do collection calls, and yet I did, for a little over two years. Around mid-2009 the stress of my job got so bad that I fell off the wagon because the only I could just barely manage to make it through the day was to comfort-eat. As of last fall I had gained back all the weight, I was completely miserable and overwhelmed at work and frequently burst into tears right at my desk. I started having suicidal thoughts. In October I reached a point where I could not tolerate working there any longer and had to quit even though I still had not been able to get another job. As of right now I am temping and still looking for permanent work. But enough about that.

I now weigh around 190 pounds. Did I mention I'm 5'1"? I can't carry around all this weight, so it needs to get lost, and stay lost. I've also had problems with my cholesterol when I've been heavy -- it responds pretty dramatically to diet and exercise, so as long as I don't have any more jobs that force me to dive face-first into the candy aisle, I should be able to avoid eating myself into a heart attack. My cholesterol was the primary motivation for losing 40lbs the first time.

I've started working out again, am cutting calories to about 1200 daily, using this site to keep track of calories and general nutrition and I'm using an app called Libra to track my weight, based on the Hacker's Diet method. It's complicated and extremely geeky, but the Reader's Digest version is that I weigh myself every day and the app calculates a moving average based on that data, and estimates my daily calorie shortage (or excess) and expected weight loss (or gain) trend. I only restarted my tracking about 5 days ago, but when I've got a week's worth of data I'll start using my trend numbers for my weigh-ins.

This time around the impetus to get back on the wagon was being a bridesmaid at my sister's wedding. I made a pretty bridesmaid, but a much larger one than I would have preferred. The wedding was last month and I wanted to start a diet as soon as I got back home but I had caught a REALLY nasty cold from my parents and my body said "LOL, no, that's not happening." Had to wait until I could take a deep breath again without having a coughing fit.

So, hi!