The Secret to My Weight Loss

After the birth of my son, I realized I had put on a lot of extra weight. And I don't mean a couple pounds I could walk off in 3 months and be back to my skinny self. No, I gained about 55 pounds. Plus, I was lazy to boot. Not a good combination! I was on the road to a life riddled with conditions caused by obesity. But still I was lazy.

Last October, I woke up one night with a terrible pain in the right side of my back. It turned out to be a kidney stone. After it’s removal, my doctor told me I needed to start drinking more water and that would lower my risk of getting more stones in the future. So I quit drinking Pepsi and replaced it with water. What was the bonus of doing this? Within 8 weeks, I'd lost 15 pounds. I didn't change anything else with my diet, and didn't start exercising.

After Christmas, I was feeling really good about myself. I decided after the New Year started, I'd work on getting myself healthier and back into shape. It was the middle of January that I found another website, which is the point of my story. I came across SparkPeople. This website, www.sparkpeople.com, offers free lifetime memberships.

The site includes a section to enter your diet and fitness goals, where you can enter the type of diet you are following (low carb, vegetarian, etc.), how often you want to exercise, your fitness level, the fitness equipment you have (if any), and how much weight you want to lose and by when. There's a weight tracker for you to use to weigh in.

They say one of the most important things to do when you start a diet is to journal everything you eat. Sparkpeople has a nutrition tracker you can use to enter in all your meals and snacks. If you have trouble planning healthy meals, there's a meal planner that will plan out your meals for you and even give you shopping lists. The nutrition information for thousands of foods has already been entered in the database, but if you can’t find what you ate, you have the ability to add any food that isn’t there.