Here's to New Health

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So, since people have seemed interested via Facebook about these new recipes we've been trying out, I figured I'd start a bloggy thing to let people in on the innermost workings of my new lease on health.

First, the background:

Growing up, I was always what my mother called, "full."  80th percentile or higher in my weight charts, but a little on the short side.  I entered college 5'3" and 135 pounds.  Determined not to gain the fabled "Freshman 15," I got a job cleaning for 2 hours every morning, bought a lot of Slim-Fast, and essentially ate pretty much what I wanted and exercised more.

Two and a half years later, I was a slim and trim 120 pounds on my wedding day, though still unsatisfied with my weight, due to years of being one of the heaviest among my friends and peers.  Lots of body image issues here, folks.

Anyway, the 8 months after my wedding included among them 8 new pounds, and then I got pregnant and gained 30 more.

Baby, Postpartum Depression, and lack of decent weather in Wyoming to exercise lead to me losing about 15 of those pounds, then gaining them back.  We moved to Colorado, I started exercising, and again, like in college, ate what I wanted and exercised more.  Little did I know that my metabolism had changed with the baby and I gained a bunch of weight fall of 2011.

In order to earn money, my husband (D) and I decided to start donating plasma.  March of 2012, I heard the reception tech tell me that I weighed 151 pounds.  That was it.  That was the clincher.  I am far too short to weigh that much after just one baby.

That day I decided that we needed to change.  My oldest brother told me about something called the Slow-Carb Diet, which consists of, 6 days a week, eating eggs, lean meat, beans, and veggies (the real ones, not the ones with seeds) and that's it.  The 7th day you eat your fill of whatever you want and then some.  I won't go into the science behind it now.  Bottom line?  20 pounds lost in a little over a month.

So, for those of you keeping track, I was down to 131.  Then I hit a plateau.  I didn't know what to do, so we just kept on keeping on.

July I spent out of state and just managed to maintain my weight loss, while exercising furiously to balance out what my dear mother fed me daily.

August we went back on Slow Carb in earnest, and kept losing the same 3 pounds week after week, then gaining it all back on our Cheat Days.  Then we decided to switch it up and go South Beach, which, after much research and reading, seemed the most practical option for the way we've been living.

I'll go into my first day on South Beach in my next post.