Finally losin’ it

I’ve been lurking on Roni’s Web site for a while now, and finally decided to start my own blog.

I’m one of those people who’s been struggling to lose weight all my life. I thought I found the answer in 2003, when I started the Atkins diet. Lost 105-ish pounds in two years, going from 276 to 169. It was easy, too. I LOVED eating bacon and eggs for breakfast and burgers (without the bun) for lunch. I didn’t even miss the bread, pasta and potatoes I thought I couldn’t give up.

But then I met … The Boyfriend, who loves to watch me eat — and not healthy things, like salad. I fell off the low-carb wagon — hard. Over the next two years, I re-gained about 70 of those lost pounds. And when I tried to go back on the low-carb diet, I found I couldn’t stick to it anymore.

Enter Weight Watchers. I write a column for the food page of the Arizona Daily Sun, in Flagstaff, Ariz. It frequently focuses on my weight loss journey. One day, the PR person from WW sent me an e-mail asking if I’d like to join WW — for free for six months.

I struggled with that question for about a week. I’d tried to follow the menus from WW magazine before, without the benefit of actually joining, and found myself so hungry that I wanted to start chewing on the furniture ’round about Day 3. But finally, I decided that it couldn’t hurt to try. Certainly nothing else I’d tried lately was working.

So I e-mailed back with a “yes” and last August, I joined WW — free through the end of the year. It has worked well enough that now I’m paying for it. I’ve lost 25.8 pounds since late August — and that’s with more than a few Boyfriend-induced detours along the way. (He still loves to watch me eat, unfortunately. And since I love TO eat, we’re at a bit of an impasse. He says he’ll stop encouraging me to order dessert, and does for about a week. Then its back to our old habits.)

I’m not sure where this blog will take me, but I’m excited to find out. Welcome to my world of weight loss.