Please don't call me Imelda...

As many of you that follow my blog know (or as the few know that follow my blog), I've been working really hard on losing weight since last Summer. It all started after a work presentation by one of our doctors at the center-wide conference who spoke about wellness and lots about a study done in China about nutrition and health.  I read a little about this after the conference and bought a book about eating a more alkaline diet.  In the book, there were some anecdotal stories about people who had kind of miraculously melted off pounds after changing their diet and I thought "why can't this be me?".  So...I started eating a more alkaline/lower acid diet, starting walking every night-- even the really HOT nights-- and watched portion sizes and  limited my restaurant trips to 3 times a week.  (In case you are wondering why I haven't been blogging so much--not going out to restaurants has significantly decreased my blogging since I was doing a lot of restaurant reviews...)  And with those changes, miracle of miracles, I lost over fifty pounds quite quickly and easily.  Then, in September, I had lap band surgery to help me continue to lose weight and also to make it more difficult to gain it back.  For some reason it always seems important for me to say that I lost most of the weight before the surgery...  there's kind of a stigma that surgery is an easy way to lose weight which I'm here to tell you is not the case at all.  My stomach might be smaller, but I still have to choose whether to fill it with chocolate or with protein/vegetables.   After a series of unexpected complications and not feeling so great, over the past month or so I have felt GREAT, better than I have in years actually.

A side effect is that clothes are fun again... which leads to wanting to go shopping for new ones.  Most of my clothes are starting to either wear out or look really big (which is a good thing), but I'm not yet at my goal weight and so I don't want to spend a ton of money on transitional clothing.  Not that I'm not, or won't spend a lot of money on transitional clothing-- I just don't want to.  So, what's a girl to do in those circumstances?

Shop for shoes!!  Shoes can be fun and you don't change sizes all that much.  So, I've overdone it a little over the past 3 or 4 months with shoe shopping as this picture shows.  I didn't post the picture in order to be a poster child for consumerism and excess, but more as a celebration that this is finally working!  I've also gone a bit crazy with scarves for the same reason... and with legging type pants since they stretch/shrink and the weight has come off my legs much faster than it has come off my tummy.  Here's hoping it will eventually come off my tummy too.  Far and away, the best thing has been having a desire to go out and do stuff that I haven't wanted to do in a long time and not be such a spectator in my own life.  Life is good!!