And so it begins

Well, a while back I declared that I would join Mike James on the quest to lose some weight. As it turns out, I didn't really do a whole lot to start trying to lose weight. I blame the separation that I'm going through for a lot of things, but this laziness and eating out of boredom will have to be pinned to something else entirely, a deeply rooted evil: my grandmother. Sure, it's not very nice, but the truth rarely is. My mom and I lived with her for a while when my parents got divorced (funny to see how history repeats itself in my family, as I'm living with my parents now also through a divorce), and that's when I started to gain weight. This was in about the first grade. Every day when I came home from school, freshly baked cookies or a bowl overflowing with peanut M&M's awaited my arrival. While watching the afternoon cartoons, I would mindlessly snack on the goodies available, hungry or not. It become comforting, normal, and even encouraged for me to snack pretty much the entire afternoon. I don't recall how long we lived with my grandparents, but I think it was around three years. That's plenty of time for me to learn a habit. While I'm many years away from that time long ago, it's still a nasty habit that I have with me today. What really gets my goat is when my granny says that I've put on wieght. Yeah, thanks for that. So here I am, ready yet again (as stated a couple posts ago) to plunge into yet another attempt at dieting. The first steps started today: Smaller portion sizes and no eating after 8:00 pm. I've also dropped french fries from the ordering menu (though the golden crispy strands of delicious death will be greatly missed). I'll stick with this for a week. Not a huge change, but a subtle one that I can stick too. Next week, I'll knock soda out. I'll also evaluate my portion sizes again and see how I'm doing. The biggest step I need to take is to start mixing in more veggies, so that will happen as I make one meal of each day some sort of salad (insert salad tossing joke here). So next week will be a bit harder, but again, something I think that will be easy to stick to. The next hurdle is exercise. With my schedule as described in a previous post, it's hard to get a regular plan for activity when I don't ever have a regular schedule. That's the single biggest problem I have in taking the diet plan to the next step: making the time to have a routine for exercise. If I can go full time at my retail job, I can drop painting. I'm in desperate need of some quality AG time, and exercise would be a great thing to do with it if I had some. Wish me luck.