If I had one wish for myself when I was fat it would have been that there was an easy fix for obesity.  Being heavy was a weight that never left me (no pun intended)!  Every day I would wake up and pray that my problem would somehow be fixed.  I would hope for amazing willpower and dedicated devotion.  I would wish I didn’t love chocolate and that I would miraculously fall in love with vegetables.  It never happened.  Day by day and year by year would go by with my weight increasing rather than decreasing.  Over and over I would try to lose weight. 

As my weight got increasingly out of control my desire for a magic fix increased exponentially.  Five pounds gained on the scale turned into ten times the wish for an easy way out.  While wishing for an easy fix, I found comfort and happiness in fast food eaten on the sly, M&M’s by the bag and butter slathered on homemade biscuits.  Obviously none of those foods helped me lose weight!  In fact they helped me add the pounds even quicker.  All the wishing in the world couldn’t provide me with the one thing I wanted – to be healthier and more fit.

It wasn’t until I intensely focused my mind on weight loss and forgot about wishing and hoping that I had success.  All the hoping in the world didn’t help me lose weight, but gaining a strong focus on the problem at hand did.  By spending time working hard at making good food choices and not worrying about how long it was going to take, I was able to be satisfied with small successes and see them in context of the big picture.  Weight loss success isn’t achieved overnight, but by focusing day by day on your goals and having realistic expectations for results you can be successful.

Losing all that weight wasn’t easy, and there wasn’t any magic involved.  The magic came when I stopped wishing and started working.  Time after time I made choices that were life affirming.  I would encourage you to begin making positive changes so you will finally get on your way to achieving your weight loss and fitness goals.  Diane