Four and a half years ago my sisters and I looked at each other, looked at our kids and said "how did we start out that thin and end up looking like we do now?" Our father had also recently gotten out of the hospital after having a heart attack and stroke. He was in his late 70's so it wasn't THAT surprising that he had these, but unlike his father and brother who both died when they had heart attacks in their early 70's, my father lived through his, and the reason the doctors said he did was that he was so strong to begin with. He never smoked, he walked and ran and gardened daily, he ate really well and kept his weight down.

That was all the convincing I needed. My sisters and I all supported each other in trying to lose weight, but we didn't follow any kind of formal program. Each of us (and a couple of friends who eventually joined us in this quest) set our own goals and figured out on our own how we'd get there.

I went with the pretty basic, tried and true method of exercising more and calorie counting. At first I was just walking regularly, then I upped that to jogging and doing pilates. I did some kind of exercise six days a week, but never more than 40 minutes each day. Over seven months I lost 30 pounds and kept it off for several years. I didn't have any real goal weight--I think that I was o.k. with anything from 130 (my weight when I got married) to 140 (my pre-pregnancy weight), since both of those were in the normal BMI range for my height. My weight stabilized at around 135 and stayed there until I started training for the triathlon I did last summer. At that point I actually gained weight because I was exercising so much harder and more frequently that I developed massive thigh muscles. The day of the triathlon I weighed 143, but I was o.k. with that since my clothes still fit just fine (except for my skinny pants, but that's another story).

And then everything went downhill. In training for the triathlon I did two things wrong: first, I got out of the habit of carefully watching what I ate (didn't really need to since I was burning off calories so efficiently!) and second, I fell and injured my ankle and ignored the injury until after race day. Knowing that my ankle needed some rest to heal, I took a week off from exercising. When I started up again, it still hurt and seemed to be worse (pain going up my leg, with lower back twinges). So I took four weeks off. I didn't change my eating habits to compensate. Started up again, and things were even worse than before. So I went to a doctor, who diagnosed a bad sprain, went to PT and my ankle got stronger but my back got worse. At that point I was in such bad pain that the thought of exercising at all was out of the question. Cycling, oddly, didn't hurt at all but my lower right leg and foot were numb so even though cycling didn't make it worse, I was worried about the lack of sensation and how it might cause problems, so I even stopped cycling.

Between September and the end of December, I put on 15 pounds! Yikes! Turns out I really messed up my SI joint, so I'm going to be in PT for a while yet, but I've been given the o.k. for cycling. Right now it's just on stationary bikes (I admire people who can ride when it's 17 degrees out, but I'm not one of those people!), so I'm looking forward to the weather warming up a bit. And now I'm back to serious calorie counting. I just want my clothes to fit again.

The lesson I've learned from all of this is that keeping my weight stable is going to take pretty much constant attention to my activity level and to what I eat both. I can't pay attention to one and ignore the other. I hate it that I don't have the metabolism I did at 20 years old anymore, when I could eat anything I wanted and stay thin as a rail. I hate it that my life is so busy now that working in exercise takes careful planning instead of "oh, I have an hour and a half until the dining hall opens for dinner. I think I'll go for a run." I hate it that biology is telling me that I'm useless for my ability to reproduce anymore and so now I need to stop using so many resources (I think that's why our metabolism slows down as we age--the human race doesn't need us any more, so please stop using all these calories that the 15 year old fertile people need).

Sarah