I Am Finally Going to Blog

I keep thinking about blogging about my struggles with weight, self-esteem, what not. I have been thinking about it for months. I want to have a place to put my thoughts and an old fashioned journal wasn’t working out for me any more. I filled more than 20 from age 12 - 22 years of age but ever since then (I’m 32) I have never been consistent. Minus my pregnancy journal but those were not lengthy entries.

I am a mother of an almost 2 year old girl who I will call Z. She is the light of my life. Smart, super verbal, funny, loves to laugh, you name it. She’s one of those kids that make people want to have kids. We really lucked out, DH and I.

I live in the Los Angeles area but I’m an implant from New England. DH and I moved here more than a decade ago. LA has its plus and minuses but overall we really like living here. The different ethnicities, languages, restaurants, parks, easy access to hiking, etc… The 405 and 101 want to drive me crazy with traffic but at least I don’t have to deal with them much. I am a stay at home mom (SAHM) M-F and work a bit on Saturdays. Although I don’t know how personal I will let this blog get - minus the inner crap I have to get out about my food choices, my obsessive nature, blah blah blah.

So to get to the point, I am probably 50ish pounds overweight. I have basically dieted myself up to here. Some of it is pregnancy weight (still!!) but I was once this heavy pre-Z. I have been on so many diets, I think it would be hard-pressed to name them all. But I’ll try.

• South Beach
• Atkins
• Somercize
• Marilu Henner’s diet
• Bob Green’s Get With The Program
• Weight Watchers 123 Success (online)
• Calorie Counting with various tools
• Fit for Life
• Eat to Live
• Body for Life
• Ediets

And more. I can’t even think of them all. I never lost a ton of weight, either. Diet Plan Addict here, that’s all. Body for Life was the one I had the most success with - but like all diet plans, I fail them. They fail me. Not because they are bad, necessarily. But because I am not a Diet Plan Person. Even simple calorie counting on sites like SparkPeople and Fitday turns me in to an obsessive mess. I love the high a new diet plan offers. I love the promise of a new life, a better, sexier future. But once the initial high wears off I start thinking of “off plan” foods - even foods I didn’t give a rat’s ass about pre-diet plan. If the plan allows free days or ways to work your points in to a “treat” food, I would obsess about that.

Diet Plans make me crazy. They are not for me.

I actually realized this via OA, which I went to after a horrible stint with Kay Sheppard’s plan. In OA, I recognized my sick relationship with food. I maintained a year of abstinence with OA - which was simply to not overeat. Many people abstain from specific foods (see Kay link), even in OA. Doing that is such a trigger for me.

I ended up leaving OA soon after becoming pregnant. It wasn’t quite for me, although I feel I got a lot out of it and still will use some tools once in a while.

Where I find myself is in a state of needing to lose weight - for health and self-esteem reasons. But knowing a plan will only backfire on me (I have dabbled in South Beach plus calorie counting this last year - both went swimmingly until my obsessive nature stepped in). I have been reading books such as Intuitve Eating, Fat is a Feminist Issue (midway through), and have thumbed through some Geneen Roth. I want to be a “normal” eater but I also want to be a healthy eater. I am at a loss how to do both - because I always end up picking crap (mostly) when I just go for it. And maybe that’s a phase but I really don’t have the patience to allow myself that phase. I want to live in a magical world where I eat healthy, enjoy treats without inner verbal abuse, and free up some space in my daily thoughts for other interests instead of ones about food/diets/weight loss/even intuitive eating.

Not just for me but also to raise my daughter in an environment of healthy, normal eating.

So here it is. My first blog post. Finally did it. So let’s see where this takes me.