My Story – the beginning
Like many weight loss stories, mine is a story of many ‘ups’ and several ‘downs’. I struggled with my weight as a teenager, got it under control when at university… slipped a little… sorted myself out again, and then succeeded in getting down to a UK size 10/12 by the time I was married. Amazingly I returned to that size after the birth of my first child. However, two children later I measured as a UK size 18 and I haven’t measured less than a 18 since then – and that was 20 years ago.
The last 10 years have been a real struggle. Once the children got beyond the age where I was literally running around after them, I gradually began to put on weight. I wasn’t particularly overeating and I was still fit and reasonably active, but I started getting heavier anyway.
Then, about three years ago, I fell really badly down some stone steps and hurt my hip and back. It became very painful to move and since then I have only been able to walk for a short distance at a time.
Now I was moving even less. Before I knew it, if I wanted to get back to that size 10/12 weight, I would need to lose 100lbs.
100lbs!
Even worse, my weight was still creeping upwards. I couldn’t even manage to hold it steady. I had become hungry all the time. Dieting was no longer working, in fact it had become incredibly unpleasant and unsustainable.
The pain was (is) permanent. My extra weight was making the pain and the mobility problems worse and, in return, my lack of movement was adding to my weight problem.
It wasn’t good.
The turnaround started with a question. “What would happen if I cut wheat out of my diet?” I was mainly thinking about bread at the time and I’m not even sure where the question came from. Even so, I let the question rattle around my head for a month or two before I did anything about it.
The next question was what would a balanced diet without wheat look like? This time I moved quickly. Within an hour of asking myself this question I was looking up information about the Paleo diet and had committed myself to doing a “Whole30” 30 day challenge – starting the very next week. Wheat wasn’t going to be the only thing I was cutting out of my diet!
That was the beginning of this weight loss journey. “How to Lose 100lbs” will be a regular series of posts here on justfreda.com, looking at weight loss and the Paleo diet, and following my personal weight loss journey. If you would like to follow along, please subscribe to my blog’s rss feed. or follow me on Twitter or Facebook.