And the Journey Begins

Dieting Doctor and I are lesbians who celebrated our 17^th anniversary yesterday. We’ve known each other twenty years. Since we’ve been together, we’ve lived in 4 states, 5 towns, 9 houses or apartments. We’ve had 5 cars, four sofas, and surprisingly only 3 TVs. We’ve gotten three graduate degrees. We had three cats for most of our journey together, losing them one by one in the last three years. But we have two new little ones who bring us much joy.

In the midst of all of this, we have become very lumpy. Both of us have always been heavy. I, in particular, am a big girl, but in the past five years, I have gained some extra weight, and with more years on me (I’m in my late 40s), this has taken its toll on my ability to move around the world as I want to.

So we concocted this plan – a trip – a big wonderful trip to celebrate our 20^th anniversary in 2013. And to take the opportunity of this trip, we both need to lose weight, and regain the flexibility and endurance that such a trip will take by going into training for it. We are giving ourselves a significant amount of time to achieve this goal, because we both understand that we have to change many things about our lives, and that takes time.

To start with, we are following a program that was suggested to us by a doctor in one of our towns, in one of those states, in one of those other years we’ve been together – called the LEARN Program. The company that set up the LEARN Program is now defunct, but we’ve got the book, and have done it before. It’s a 12 week program that is organized around behavior modification. It involves tracking food and increasing activity and understanding how you eat and why you eat, and what foods you eat. We understand that this is just a jumping off point to the process, of course. Dieting Doctor would like to try Weight Watchers; I will do that if I don’t have to go to meetings. Nothing makes me feel queerer than going to WW meetings….

So here we go. We’re actually in week 3 of LEARN. We will be setting up appointments with our MD this week to talk this all out with him. And we will track our progress and experience on this blog.

T minus - 156 weeks

June 20, 2010

PROGRESS

Dieting Doctor - 6 lbs

Dieting Diva - 6 lbs