Whoo Hooo!!

Tired of my whining about having to wear his dress pants when I wanted to look nice and equally tired of my complaining about how fat I felt, my husband finally took action. He did research on diets and then gave me the paperwork on various options he found.

Now - I do not believe in "diets" in the old fashioned sense of the word. I do not believe in restricting your calories, counting every calorie and weighing every piece of food before it passes your lips. Diets, in fact, are very unhealthy as well as counter-productive to the very goal you are trying to reach - weight loss. Permanent weight loss, that is.

Research has shown that when we starve, err diet, our bodies go into crisis mode as the body is designed to realize when we are experiencing a famine and it adjusts the metabolic rate accordingly. However, once the famine (or in this case, the diet) passes the metabolic rate does not readjust back to what it was. Instead the body packs on more fat in preparation for the possible next famine.

All of this was forefront in my mind as I perused the options my husband gave me. I discounted one immediately as following this particular "diet" required one to buy your meals from them. So I thought - what happens when you want to start buying your own food again - is that even an option or would the weight pack back on if you did this. No, I wanted a diet that was going to effect a permanent life style change in regards to the food I ate. The amounts I was eating were not the problem, it was the combinations I was choosing as well as the poor choices I was making for snacks and desserts, Sugar, sugar and more sugar - typically refined sugar. And while I knew this, I simply did not seem to be able to find the will power to change it.

I wheedled the choices down to two diets or, as I prefer to call them - life style changes. Of the two I was leaning more towards the one that styled its recipes and food choices on the Mediterranean cultural as I liked the various options I could combine in my meals and have for snacks. I loved this idea of subscribing online to a "diet" as I was able to peruse their recipes, print them off, get daily emails with the food choices I had selected and, in short, have an online cheerleader as I struggled through the first ten days of striving to eliminate my sugar cravings.

Best of all - when the first pound and a half fell off through seemingly no more effort from me than to avoid sugar and eat healthier choices at meal time, I was ecstatic and charged to keep going - no matter how much visions of chocolate and more chocolate danced through my head.

So in answer to Lisa's question (wifeforlife) - how is the weight loss going I have to say FANTASTIC!

Drum roll please...
in the past ten days
I have lost
FIVE pounds.

I am so excited about this. I fully expect this weight loss to slow down, but this is such a boost to me and best of all I really love the changes we are making to our diet. I also feel more energetic and healthy as a result of these changes. Look forward to more updates as I continue to work towards my goal of losing approximately 40 lbs without a time date, other than I hope to have lost the first twenty before our daughter's wedding in June. Fifteen to go for that goal! And I owe it all to my husband who loved me enough to help me take the plunge and perhaps is hoping that in the process he will get half of his wardrobe back?

Thank you Hugo!