The Bev Diet (part 1): if I can do it, anybody can!

 

I’ve lost 45 lbs over the past 10 months (still going strong!) and am pleased--not to mention surprised--with these results. This is NOT a story involving Ozempic, by the way, but partly an old-fashioned one, involving calorie counting and low impact exercise, leavened with more modern touches: digital scales, the Samsung Health app.

Friends and acquaintances have asked me how I’m doing it, and I thought I would get back into blogging a bit by describing it in full.

The biggest thing, to my mind, is that if I can do it, anybody can. I repeat:

IF I CAN DO IT, ANYBODY CAN!

To explain why I say the above, a bit about me:

I’ve struggled with my weight much of my life: I went on Weight Watchers for the first time at 10 years old. I weighed 130 lbs then, which rose to just over 165 lbs by the next time I hit WW, at the ripe old age of 14 and a half…I managed to keep my weight mostly under control through younger adulthood, lost 30+lbs after my second kid (of three) using UltraSlimFast. And so on.

So I’ve dieted, off and on, much of my life. Which I’d come to believe is really not great for my metabolic rate, which ranges somewhere between slug and sloth…

The past 10-15 years, whenever I’d dieted, I’d used a combination of low carb and lots of aerobic exercise (and, latterly, Zumba). Let me just say here that I think keto is nuts and low carb unsustainable…but maybe that's just me.

But COVID was kind of the end of my dietary self-control, such as it was: “if the world is coming to an end, what does it matter how much Ben & Jerry’s I consume?” was more or less my mindset through much of 2020, 2021, and 2022. COVID was the end of a lot of things...I had NEVER binged ice cream like that before in MY ENTIRE LIFE!!

Dammit.

My weight ballooned to heights I’d never thought possible, significantly BEYOND what I weighed when I was nine months pregnant…unhappy days.

I’m in my early 60s, work freelance and part-time (very!), am short, not very athletic, have three adult kids and one grand-child. My life is relatively secure and low stress (“privileged” is the term du jour, although I think I've paid my dues). So I felt this was as good a time as I’d ever get to do something I’d always wanted to do: lose the weight for good.

So that’s what I’m doing, and in the next several posts, I will describe how. I hope this narrative will help someone who wants to do the same. Remember, if I can do it, anyone can!

Please note: this blog is meant for informational not medical purposes; please consult your healthcare provider as necessary before embarking on any weight loss project.