Hi everybody! I have some exciting news. You know how this blog is called the DOUBLE Chin Diary? Well – it’s not just double because of the amount of rolls under your chin, it’s double because now there are two bloggers at the Double Chin Diary! Please give a warm welcome to my older sister April. Here’s some things you should know about April – April is 29 years old, an animal lover, a major environmentalist in that she spends her free time picking trash up off the beach (seriously saintly), loves working with kids, and she travels to all kinds of cool places all the time. April will be stopping by every now and then to chronicle her journey towards losing 30 pounds by the time she turns 30 in April. (That’s a lot of Aprils!) I’m looking forward to seeing how our stories match – and how they differ. Thanks for reading and have a great day!

Here I am on my 29th birthday – celebrating with yummy food.

Seven years ago I managed to lose 50 pounds with the amazing and classic style of eating right and working out more. It was irritatingly hard the first few months that I struggled through workouts and eating whole grains and it wasn’t until I had a break down on the scale that I finally started to see a change. The change surely wasn’t on the scale since I was in tears, the change was within myself.

A friend that I had met at the gym consoled me as I cried about my disappointment in myself and questioned why I wasn’t losing weight yet. My friend then stepped on the scale and showed me how she weighed almost exactly the same as me. Being the same height as myself too, her simple action made me A LOT better about myself. I had never thought of my friend as a fat woman so seeing that we weighed the same meant that surely my body couldn’t be THAT horrible.

I decided that I would just work harder on the exercise and keep at it. I even managed to get a job working at the small women-only circuit training gym. After that initial break down on the scale, my weight started to creep off pound by pound. I would go down two pounds one week then gain back a pound in the next. That pattern continued for a solid four months until I had lost fifty pounds. I hit a plateau and it seemed like no matter what I did to lose weight, no matter how much I worked out or how wonderfully light I ate; the weight just wasn’t leaving.

I managed to keep the weight off for a few years until I started to go back to my old ways of eating fast food, drinking soda, and working out MUCH less. As it tends to happen, that kind of behavior only resulted in me packing on the pounds until one day I noticed I was a mere 11 pounds from the heaviest I had been before I ever lost any weight at all.

That is where I am today.

I feel disappointed in myself for letting my weight come back but I have hope in knowing that I did it once before and now I’ll just have to do it again.

I’m starting small and cutting back on my sugar intake. I’ll give up my precious Taco Bell again that has been my treat of the summer. I’ve begun taking walks and hikes again. I have even been pretty routine about my doing my weighted hula hoop. It will take some time and a lot of effort but I know that eventually I’ll get back on the road I need to be on.

How do you deal with getting back on the “weight-loss train” when you’ve been off it for so long?