A few years ago I saw a picture of myself at a temple in Penang, Malaysia and decided instantly that I needed to go on a diet in a big, bad, ugly way. I had several chins and looked pregnant, and wasn't happy about any of it.
After doing a lot of research I decided on a low carb diet based on the book _Life Without Bread_, which I preferred over the Atkins thang. This was a year or two before the Atkins craze took hold.
Over the next year to a year and a half I dropped around 30 pounds, purposefully not doing any regular exercise. I wanted to see what kind of weight I could sustain without working out before getting back into that groove. It was very successful... not easy, but successful.
Unfortunately, with the success came complacency and I started slowly re-adding more carbs back into my diet. For a while this was fine, I gained maybe five pounds back total and was still feeling very good about the whole thing. I'm not sure what tipped me, but now I've gained another ten pounds on top of that and my pants are getting very tight again, and I'm looking back to see what went wrong.
The typical problems with eating too many carbs have been haunting me: I'm hungry all the time, constantly snacking, craving carbs, and rarely feeling full even when I know I am. It got so bad over the last year or so that I've been eating candy again, and stress just makes this spiral worse.
I suppose that the one bright side is that I've only put on the amount of weight that I have, it could have been much worse.
So now I'm back to the strict low carb diet and will be much, much more careful about adding any back in once I'm down to a reasonable weight again. Additionally, this time I'm working out.
I would really, really like to avoid getting diabetes.
I'm on my second day of my new old diet and it is already having a dramatic effect. Just cutting out my breakfast banana has made it easy to make it to lunch without feeling hungry at all, and yesterday for the first time in a long time I didn't have any desire to have a mid-afternoon snack. I brought low carb snacks in to work just in case (almonds and landjaeger) but didn't need them at all. Just had lunch and I feel nice a full, and expect to be able to make it clear to dinner again without needing more food.
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