As of this morning, I’ve lost seventy pounds (70.4 to be exact) since January 2007. I’m excited and proud of myself but I have to say that I’m more relieved than anything else. It sounds kind of crazy but I just realized that it has taken me nine months to get from 60 to 70 pounds. NINE MONTHS! During the past few months I’ve been stuck at the 66 - 64 pound range and it just felt like nothing I did was making it budge. For a long time, it felt like I was never going to get to 70 pounds. This year, I’ve been the thinnest I’ve ever been as an adult so I was starting to wonder if maybe my body just wasn’t capable of losing any more weight.

During the past couple of years, I’ve been mostly losing weight by following the idea of intuitive eating and exercising pretty intensely. I’ve focused on eating fairly healthy food, drinking plenty of water, writing down what I ate, and only eating when I was truly hungry. It is a slow approach but it did work for me, especially coupled with the heavy exercise. But without the exercise, I seemed to only be maintaining my weight.

A couple of weeks ago, I decided that I should try something more structured than what I’ve been doing. I thought about using one of the free food diary sites and counting calories but for whatever reason, that didn’t seem too appealing to me. I decided I wanted to try the online version of Weight Watchers. I did Weight Watchers when I was 22 and sort of developed a chip on my shoulder about their program. At the time, I only managed to lose about 15 pounds and then ended up gaining it all back and then some. I always found those meetings really pointless and I hated being weighed in front of other people (what am I cattle?). And regardless of what they say, it is a diet. But they do emphasize healthy eating and it isn’t too different from what I was eating before, just the portions are a lot smaller. Even though they encourage exercise, they don’t seem to count it into your plan. And that’s been really helpful for me since even though I still workout 5 - 6 times a week, it just isn’t at the same level as when I was running every other day.

I don’t know that I’m at a point where I can unequivocally recommend Weight Watchers. I’m sort of at a different level than most people starting it. I will say that you can lose weight doing it. The main issue is can you stick with it and keep it off - and I think you can only do that if you figure out why you had a weight problem in the first place. It is much deeper than eating the right food and getting some exercise.

But in any case, it has been really exciting to finally break my plateau and to think about hitting my next major milestones - 75 and 80 pounds. It’s also exciting to know that I’m closer than I’ve ever been to my goal weight and that I’m halfway there. I’m hoping I can lose another ten pounds by the end of the year and hopefully get to the 90 pound milestone by the time I turn 30 in March.