Me from about 4 years ago

Good Enough Mother
Weight Control REBOOT! 

I’m actually a little bit embarrassed to be writing this post because writing it means admitting that, on some level, I failed myself. It also means that I’m ready to take control of my life and that means controlling my weight.

I tried to do this in secret first; it didn’t work.  That changes now.

There were a couple of things that conspired to get me to this place, the most recent happened while shooting my new show, Sweet Retreats in Breckenridge, Colorado. As you know Denver is a mile above sea level and  the air is already thin. But the base elevation in Breckenridge is 9600 feet; heck, planes fly at 30,000 feet and they’re pressurized! Carrying my bags and the padding around my hips was tough. Most disconcerting, however, was the pressure on my chest, not to mention the excruciating headache.

Weight gain at middle age is insidious. The jeans you wore all summer are now just a little harder get into and require Herculean effort to button. Pretty soon it’s easier to buy a bigger size and rationalize why; you’re getting older, the dryer is shrinking your pants, they don’t size things the way they used to and so on. Then you start taking pictures but avoiding certain angles because you’ll look “fat”;  soon you avoid getting in them altogether. Trust me, I know.

I  also know how it happens. As mothers, we’re so busy taking care of everyone else that too often, we put our own health on the back burner, something I talk about in the speeches I give around the country. And yet… it happened to me.

Then I had this epiphany, which I laid out on my Facebook page recently.

*I am 7 weeks away from turning 50.

*I have become uncomfortably sedentary the last couple of years.

* I have put on and am carrying around more weight than I need.

*I eat too much and not the right things.

*I need to take better care of this body as I gotta get a few more years out of it.

*I don’t like the way I feel and know it will be hard to care for my family from a hospital bed (or worse). 

Against that backdrop, I’m calling this what it is, weight CONTROL! I’m tired of going on and off diets, cutting out fat, eating only fat, cutting out sugar, eating only fiber, and any number of popular diets that require drastic, dietary changes. The reason I’m doing this slow and steady is because I need a plan that I can actually live with every, single day for the rest of my life.

This is not about getting into size 6 jeans or looking great in a sleeveless dress (wait, I do want that); I’m making this (slow and steady) change because I want to feel good as I enter the second half of my life. I have no illusions about looking like I did two decades ago but I do want to be the best 50-year-old I can be and that’s going to require some effort on my part, more than I’ve been giving.

What weight loss plans have you tried? What were the results?