Decision

I have been struggling with the issues of health and fitness for 60 years.  Well, okay, maybe that's a stretch.  56 years.  My weight was an issue when I was very young.  My mother tried unsuccessfully to get me to lose weight.  She didn't have a chance at success.  Not when I had an aunt next door who gave me Hershey bars and chocolate milk.  And my dad didn't help, either.  He quickly gave in to my demands for sweets, potato salad, rice and gravy.  So my eating habits and food preferences were set early on.  I remember how proud I was to add corn to my diet - finally, I thought, I'm eating a vegetable.

I've been challenged and encouraged in many different ways by many different people to lose weight.  Nothing ever worked long-term.

Now I am faced with the reality of diabetes, which will devastate my body if I don't control it.  I did very well at the beginning; my nurse practitioner was ecstatic at my results.  However, tax season crumbled away at my ability to stay low-carb, and it has been hard to get back on the wagon again.  Eating high-carb foods leads to eating lots of high-carb foods, which leads to craving high-carb foods.  I would love some chocolate right now.

As I've worked on keeping up the motivation, I've seen plenty of pictures and slogans designed to encourage women to become ultra-fit.  But that will never be me.  Whenever I lose weight, my skin sags, flops and waves around.  It was something that bothered me years ago when I was working out regularly with a trainer.  When I stopped training, and started gaining weight, I had the idea in the back of my mind that the hanging slab that had become my abdomen would fill out and move back up.  That didn't happen.  It continued to hang, just got bigger.

So I'm never going to have a lean silhouette.  All I want is to keep my blood pressure and blood sugar under control, have energy, and be able to move without stiffness and pain limiting my motion.