50+ year old

Well done you. You're doing great!

Wow, you've done so well already. Hope you continue until you can skip into the doctor's surgery and say, "whaddaya think about that then?" Hopefully the doctor will say, "Sorry, I don't recognise you!" Good luck with it.

I've never been a dieter. I see women around me on permanent diets, and it seemed pointless as they seemed to lose weight, then come off the diet and put that weight back on, plus a lot more. I really didn't want to keep doing that. So I've only purposely lost weight a couple of times in my life.

I started to look at why some of us are able to control our weight and others struggled with it. I will leave it to the scientists to try to discover biological reasons, but I have a theory!

There are some people who don't have to worry about their weight. They are lucky. But then there are are the rest of us.

Out of the second group of people, there are those who watch the scales and see a pound go on, and say, "I've put a pound on, I must watch what I eat for a little while and get rid of it."
And then there are people like me who say, "Oh, I've put a couple more pounds on, but it's only a couple of pounds, it'll be okay."

Basically we are aware that weight is going on, but we pretend not to notice, or we pretend that we'll lose it later, or pretend it's okay, we aren't worried about our weight. Personally I don't want to be jumping on the scales every day, but I realise I need to wake up and see what has happened. I need to kiss goodbye to a third of my body weight. I'm 15 stones now (that's 210lbs for non-UK) and I've set myself a target of 10st 7lbs (about 147lbs) by next March 2013. That's 2lbs a week, which I think is probably wishful thinking, but I might just manage it. I think 147lbs is realistic for a 5'7" woman. Then will come the most important phase - keeping control, watching the pounds so that I don't have to watch the stones.

I'm 58. I feel fine most of the time. But when I accidentally catch my reflection I wonder who that fat middle-aged woman is. Health-wise, my back sometimes complains at me, my skin is suffering, I struggle with socks and boots sometimes. My lady bits are struggling to stay in place because of the weight of internal fat. My father died aged 62, and although my mum is 92, I have the feeling I should be wary. I am like my dad in many ways! He only had another 4 years left when he was my age. I want to feel fitter, and I want to feel stylish. I want to live until I die!

My Fitness Pal can help, but I know I have to keep it close, and USE IT!

Congrats I would like to follow you .sounds like you are on track .....Carol