This is a quote from an entry on my blog in early January:

“I really don’t want this to be a flash-in-the-pan sort of effort. That’s part of why I decided to write about it here. But I have written about weight loss efforts before, and as we all know, they weren’t successful. I don’t want to make excuses for past failures. I just want to focus on the task at hand.”

Well, as you might have guessed the early efforts were not successful. However, it is not all due to a lack of trying. It was due to a lack of success and therefore a lack of motivation to stick with a program.

In April, I went to a homeopathic MD who ran some tests and put me on thyroid medication. She also recommended the Fat Flush diet. This is a low-carb plan than includes lots of herbal supplements, not all the animal fat of Atkins, and the addition of Omega-3 fats like flaxseed oil. I sort of half started the plan the third week of May. Two weeks later when I went to my follow-up doctor’s appointment, I had lost 9 pounds. I started the plan more seriously and added several herbal supplement. In a week I lost another 3 pounds. I had a bit of a plateau for 2 weeks, and I added a couple of other supplements, and now I’ve lost another 4 pounds. So in 5 weeks, I have lost 16 pounds. I have hesitated to blog about this because I have been afraid to “jinx” myself. (I know, this isn’t a very Christian concept.) But my initial losses are encouraging after major attempts with diet and exercise (consistent and long-term, BTW) that led to little weight loss and ultimately a downward spiral emotionally that actually led to more weight gain.

The bottom line is: I need to stay on this plan and get healthier. I see the doctor again at the end of August. That’s about 9 weeks. I am hoping to lose 2 pounds a week at least, which makes my goal by the doctor’s appointment to be a total of 34 pounds.

Hopefully, my next post about my losses will come sooner than this one did since I started out in January.