161.2 - First Quarter 17lb 8" - How I Did It

4 inches off waist, 2 off tummy, 2 off each thigh, and other smaller achievements

While it seems my weight is unchanged, it really went up 3 pounds over a weekend with guests and is again on it's way down.

Today, I decided to give back and posted the following on 43things

"My goal is "Eating Well for a Year" rather than focusing on losing a certain amount of weight."

How I did it:

1. Beginning last Thanksgiving, I reviewed previous dieting successes and failures and began recording my daily calories and exercise at MyNetDiary
2. From Leo Babauta's Habit Change Cheatsheet, I gained structure and motivation
3. I had a clear goal, my daughter's early summer wedding but I needed insurance to avoid regaining
4. On January 2, I began a blog, A Year of Eating Wisely, making a public commitment to changing my life
5. I set a mini-goal for the first ten pound achievement, "rewarding" myself" with an extra day of Zumba weekly. As weight came off, I began to look forward to exercise.
6. My husband went on a stringent diet and backed off encouraging me with high calorie cooking and daily drinking

Lessons & tips:

* Know yourself, trust yourself.
* If you've ever successfully dieted before, you have a good idea of what
will work for you, what foods you can have around, what situations set
you off. Writing it all down helped clarify my personal behavior
allowing me to define when I would let go and how I would recover.
* The single largest positive factor was "removing my husband's influence", the temptations he brought to the table. He really loves foods and epitomizes lack of self-control. For him success has come from the Ideal Protein diet, paying $$ and eating a highly structured artificial diet (after three weeks he was off insulin, so it works for him).
* For me at age 63, I never again want to eat anything I don't like. That rules out dozens of diets. In the long run, it would be nice to imagine that I will be able to eat anything with abandon, but I know that's unlikely.
* Don't expect to find a perfect diet. My diet evolved week by week thereby avoiding boredom.
* Eat around the edges of the supermarket. I totally avoided the white stuff - bread, pasta, potatoes except on special occasions - it made them more special.
* The long-term goal is to identify foods and situations beyond your control, admit you will occasionally err, and know yourself well enough to believe you can recover.

Helpful Resources:

* MyNetDiary or something like it which required daily calorie counting for a month or two
* ZenHabits for motivation
* ZumbaWorks dance-exercise twice weekly to start; 3x currently
* Allegro Pilates (The Club At Spine And Sport Institute, Vero Beach) once weekly has made incredible improvements in my posture and balance
* Blogger daily at first until I found my rhythm, an analysis and journal of success and failure
* The Skinny by Louis Aronne, MD for insights to reorder what and when to eat
* Joe's Goals is set up to open every morning to remind me to track my weight daily

Day 85