Thank you for helping me find a healthier relationship to food and lose 25 pounds

I wanted to check back in with my good blood work, four months after a pre-diabetes wake-up call, and to say what a life-changing moment it was to find the sane voices here who helped me to see how judging individual foods as bad/healthy or sinful/virtuous was deeply damaging my ability to eat mindfully and listen to my body's own feedback.

In my family of origin, neither parent had an enlightened relationship to food. My dad branded chocolate and sugary things as pimple-causing and shameful indulgences and fried foods as fatty, all while he secretly ate crappy store-bought snacks in his cars and no-doubt felt terrible about himself doing it. My mother was eternally on a diet and would brand entire categories of food as off-limits to make it easier for her to "resist temptation." Not having good role models, I studiously ignored my own slow weight gain because I didn't want to become a habitual dieter or intensify my (inherited) negative self-talk around food.

Finding people here who de-criminalized food and made rational suggestions about small, sustainable changes that would add up over time was a huge eye-opener for me. You guys truly helped me change my body, my energy levels, and my health profile. Bless you all!

When my A1C came back in feb at 6.0 (normal is under 5.7 and this was smack in the middle of the pre-diabetes range), along with weird low vit D and very high blood iron levels and bad cholesterol numbers and slightly off liver numbers, I panicked and vowed to grab this bull by the horns and figure out how to lose weight sanely and sustainable.

Unfortunately, I had the wrong doctor, someone who'd become a huge fan of keto diets and repeatedly refused to give me any other advice except "Go Keto! You can do it! It's the Only Way to reverse pre-diabetes!" I had gone keto before several times, in search of a nutrition-based solution for chronic fatigue (which I eventually recovered completely from through a very specific cognitive therapy that held that symptom flares were somaticized messages from my deeper self, whose needs were being constantly overridden by my frontal cortex and its rules and roles that it was certain I had to follow. Finding the ways that I was going against my own desires and needs and not speaking up for myself, situation by situation, eliminated the constant triggering and exhaustion of my sympathetic nervous system and ultimately, all my lesser symptoms.)

When I tried keto once again, and fell into what she assured me was a keto flu and would pass, as I laid in bed with brain fog, gut pain, and exhaustion, I finally realized that I was experiencing the equivalent of a massive symptom rise. I got up, started eating healthy carbs, vowed to myself to find a new doctor ASAP and found the sane and reasonable voices on this forum.

Four months later, I am down from 183 to 159, all of my retested bloodwork is in normal range except for A1C, which sits at 5.7, the very lowest of the pre-diabetes range, and my new doctor says everything looks great and I should just keep doing what I'm doing and retest in six months, when she is certain I'll be back to normal blood sugar readings.

After tracking calorie intake and weight daily for three months and losing about 20 pounds (via small sustainable changes, most of which I listed here: https://community.myfitnesspal.com/en/discussion/10656580/easiest-dietary-changes-that-you-made#latest) MFP had its data breach and my re-set password failed to work one day.

After struggling to log in for a few minutes, I finally decided that this might be the universe telling me to try eating more intuitively, and see if I could maintain or lose without meticulous tracking. I'd learned what size meals fit within a certain calorie profile, I'd learned what satiety felt like as opposed to fullness or over-fullness, and I'd made friends with a feeling of light hunger as a sign that I was losing weight incrementally and healthily. So I let go of that life-jacket of logging and decided to learn to swim on my own. I did continue to weigh myself every day and charted them at The HackerDiet (https://www.fourmilab.ch/cgi-bin/HackDiet) so that the 20-day moving average kept me focused on longer term trends rather than day-to-day fluctuations.

Six weeks later, I am down 4 more pounds and feeling confident that I will be able to lose the last four or five pounds I want to lose. I am finally in the normal BMI range for the first time in 25 years, and I have so. much. energy. I walk an average of 15 miles a week and do lots of gardening and housework on top of that. I feel great and I have to say, I'm very happy with how I look too. I wish that dang A1C bloodwork had come back a hair lower so that I could claim total victory, but I do recognize that I"m just barely getting into normal BMI range and should lose a bit more weight, so I take that as the message of that still-slightly-high reading.

I'll add a couple photos here -- not ones that I took specifically as before and afters (because as part of my not-thinking-about-weight-and-weightloss I have studiously avoided taking photos of my body) but ones that somewhat show the change.

You all have been such a valuable resource. Thank you so much!