It's been a while...

I had to take a break and really, through trial and error - sometimes a lot more error! - figure out what was going to work for me.

To lose weight, you have to do what works for you.  That is my mantra and has been for many years.  Putting it into practice is a lot harder than saying it.  That's what makes the authors of diet books rich.  So many choices.  The grapefruit diet will work for some people.  The Atkins diet will work for some people, too.  And every diet in between.  But a person who can do Atkins every day for the rest of their lives is a very different person from the one who can do grapefruit!  Some people love to exercise (at least I've heard these people exist...)  They can eat more as long as they exercise more, but look out if they are injured.  That weight sneaks up fast!

Figuring out what works for you is the tricky part.  You can lose weight on most diets.  But it has to be a way of eating that you can commit to and stick with for a really long time - as in forever.  That's how you gained the weight, right?  You committed to eating badly and stuck with it for a long time.

What I ran into was once I hit 50 and the dreaded menopause, I couldn't lose weight any more.  At least not the way I had been doing for the past 10 years.  I was slowly gaining and I didn't know how to stop it.  10 lbs in 18 months would turn into 20 lbs in 3 years, and just keep going from there.

What is working for me now is keeping my numbers a lot more steady.  In the old days, I could fluctuate wildly from day to day.  1000 calories today, 3000 calories tomorrow, 1200 the next day.  It all averages out, right?  Well, it did when I was younger.  Nowadays, I am finding it better to hover between 1400-2000 calories, and get a little exercise every day, too.  As you get older, you have to cut out a lot of the extremes.  I just hadn't applied that thought to dieting before.

So, I'm back on track with this and seeing where this takes me.

188.2/185/165