Losing Weight in 2010

The year 2010 found me the 55 year old mother of ten children, three of whom had been adopted since I had turned 50 and were six years old and under. I also had two teenagers and a young adult still living at home. I found myself feeling tired and achy.

For a while, I just accepted it as something that comes with aging and yet still having young children. But my teenagers were not happy. As homeschoolers, they wanted to get out of the house sometimes, and having a tired mother who didn't want to make the effort to leave home was not going over very well. I knew I was not so old that I couldn't still enjoy life with my children. Something had to change.

The first thing I decided to do was go to the chiropractor and see if we couldn't work on the aches. At first, I went every week, then every couple of weeks, then less often until I was going every six weeks. It did wonders for me, and I began to feel a lot better.

But I knew that wasn't enough. Although my weight was on the high end of the BMI (Body Mass Index), I still felt heavy. I decided it was time to lose some of it.

I knew whatever I did needed to be a permanent change, not just a diet. And the only way to lose weight is to eat less. So I decided to go ahead and eat like I usually did, just less. I made a concentrated effort to cut everything I ate in half. If I wanted a candy bar, I ate it, but first I cut it in half and gave the other half away. I ate ice cream, pie and hamburgers; I just cut all my portions in half, first.

It worked, and the weight began to drop off rapidly. I had in mind to drop ten pounds, but more than that melted away, and I eventually lost fifteen, which was even better.

Now that the weight was off, I wanted to eat more healthily so that I would feel even better. I already had the "Raw Food Detox Diet" by Natalia Rose, so I decided to put that into place once more. I used stage three of her five plans, which was to eat raw until dinner. Then I cooked for my family, and ate a cooked meal with them, still eating half of what I used to eat. It wasn't as hard as I thought to eat raw until dinner. My young teenage daughter and I began to make fun shopping trips to Central Market in Fort Worth, a grocery store that sells organic produce. It was amazing how much better the fruits and vegetables tasted, and we would treat ourselves to one or two luxury items as well: wonderful bath salts for me, and for my daughter, a perfect rose to hang in her room.

I also began to make the "green lemonade" Ms. Rose suggests in her book, something I could never force myself to drink before. I juiced a lemon, an apple, a stalk of celery, and some leafy green lettuce or spinach each morning. Sometimes I added ginger, and recently, I have begun to add a spoonful of molasses for the iron content and a spoonful of Bragg's apple cider vinegar. It hits my stomach pretty hard, so I hold my breathe and gulp it down, having a little bit of water to chase it with before I breath. As awful as that sounds, after a few mornings, I found that I would wake up craving this juice. It made me feel good for hours.

Although I don't always eat raw until dinner, I try to stick as close as I can to eating either raw foods or healthy, homemade soup until night. The weight has stayed off, and I feel years younger!