Losing it - and not planning to look for it again!

So here I am, classified as obese, and I'm losing it. No, not my marbles, though possibly you could be forgiven for thinking so as I'm choosing to document my weight loss on a public forum, which some may say is diet suicide.

No - this year, 2010, is the year I lose the excess weight I'm carrying and let it go for good. I've thought long and hard about whether it's a good idea to do this with everyone else watching, and I've come up with a resounding "I hope so!"

I've been a fulltime writer for nine years. I love social media, such as Facebook, Twitter, YouTube and blogs, and the way it connects with other people, so doing this all on a blog platform feels natural to me. I speak in public a fair bit so I figure people who see me know I'm big, so really I've got nothing to hide behind.

I've been overweight all my life: I was a chubby kid, and was put on a diet at ten that actually just made me put on more weight and gave me pretty awful ideas about my body and how I felt about it. Back then the idea was to severely restrict calories and I was hungry all the time. Many of the foods we now know are great to eat in abundance were banned and I had no motivation. I barely realised why I might need to be on a diet. I'm not blaming anyone here - I don't think it was a mean thing to put me on one, but it certainly didn't do me any good in terms of my developing body image.

At 17 I decided to get rid of the excess weight. I went on a calorie-counting diet and loved my self-control. Everything was written down, and as I saw myself shed the weight I dropped the calories more and more. At the end I'd lost 18 kilograms, and was a healthy weight, though to my disappointment I still had a tummy. I had spent the last two months eating around 650 calories a day, having no idea I was throwing my body into a starvation cycle.

But I kept it off, until I managed to put all of it on and more at 21 while going out with a guy who could eat a family-sized shepherds pie by himself if you'd let him. I was now classified as obese.

I lost 20kg after the birth of my second child only to get pregnant again and put it all back on. Four years ago I started again, and lost 38kg, mainly on a low-carb, high-protein diet. Halfway through that I left my marriage, moved out of my rural South Island home and to Auckland. Where I've slowly but surely put 10kg back on, trying to adjust to a new life, in a new place with new stressors. I'm one person who is part of a much larger issue.

The obesity epidemic is (to use an unfortunate pun) huge in New Zealand. And we're not winning against it. Kids are getting bigger, adults are becoming fatter, and nothing seems to work (except apparently an operation which isn't a path I wish to go down.)

So I'm back here, ready to lose it all. And I plan to lose it well enough that I won't need to find it again. I've taken about a year to decide what diet I'm going to use, and work out if I'm strong enough inside to keep going no matter what. I am hopeful that I am, and I'm hoping this blog will help me stay accountable to that - though not out of shaming myself if it fails, but more making my struggle public, so that others like me can feel more relaxed about giving it a go too.

I have cheated a little bit. I knew it might be foolish to start and fall in a public forum, so I started my diet just after Christmas. To date I've lost 5kg out of the 50-odd I need to drop. I'm on my way.

Over the next few weeks I'm going to post blogs that are on how I came to be ready, and some of the thought processes I battled with. I'd love to hear from people who struggle with their weight too - what are your biggest hurdles? What do you worry about the most? And if you've lost it are you scared you'll put it all back on again one day?

» Follow NZStuffBlogs on Twitter and get fast updates on all Stuff's blogs.

» Fancy yourself as a blogger? Whoever wins Blog Idol 2 will blog on contract at Stuff as well as win a new Nokia phone. Put on your blogging hat and enter!