My Turn!

I’ve been fighting my weight since puberty. My first big weight loss was on the Cambridge Diet (kind of a proto-Slim Fast pyramid scheme) back in the early 80s. I was 16 years old, and managed to get down to 140 from a high of about 180, and managed to squeeze into a size 12 (nowadays, a size 6). Dipped maybe ten pounds lower for a couple of weeks, but never did manage to get down into the 10s and 8s my friends were wearing. And by the time I got to college, the weight was back again. Junior year, Spring semester, I completely stopped eating and lived on Diet Jolt (which briefly was a thing) for I’m thinking about six weeks, and got back down to 140ish again, but by graduation I had yoyo’d up to 200. So, I joined Weight Watchers when I was in grad school, but dropped out before reaching my goal (I believe somewhere in the mid 160s). Up to around 250 by my early thirties, when I starved myself again back down to about 170, then back up to 300 or so in my early 40s. Dieted down to around 175 in my late 40s, and by my start date with MFP in October 2017, I was back up to 285. And now, a year and a quarter later, I’m all the way back down to my healthy starting weight, the first time I’ve actually hit goal since I was sixteen years old.

This is the END of the rollercoaster, because my attitude has completely changed. Every other “diet” I was just waiting to get low enough I could “eat like a normal person”, but I had no bloody idea what my actual maintenance caloric level was, so “like a normal person” to me meant “eat whatever you want whenever you want,” and the cycle would start again. I’d start not looking at the scale for longer and longer, and before you’d know it I was huge again. And the health issues just keep piling on — hypertension, diabetes, kidney disease...

But there’s the key for me — I’ve decided to approach my obesity as a chronic disease that will need a lifetime’s management, just like all the conditions its caused. Right now, it’s in remission, and I intend to keep it that way. Between MFP and Fitbit, I have all the tools I need to maintain my weight for the rest of my life. Maintenance is really no different than weight loss — same habits, just slightly bigger numbers.

I’m very optimistic for the future, and feel a world better than I did in forever.