This January, my wife and I decided to take the unusual step for us and try to get healthy. Eat better, exercise a bit and do other healthy things. We opted to use the Weight Watchers program on the web as a way to help track our progress and get tips to understand what you can eat and in what portions in order to make reaching our goals a success.

 

I have to say, while the first 2 weeks or so were torture, the 'diet' really became quite easy to stick to. Your body gets used to the change and your stomach fills up more quickly just over time as your habits change. And, while we are very good about the diet during the week, the WW program gives you weekly 'bonus points' that we chose to hoard (still do) until the weekend. All of the good cooking and eating occurs from Friday night through Sunday night for us. While we eat anything we want on these weekends, we still tend to be pretty good, and our smaller stomachs tend to help us to not completely overdo it as we just can't eat that much anymore.

 

And the exercising? Piece of cake. Lift weights? No. Run? No. Yoga? Spinning? Tai-bo? No. No. No. Swimming, biking, sports? No. No. No. Our chosen exercise is just plain old walking. I walk 4 miles a session from 2-5 times a week. This is supplemented by working in the yard for a few hours a week, too. That's it.

 

Dining out a problem? Nope. Generally, this is limited to weekends anyway, so it's easy. On the times we 'have to' eat out not on the weekends, you naturally just increase the exercise a tad and skimp on the other meals that day a bit. Piece of cake.

 

So basically, it is all about moderation. It's ok to splurge a bit, as long as you are good most of the time and just do a little exercise. Had I known it would be this easy, I'd have done it long ago.

 

WIML has been sort of my latent inspiration, but all of his talk about working out scared me off. That said, my real inspiration is to get healthy s o that my wife and I will each make it to live to 111, natch.

 

My goal is to lose 64 lbs and to keep it off. I've lost 39.8 lbs so far. I hope to hit the goal by the end of the year.