So, if you remember (those who read here regularly), I was wanting to lose a decade of gathered up baby weight before I turned 40 last December.

I started at 195 lbs (I didn’t weigh myself during my last pregnancy or for a few weeks after, so I was more than that).

For the year I was 39, I lost to about 145lbs. That’s about 50 lbs! I mostly did it on my own, eating oatmeal, fish, salad, eggs. I would do a cycle of good weight loss, then stop when I lost interest, then go back to a cycle of loss, then stop. It helped me to do it in strong spurts.

But then I turned 40, and I lost all desire to diet and exercise. I still wanted to lose all the weight, but I didin’t have enough desire to actuallly do it. So I regained to about 167.

I was kind of thinking and praying about what to do. Sometimes I would try to motivate myself. But it was short-lived. Then my mom and dad came for a visit in June of this year, and mom had been losing weight, too, and we were talking about how we wanted to keep losing. So we decided, why not start now, and we joined the Curves that’s on the third floor of our mall.

During that month, we exercised faithfully 3x/week. We both gained a little weight still, from all our eating and special times, but I lost fat. At Curves, you really focus on shifting your muscle/fat ratio, so your body becomes more and more able to burn calories (because it’s more muscle) and it becomes easier to maintain weight loss.

By the time mom was leaving, they were announcing their 8-week Food School starting early July, so I joined that. It was a weekly group/class about eating and weight loss, and overall, a healthy lifestyle. I was ready to join because I was tired of motivating myself and really wanted someone else doing that, I like getting more education, and I met ladies at various places on the same road of weight loss.

It was really, really fun! And the important thing is that I really committed myself to doing their eating plan with little to no exceptions (even when we traveled) and exercising very regularly and faithfully.

It’s now September, Food School has been over for a month, and I’m still going strong. I’m still on the weightloss part of their diet, because my body is still willing to shed weight. I’ve lost 20 lls (back around 145), my percent of body fat is 31.9% (I started at 38.1%, and the norm is 20%-30%). My muscle mass has increased from 27.1% to 30.3% (norm is 35%-38%). And I love the beautiful, muscular curves in my arms and legs.

I haven’t eaten sugar for over 3 months now. I can’t believe it. Sugar in my coffee was an absolute must–otherwise, why drink it?? But the Food School teacher said she loves lattes without sugar, so now that’s what I’m doing, too.

A few major lessons from this:

1. I’m trying to make a life-change, not just achieve a goal weight. Lord willing, I will keep up my exercise and good dietary changes for the rest of my life.
2. I’m noting times when I would, before, have eaten in order to help myself. Times of fatigue, stress, Vitaliy being gone, emotional fatiuge or frustration, boredom … and I’m finding other ways to comfort and strengthen and busy myself that don’t involve food. It’s a good thing. When I want to eat for no good reason, I remind myself that I love how my clothes fit and how my body looks, and that’s worth more to me than this temporary, often non-physical craving to eat.
3. God used this to start a wave in my life of learning self-discipline. This diet and exercise requires a lot of self-discipline. It’s stressful, even in a good way, but it breaks down, into small steps, a huge task that I can’t accomplish in one or a few bursts of energy. So I’ve started applying this to other areas of my life– currently, fundraising and home schooling. It’s helping me break down those huge jobs into small steps and tasks and do them consistently to accomplish a huge job in good time.

I should post a photo sometime soon 🙂