3 years, 3 months into long term weight maintenance- boring as heck and happy dance combo! June 2015

Oh yeah!!!  3 years, 3 months. 3.25 years. In one way my update will be boring as heck. In another way, I'll spend part of today happy dancing my way around for another quarter year into long term weight maintenance.

I have photos, I have graphs. You know the drill if you are a long time reader and before and after photos or graphs trigger you.

Lets get to the statistics, shall we?

Starting weight: 187.4
Current weight: 118.4
Current maintenance range: 113-119
Age 49
Years in weight maintenance: 3.25 years
Menopause: 2+ years
Height :5' 1"

Tools: Paleo-ish, lower carb approach- just eat real foods, better sleep, modified AIP, walking 12, 000-16,000 steps per day, daily weighing and graphing my weight, strength training 2X per week, sprinting occasionally, abstaining from all grains, most processed sugar (85% chocolate works for me, most days- small amount), no dairy, no legumes, no nuts (high inflammation).  I pray to a higher power and meditate, too. Nothing too woo-woo.

Love or hate my tools, doesn't matter.  Find what works for you. I woke up today NOT wanting to binge eat. After 40 years. I'm now 3 years, 3 months into long term recovery. Yeah! I'll take that.
In one way, my updates are so, so boring. Yawn... another similar post. In other ways, I'm privileged to be here, providing a long term weight maintenance update.

May 2015 was a tough month stress wise. It brought stress and uncharted territory. It brought life and ups and downs and I can manage that by:

What works for me:
1. Rely on what works and using change management to easy my way into the new normal.  I can say I'm prioritizing myself.

2.  I can use non food techniques to manage stress. Stress does not =putting binge foods in my pie hole. Food and false fixes never helped me. Ever. No sugar or grain will fix these issues.

3. I  can use meditation, reaching out to others, and long walks and better sleep habits to maintain my weight and my health.

What didn't work in the past:
1. Not managing life change, as it happened.
2. Using food to attempt to soothe my feelings and moderating sugars & grains.( Skinny Cow ice cream and cinnamon toast never fixed it!). Sugar and grains only fueled my binge eating. Especially while sitting on the couch watching the Biggest Loser! LOL.
3. Not using multiple techniques to manage my health.

All right. Graphs follow. I suspect keeping my gut bacteria in check really helps, but EVERYTHING is highly theoretical at this point. I'm fascinated by the emerging science. All the proof I need for myself is "I feel better". Yeah!    More blog posts soon, at least that's the plan. I favor sleeping over blogging any day.Onward.

Oh, be sure to check out David's graphs at Keep It Up David. Kudos for looking at the big picture in long term weight maintenance, David.