AKA: Jeff

Or, why I’m doing this.

Well, I am ninety or so pounds overweight and I have nine children.  It’s not difficult to see where the weight came from.  While I did manage to lose the weight with the first three (well, most of it anyway), with my fourth (at the ripe old age of 22) thanks to a lot of things, I didn’t lose it.  And, I didn’t lose it with any of the subsequent children.  Weight does not want to leave my body.

I’ve spent over ten years trying to determine why I’m so big and what I  need to do to reduce my girth.  I thought it was food quantity.  Then I calorie counted for a few weeks.  At around 1200 calories on most days (including coke!) that wasn’t a very reasonable answer to the problem.  I went for quality of food instead of quantity.  Everyone assured me that if I’d just cut out all coke, I’d lose at least ten pounds with that alone.  I didn’t drink a single soda for three years.  I didn’t lose a pound.

Now, I must confess, the good news is, that if I’m not pregnant, I don’t gain weight and when I do manage to pound away a pound… it does stay gone.  It’s just so dad gum difficult to lose those pounds in the first place.

So, with the realization that eating only fresh foods (didn’t do a thing), yeast-free diet (you know… nothing that’ll feed yeast… didn’t do a thing), sugar free diet (didn’t do a thing), and other intake adjustments (didn’t… you know the drill) only one thing in regards to food made a difference.  Eating more.  Yep, if I ate when I got up, ate at noon, and ate at dinner (and even a late night meal) I lost weight.  Not much mind you and REALLY SLOWLY but over nine months I managed to lose about ten to twelve pounds simply by adding more volume to my diet.

Obviously that is only going to help to a point.  I’d always suspected that exercise was the answer.  Until I tried exercising for 90 minutes a day 5 days a week for six weeks.  I lost two pounds.  However, I didn’t eat more during that time, I’m sure that was probably water weight, and yes it did hover back up to normal again quite quickly.

Now that my asthma is under control, I’m feeling pretty good, and I have teeth that I can eat right with, I’m trying something I’ve always been fascinated by.  I always wondered why I couldn’t get enough of a daily workout with housework and kill two pounds with one stone!  (dirt and fat… get with the program).

So here I am.  We’ll see if it works.

Mutt plans to keep me in line.   Well, bless her heart.