Okay - boring diet history: I once dropped to 117 unintentionally when I started skydiving. Considering that I was a couch potato and falling out of an airplane isn't that physically exhausting I'm still not sure why this happened. It must have been the adrenaline.

Anyway, I got used to it and regained back to high 130's. I got married; when we moved in together, my husband complained of being overweight and wanting to do something about it. I did a little research and we started a low-fat diet. It worked. He got to 165 (From over 200) and I went down to 124. Both of us were still couch-potatoes.

Our biggest problem was slowly regressing back to our poor eating habits. Jon, to his credit, stays mainly at 180-190 pounds, but I went right back to the high 130's.We have been married since 1999 so we have been yo-yo dieting for 4 years. So, you might wonder: why should this time be different?

My biggest reason for being optimistic is that in 2000 Jon got me to go to the gym with him. The place where I work has one for its employees. Free and convenient! At first he tried to get me to do aerobics - bleah! It's too close to dancing and I have 2 right feet. Then I discovered something - weight training. Holy crap, I have come to love weight training. Despite the flab I could see and feel muscles and I made good progress (at first). It took a while of going to the gym on again and off again, but we finally do it out of habit (in other words, it just feels wrong not to go, like it feels wrong to me to climb into bed and not brush my teeth). That was a big step for us, and a big clue to me as to how to treat a diet.

After initial great gains both of us stalled out on weight gains and did the on again off again diet thing. Up, down, up, down but at least the weight training was a constant.

I'm not going to post weight training information here, not when Mistress Krista has this most excellent site chock full of good information on weight training for women and much of this info applies to men, as well. She also has good sections on diet.

Where was I? Oh, yeah, why this one will be different. See rule 1.e about weight training; I have finally accepted the fact that I can't gain muscle and lose weight at the same time, so I have picked weight loss to do first. I want to develop the habit of eating right - and the first rule is to eat less than I need to maintain. One of the reasons for this blog is to help me keep on track, to not lose focus of my goal.