When I was forty years old in the year 2000, I weighed over 300 pounds. i realized I was going to die if I didn't drop a significant amount of weight.
Over the period of the next two years, I dropped around 100 pounds. My lowest weight was 202 pounds. I looked and felt great.
I moved to Indiana and remarried. I have had emotional and personal problems which has caused me to put on around twenty five pounds, as I've experienced stress and depression, and have turned to food for comfort. When I dropped weight before, I had many friends and a number of strategies to rely on. Most of these strategies involved ways of coming to terms with long-buried emotional issues which caused me to eat when I wasn't hungry. I kept a weight-loss blog on my website, and over the course of the two years I kept the blog up, I posted pictures of myself as I became smaller and smaller. I recieved e-mails from all over the world encouraging me to continue, and many telling me I was an inspiration.
The strategies that worked for me before need modification, as they'll no longer work. My wife, overwhelmed by the demands of her job and personal issues of her own, has no time to help me deal with my emotional needs, and I've moved away from my friends and family. Furthermore, many of my friends have died recently from old age and disease. I realize this is going to become a more frequent issue as time passes. I'm at the age where I'll more frequency hear news of illness and death than I will of marriages and births.
In a nutshell, I'm pretty much on my own this time.
For the past year I've been rather seriously ill with a recurrence of asthmatic problems, so my exercise regime was impossible to maintain. There were times I was so short of breath I literally couldn't walk upstairs to my bedroom. I spent long hours sleeping from sheer exhaustion. My "oomph" was gone. Many intersecting conditions caught up with me to put on these extra pounds. Not the least of these conditions was denial. I looked the other way as I gained five, ten, twenty pounds. My new family I married into didn't help; nice as they are, they're also habitual over-eaters and love to encourage the same eating patterns in me. A celebration isn't complete without rich and caloric foods, and without eating until you're about to pop. The problem with me is that if there is enabling, I will happily allow myself to be enabled.
However, enough is enough. Recently I've taken care of some of the factors contributing to my problem. After two trips to the emergency room due to severe asthma attacks, I finally realized the severity of my situation and went to an Asthma and Allergy specialist. Now I'm receiving treatment and am already breathing better, and am planning my new exercise regime. I'm also refining my vegetarian diet and will record my daily caloric intake for accountability. I found these strategies, more than anything else, worked for both mood elevation and weight reduction.
There's nothing I can do about the world around me. But I can change me.
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