For much of my life I have been more than a little heavy. There are lots of "reasons" why I ate too much, and they will likely come out in the posts, but most of that is food under the bridge.
Four years ago we moved to North Carolina's Southern Outer Banks which are also know as the Crystal Coast. One of the reasons we moved was so we could be outside more and get better exercise.
It has turned out to be a great place to live with lots of things to do outside like walking on the beaches, hiking on area trails, riding my bike, swimming, and kayaking.
So we were able to get out more, and I did get more exercise. However, the exercise often left me exhausted. I had a knee that I hurt years ago that started bothering me a lot. When I mowed our substantial yard with our walk behind Toro mower, I was beat.
It turned out that moving to the coast had also brought us in close proximity to lots of fried treats like fresh flounder and oyster. We also found some great local restaurants, and my weight continued the steady creep upwards that began after we moved off the farm in 1984.
There had been a period from college through my years on the farm that my weight had been under control. When I took a job with Apple Computer in 1984, the change from sixteen hours a day of hard physical labor and eating at home to business travel, corporate stress, and lots of meals outside the home brought lots of pounds with it.
I had some periods of dieting where I had some success, but there was always another business trip and never enough time to do as much exercise as was needed to keep my weight down. The cold hard facts were that I was eating more than I was burning off.
Finally this spring my wife, and I decided that we had to do something to change our ways. We knew that going on another diet was not going to cut it. So we decided to change the way that we eat and how we treat food.
That is a tall order for two people who grew up in the South at the feet of some absolutely great cooks. My mother was famous for her legendary fried chicken. My wife is a great cook in her own right. Her pot roast or clam chowder are meals that anyone would envy. As you can see from my homepage, we have a fair number of family recipes including my own classic Southern pimento cheese.
However, we knew that we had to change the way we eat, or we were going to eat ourselves to death. We have a wonderful two year old granddaughter, and we would both like to be around to see her grow up.
We are now about seven months into our life style changes. I have lost close to sixty pounds and my wife has lost thirty-five pounds. We have figured out a way to control our weight. There are no magic shortcuts. I am losing about eight pounds a month, and I hope by next spring to have lost over 100 pounds.
I am confident that I can do it. This is not some diet where we are at risk of falling off the wagon. This is a new way of living, and we are actually enjoying it. My wife and I eat differently, but we are both still losing weight.
In fact we both think that we eat like a king and queen, but we are eating different foods than we used to eat. We are also paying a lot of attention to how much we eat. We have a digital scale on the table with us for most meals. I have become a member of CalorieKing.com and have used it regularly to help us both.
It is not easy to lose weight when you are over sixty and love food, but our experience shows that anyone can do it, if you eat the right foods and limit your eating out to special occasions.
This blog will be a journal of getting to that one hundred pounds of weight loss for me and fifty pounds for my wife.
We already see a big difference in the quality of our lives. I rarely take naps unless I fall asleep watching a football game. I can mow the yard and still do lots of other work without being exhausted. My knee that was bothering me rarely gives me any trouble. I am back to getting some regular exercise other than mowing the lawn. We both now have closets full of clothes that are too big instead of too small.
I recently had a physical which confirmed my weight loss. It also showed that eating right along with the weight loss has resulted in a good report on about everything they could measure. I am looking forward to seeing how much progress I make in another year.
We plan to share new recipes that we have created along the way, and how we approach the grocery store these days. We will also talk about how we have motivated ourselves to completely change the way we approach food.
I am hoping this blog helps others and ends up helping make my journey to 100 pounds of weight loss that much easier. By next spring I hope to report that our weight loses are liking losing a person.
