God & Determination

There are two things that helped me start and stay on the program I am now using.

God was the first thing I needed to begin and maintain what has become a life change for me.  God is the one who helps and encourages me to stay true to this eating pattern.  I know I can turn to Him whenever I feel discouraged, like when I hit the plateaus were I stop losing or go on a rollercoaster ride of gaining and losing.  I always know He is there for me, so I do not become completely discouraged and give up.

Determination was the second thing I needed.  Now, I have been determined before, but what I lacked was a platform whereby I could make a change and monitor what I was eating.  I have to admit that I have felt determined in the past, and the desire to lose weight has been with me for a very long time; the problem was that I did not know how to go about it.  Oh yes, there is the concept of just eating less, but how can you do that when you don't want to give up certain foods.  That was one of the major factors that stopped me many times before I even started.

As I said before, my doctor made many suggestions, and one of those suggestions was counting calories.  Now, anyone who is of the older generations and remembers what it was like to try to count calories will remember that you had record everything on paper, you had to look up foods in books, and you had a real hard struggle with meals that came from your favorite recipes or from restaurants. It was not an easy task and became frustrating very fast, and what generally happened was that you gave up.  Absolute frustration that leads to giving up puts an end to anything whether you have the determination or not, and even knowing that God is on your side may not be enough to keep you going in the fact of frustration so overwhelming that you do not know how to make something work effectively.  With that said, so ends any attempt at losing weight, and if you lost anything, you immediately gain it all back.

So what if you have determination and God on your side?  How do you go about gaining your GOAL?  That is where the platform came in for me.  MYFITNESSPAL was a God send for me, and the fact that I even stumbled upon it was great.  Here was something that would count the calories for me, and not even just that, it also had the calorie count for restaurants and fast food places.  I could also add my own recipes and it would give me a calorie count for my meals.  With that said, I past the first major roadblock in my personal goal to not only lose weight but to make a life change in eating that I could live with.  That fact was also one of the major roadblocks in my quest for losing weight.

If whatever way you want to use to lose weight, it has to be something you can live with for the rest of your life.  Any diet you choose is never going to be something you can live with because all of them are to last only as long as you are losing weight.  They do you cover what to do to maintain that weight lose.  Myfitnesspal has a setting for maintaining your weight, and for those who need to gain rather than lose, there is also a setting for that.

Let me, right now, warn anyone who decides to use this wonderful app to lose weight that it is not a magical app that make weight loss easy.  Weight loss is never easy, and anyone who convinces themselves or anyone else that is lies.  Nothing worth really having in this life is easy; there will always be struggles.  It might start easy or seem to, but you then hit areas in your life that make it much more difficult and that is where God and determination step in to help, at least for me.  You see, I know that my determination to succeed is coming from God and that God helped me find a platform that would work with my determination.

So how much have I lost?  Well between January to April, I lost another 26.8 pounds, and I was not ready to stop there.  Was it easy to shed those next pounds?  Heck No!  It was a struggle, but once again God and determination were on my side.  Between that 26.8 pounds and 25 pounds I lost before that, I have seen a total loss of 51.8 pounds; I first-time achievement for me.

I was not done at the point; I still had more to go before I would reach my goal, but I was not going to give up, become frustrated, or lose heart even as more changes in my eating had to change to continue on my personal road to success.