Tuesday, May 5, 2009

Progress photo

Well, not progress, really, this is the new starting point.

I’m happy to report that I did the South Beach Phase 2 Total Body Workout yesterday, which targets, um, the total body. You’re supposed to use a step for a couple of moves, and since I don’t have one I used the bed of the treadmill instead. It seemed like the perfect height and I got to watch television at the same time!

And for the past three days I’ve managed to down two bottles of water each day. Baby steps!

Thanks so much for your thoughtful and encouraging comments. I wish I hadn’t done this so many times before in my life. For those of you who are younger than I, and especially those of you who are losing a significant amount of weight for the first time – figure out now what you need to do for maintenance. I know you’ve read all the same magazine articles that I have, and they’re right. You can’t pick up where you left off once you reach your weight-loss goal. Maintenance is for a lifetime.

Unlike riding a bicycle, it doesn’t get easier to lose weight again once you’ve done it. It actually gets harder. And harder. It takes more vigilance over food, more consistency with exercise, more effort in general to shed pounds with each successive attempt. Once you hit that magic number, don’t let yourself go more than five pounds above it. If I’d done that the last time I was a size 8, I wouldn’t look like that woman in the picture at the top of this post.

2 comments:

Emmett said...

Nice blog.

Anonymous said...

Having someone deliberately take a full-body picture of us at points along the way is important so we can see the changes - but it's so hard to do because we usually don't like what we see. The camera sees us in ways we don't see ourselves.

I think you look cute, happy, and determined.

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