*In honor of the worldwide week of weight loss plans, I am reposting my weight loss story post from last January! I have put on a few pounds, so I am joining the nation in trying to watch what I’m eating! :) Hope it may inspire some of you all! Plus who doesn’t love a good before & after shot?!

It’s the first week of January, and we all know what that means, right?  Time to start thinking and wishing and writing about what we want to happen this year.

Most of the time, #1 on the list is weight loss.

I’ve shared my own weird weight loss journey, but I’ll recap briefly.

•  Was a skinny little chicken legs growing up.
•  Gradually put on weight.
• Had 2 kids.
• Decided to lose weight before our big 10th anniversary cruise.
•  Weight loss resulted in surprise pregnancy #3.

•    And then finally, my weight loss reattempt last Spring.

I shared in June my beginning weight loss success of 12 lbs and even featured a few fabulous people who had GREAT stories and before and afters.

I still repeat Steven’s {who lost a whopping 100 lbs} advice… Basically,it’s much more important what you eat than how much you exercise.  Sorry, but 9 times out of 10 you are not going to lose weight by only exercising and not watching your calorie intake.

It’s so easy to count your calories with loseit.com.  I’ve heard so many success stories!!  {Amy, Carla, Rachel}    Lose It says, “96% of users who use it for 4 weeks lose weight!”  It won’t work, though, if you don’t stick with it.

Yes, it’s annoying to enter every solitary thing that passes your lips.  Yes, it’s annoying to have to count pretzels and google the calorie count of pickles {they are super low cal, btw}, but that is the point.  There were times that I refrained from eating something because I just didn’t want to have to go to the trouble of entering it in!

It’s important, especially in the beginning, to track your cals religiously.  It’s even better if you can stick with the counting even longer, but I have to confess that I fell off the lose it wagon once I hit 15lbs and just tried to watch what I ate. As a result the weight loss then became quite snail paced.

It took another four months or so, but I eventually reached a HUGE milestone.

A milestone I had been shooting for when I first tried to lose weight for our cruise back in the day.

In October, I finally hit my original goal.  I lost TWENTY POUNDS!!!

And for fun cuz I’m crazy like that, I even took a pic wearing the same ‘before’ clothes to really see the difference…

Isn’t that the most horrific before pic?  Why do I look so angry?

After months of staring at unworn clothes, I finally decided it was definitely time to go through my closets and drawers and clean out my former sized clothing.

I have to admit I was actually very sad to part with a lot of them!  They were some faves of mine…  :(

One giant huge perk though of cleaning out clothes that don’t fit??

Having an empty closet that NEEDS to be filled…  Ha!

It’s the first week of the year.  A BRAND NEW one… fresh and ready for all of us to achieve great new things.

Watching your calorie intake is NOT just a temporary thing… a momentary diet plan to shed some weight.  Think of it as a new way of life.  All of us have so many calories to spend {aka EAT} each day.  Just don’t go over {too often} and watch the pounds fly off.

Can’t wait to hear of YOUR success.