Not yet!

I certainly am not a testimonial to losing weight. So far I haven't lost any. I tried the "Sleep Diet" and increased my sleep for a while. Unfortunately my body got used to going to bed earlier so I started waking up earlier. Apparently not everyone needs 7 1/2 - 8 hours of sleep per night. I'm not sure where the weight loss idea fits in if a person gets more sleep.

I then tried a diet that was supposed to be suited to my metabolism. I gained weight. Then I tried low-carb and gained more. Then I tried the Sonoma Diet and gained yet more pounds. SO now I weigh a few pounds more than where I started. I ventured on these quests and I gained! So I stopped dieting and I quit gaining but I haven't lost any weight. It's depressing because a year ago I had a lot of lovely clothes and this year I only have a few. I actually had to buy some in larger sizes and I swore I wouldn't do that. However I have to have clothes to wear!

I'm not sure what to do about all of this. My doctor has no advice. He said to log my calorie intake and I've done that. I seem to average about 1350 - 1400 calories a day and that seems to be what most of the commercial diet plans suggest for me. I've signed up for online diet plans through eDiets and most of the time that's what my average calories per day are. When I lost all the weight a couple of years ago my calories per day were between 1000 - 1200. I hate to go that low because I keep hearing that's dangerous but I'm not so sure it was.

Diet books anyone?

I've been working on the mind part of losing weight without "dieting" for two weeks now. I can't tell you if I've lost any weight because I haven't gotten on the scale. Today I decided that it would be good to clear away some of the clutter around here as part of my spring cleaning. I gathered up all my diet books and the cookbooks that go with many of them. After checking on what I could sell them for on Amazon.com I listed 25 books to sell. But that's not all - two of them have already sold! That's pretty good especially considering that none of them ever did me much good. The rest of them that aren't worth enough to bother with listing I will take to Half Price Books. Why not make some money and clear some space in my house?

Still haven't weighed!

I am feeling great. I am focusing on the positives, focusing on how slim I will look this summer. I have been working on some exercises, both for my mind and body. I am appreciating myself and my body. As I focus on being thinner I can feel a shift in my relationship with food and it's all good!

Breaking of a New Dawn

It’s a lifelong story for me and a typical one for a woman – a struggle to be at a healthy and attractive weight. It seems like I have always been on a diet yet I have only had one time when the diet was successful and I was very pleased with the outcome. Unfortunately it’s two years later now and my struggle is still going on. Yes, I lost the weight but I was so focused on NOT gaining the weight back that I have done just that – I have gained weight!

I realized that I was bringing this on myself. By focusing on weight all the time it was just like I was asking to gain and then I did. I ate “fake food” with artificial sweeteners that caused me to crave more sweets. Since I felt I couldn’t have much bread I craved bread and then I would overeat bread. It’s ridiculous!

As a result I have a new thought process, one that involves visualizing myself as slim and trim and healthy. Little my little my body is beginning to reform itself from what it is to the new vision. I fully expect this to work. I am not dieting. I am eating what I please and the funny thing is that what I please to eat isn’t loads of rich fattening foods. Yes, I plan to eat whatever my body wants me to eat. My body and mind are still getting used to this idea. I expect that my mind is beginning to notice that eating good healthy food will give the results as seen in the mind’s eye, at the weight I think is right for me.

This is not just a quest for a certain look. My body isn’t perfect even at a healthy weight. No one really has an ideal figure but I will say that when I finished that diet 18 months ago I really was pleased with how I looked. In addition to my looks, I felt marvelous – had energy to burn! I could run upstairs. I had the shock of my life one day when I picked up my mother at her assisted living facility, realized we didn’t have some papers so I ran up the stairs and down a long hallway to her room to get them. I couldn’t find them so ran back downstairs to ask her where they were. Then I ran up the stairs and did the whole sequence again. When we got into the car after all of that I realized I wasn’t even winded! At 67 years old I had more energy than I had when I was 50.

That was when I weighed 22 lbs. less than I do now and I want that feeling and look again. Right now I am threatened with having to take medications for high blood pressure and Diabetes – the ones I had to take when I was heavy. They are costly and they are artificial products that I know don’t need to be in my body if I weigh what I am supposed to weigh. I can avoid taking medications by getting my weight down.

I weighed myself this morning and I don’t plan to weigh again for several weeks because I want to keep my mind on the vision and don’t want to bother with trivialities that could distract me from the vision. If I can visualize it, then it will be so. Besides, there are other ways to measure weight loss. The best one is when the clothes start being a bit too big. That will be soon – LOL! I’ll keep you posted on my inner transformation.