When we come to that point where we understand once and for all that dieting just makes us gain weight, then we can quit living our lives as a fat person and release the thin person inside.

Marna Goldstein Thrall has discovered this truth and shares the first steps to learning to accept and love ourselves and letting go of the fat self-image we have held on to for so many years.

We are finally settled here in San Felipe and I can no longer offer my travels and lack of roots as an excuse for doing or not doing what I need to be doing.

This morning my sister-in-law and I started a new exercise program… it’s the 5 Day Workout program, which I picked up at Costco a few weeks ago.  Amazon doesn’t carry it so I can’t give you a link for it here.

Having only gone through the first day, I can’t offer much of a review except to state that the first day was tougher than I was ready for.

I recently received a letter from Lucy of DailyBread365.com asking if I would be interested in writing an update of my progress since starting with DB365.  As you can see from the title of this article I have been receiving the DB pages for nearly three months I must admit that I have very little progress to report in the weight loss arena, in fact this morning I got on the scale and discovered a ten pound gain since my last weigh-in at the doctors a few weeks ago.  However, let me qualify that statement a bit.  First I don’t normally weigh myself anymore.  As noted the earlier weigh-in had been mandatory at my annual exam.  The second had been also mandatory, following surgery yesterday for the removal of my gall bladder.  I’m chalking up the drastic jump to the three or four bags of saline they had pumped into me in the last 24 hours.

Today in Lucy Prideaux’s lessons I was instructed to visualize and draw the steps to increasing my metabolism.  I am no artist but I’ll give it a shot any way. The instructions say to picture a flame (your metabolism) buring in your stomach and surround it with the five steps you need to keep it burning strongly. They are:

• Balanced meals
• Avoid carbohydrates
• Avoid large meals
• Exercise before breakfast
• Resistance training (my wording)
• I added a sixth item…a reminder to SLOW down and enjoy my food

Photos are courtesy of Freefoto.com

You know that moment when the picture goes from a incomprehensible blur to crystal clear?  Day 43 in Lucy-Ann’s 365 day program says it is a recap so I obviously should have read this fact before but today the words suddenly became clear and made sense. Lucy writes: