When I started this, it was going to be a private blog place for Mom (Dory), sister Pam and I to share diet tips and ideas/support...but for a variety of reasons, we decided not to do it so I changed the name and have opened the reader list to anyone...so if Pam and Mom want to write something on this,they can, if not I will just use this blog to write specifically about dieting and weight issues.

I started South Beach Diet Phase One last Thursday, May 16....so today is day five of phase one...really no problems so far other than wanting to reach for food all the time, just a bad habit....I have South Beach Diet proofed my kitchen which definitely makes it easier. And so far no big cravings and haven't really been hungry....

I weighed 316 on 5-16 and will weigh again tomorrow morning so I will be on a weigh every Monday schedule... I'm trying not to obsess over this whole diet thing and just take it one day at a time. Hard for me because obsessing is something I do really well!!

It's been many, many years since I dedicated myself to following a specific plan....and my 60th birthday is a bit over 6 months away which is making me feel a little frantic....it feels like I'm running out of time to deal with the weight issue that's always been such a big part of my life.

I was always the biggest and tallest in my class as a child....by 6th grade, I'd reached my full adult height of 5'8" and had started having periods at age 10 so was way ahead of my classmates on all of that.....but never really had a weight problem til high school. I weighed about 225 when I graduated from high school in 1971...Up and down through college, I weighed about 240 when I graduated college in 1976....Went up and down over the next few years until 1981, when I was 27 and went on Optifast (same liquid diet Oprah lost all the weight on back then),,,,I weighed 310 when  I started Optifast and didn't eat solid food for a YEAR...and got down to 150 for about 5 minutes....when I started eating again, it was a disaster....that program didn't fix anything in my head and I went right back to bad habits, and even some new ones like bulemia....after a couple of years of that, I was back to 310 or so. Pretty much stayed around 320 or so through my 30s.....

I still don't have a lot of insight about what happened to make me gain another 100 lbs but by age 45 I weighed 420.....It's like I just woke up one day and weighed a lot more....I know I had a lot of problems with depression, etc. that I didn't deal with til my 40s....anyway, I had finally had enough and had gastric bypass surgery in 1999 when I was 45.....I weighed 420 before the surgery and over the next year or so lost almost 150 lbs. The lowest I got after the bypass was 267.....

So, in the almost 14 years since my bypass surgery, I have settled in at a weight of about 310 lbs...still 110 lbs lower than my all time high but hard to feel successful when I still weigh this much. So, my first goal is to get under the 267 I weighed at the lowest point I reached after the bypass.....that means losing about 60 lbs which might be WAY too ambitious for only 6 months but, what the heck, I have a built in tool/advantage with the bypass surgery I had....if I don't eat the sugar and flour carbs in excess, I should be able to lose pretty quickly...

I'm looking at this next 6 months as an experiment to see how my life works if I've lost weight and feel better and more active. The older I get, the more I will have problems with mobility and so it's time to do something about it....never too late to change for the better!!.