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Lynne's
Weight Loss Success Story!
My
weight-loss journey began in January 2005 when a soft compassionate
voice in my head asked a simple question. What would
happen if I just tell myself, this is the year? If you
are a real foodie, you know when recipes are written by
true cooks, and when they are not. There are people who
eat to live, and then there are the rest of us! I
needed to find my own kind.
Secret #1: Start somewhere. Just START.
Kathleen Daelemans' cookbook, Cooking
Thin with Chef Kathleen, was exactly what I'd hoped
to find. Written by a true foodie (a bona fide chef)
with a believable, fun, and light hearted voice, this was
a stylishly current book, and it was brimming with great
looking recipes. Each one looked too good to be good
for me. I bought the book and the next day I went
back and bought volume two,
Getting Thin and Loving Food. I read them
religiously, and marked everything that I wanted to try.
Dinners every night were out of the KD library. I was ecstatic
to find that Kathleen had lost even more weight than I had
to lose, and had done so without trauma and torture.
Having found a way of eating that I knew I could live with,
I had taken my first small step toward healthy weight loss,
so I decided to go ahead and take my second. I joined
the local YMCA.
What I noticed within two weeks was that just by cooking
these recipes, I was learning how to stop loading up on
fats, carbs and sugars. My first shock was that I
was not missing them. I had become so used to coating
my foods with butter, cheese and sauces, and throwing everything
over a plate of rice, potato or pasta, that I didn't
know what most foods really tasted like. I truly re-educated
my palate. At the same time, I began going to the
YMCA every other day to do the Nautilus weight circuit and
walk on the treadmill.
Secret #2: Write Everything Down
I have kept journals all my life, but had never tried to
keep a food journal. I started writing everything
down, including my daily weight. I would list the previous
day's foods honestly, including even bites of things,
because I knew that if I lied I was only going to thwart
my own progress. This helped me to notice what was going
right, which was a great encouragement to me. Oh!
Eating dinner by 7pm every night works! Oh! Working
out works! Oh! Choosing fruit instead of chips (wonder
of wonders) works! And, so on.
Secret #3: Do what works and stop doing what doesn't.
Some weeks I lost three pounds, and some weeks I lost just
one. I became a scientist with the data from my food/exercise
journal until I taught myself what worked and what totally
did not work for my body. I'm a word-girl; mantras
work with me. If this is the year got me going,
then do what works is what kept me going. A month
into my journey (with 12 pounds gone), I found this forum,
and I began asking all my stupid questions, which I quickly
learned, were not at all stupid. Should I work out
more? How much water should I be drinking? How
do you break out of a plateau? What do you eat for
breakfast!? And, the community of women who are here
to help each other as they help themselves gave me yet another
tool that worked: support. Through the wisdom of the
homework assignments, I also learned that making excuses
doesn't work for anyone. Before my very eyes, I developed
into a tough chick who was ready to do what I had to do
to get what I wanted: a body that looks like who I really
think I am.
Secret #4: Shock yourself.
By June, with Kathleen's great recipes as my teachers, I
had learned how to choose other recipes from healthy magazines
and cook with the techniques I had in my personal arsenal.
I had also graduated from walking on the treadmill to running
and I'd bought a nice new Trek bicycle (also because of
Kathleen!). I had lost 30 pounds and was fitting into
size 10 jeans. However, I felt like the folks who
thought the world was flat, and feared sailing off the edge.
Thirty pounds was beyond my wildest dreams of what I expected
to lose. I was suddenly in my own personal no-man's-land.
Strangely enough, weighing 145 was great but not great enough.
I had become addicted to expecting more of myself.
Then, one day I went out to breakfast with a girlfriend
who told me about a race she was participating in called
a sprint triathlon. Swimming, biking, and running.
"If you can do those things you could do this,"
she said. Guess what? You can do this
became my new mantra. I signed up with 6 weeks to
train, and devoured triathlon manuals until I had a plan
to finish that race on July 31st. My daughters
and husband cheered me every minute and the looks on their
faces as I finished was hilarious. I'm especially
proud to be the person I am now while my daughters are teens,
because as they grow into womanhood, they will know that
hard things are worth doing, and that all you have to do
is want your goals more than you want your comfort.
The payoff pops up with every step.
Sounds like a good life plan to me!
If you'd like to submit your weight loss success story,
click
here.
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