How to lose 100lbs – part 2

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When I first had the idea to start this blog I expected to write a lot about my weight-loss process. I thought that I would tell you the week by week story, so that you could follow along as it happened.

Apparently when you write a weight loss diary you need to tell your readers about all the successes and all the failures, however losing weight this way has been incredibly straightforward and uneventful for me. It hasn’t been anything like the roller coaster experience I have come to expect of a calorie counting diet. My family have simply changed our diet to one that is based on Paleo principles. That is all, it doesn’t even feel like dieting, yet the weight loss has happened anyway. All 70lbs of it so far!

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Tarn Hows

Last week, for our walk, we took a trip up into the Lake District to Tarn Hows. I have a list of easy walks and the walk around Tarn Howes, while longer than I remembered, is reasonably flat and easy underfoot. We took our time and I managed to walk the whole way around, which is one and three quarter miles. Although my husband said we would have walked it faster if I hadn’t insisted on stopping every five minutes to take photographs!

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How to lose 100lbs

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My Story – the beginning

Like many weight loss stories, mine is a story of many ‘ups’ and several ‘downs’.  I struggled with my weight as a teenager, got it under control when at university…  slipped a little…  sorted myself out again, and then succeeded in getting down to a UK size 10/12 by the time I was married.  Amazingly I returned to that size after the birth of my first child.  However, two children later I measured as a UK size 18 and I haven’t measured less than a 18 since then – and that was 20 years ago.

The last 10 years have been a real struggle.  Once the children got beyond the age where I was literally running around after them, I gradually began to put on weight.  I wasn’t particularly overeating and I was still fit and reasonably active, but I started getting heavier anyway.

Then, about three years ago, I fell really badly down some stone steps and hurt my hip and back. It became very painful to move and since then I have only been able to walk for a short distance at a time.

Now I was moving even less.  Before I knew it, if I wanted to get back to that size 10/12 weight, I would need to lose 100lbs.

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The what, who and why – justFreda

The ‘What’

justFreda.com is, at its core, a personal blog. However, consider this to be just the starting point on a long, and possibly meandering, journey.

The website “just Freda” is named after someone I knew as a child. Hair always in rollers, always wearing a pinny (apron), she would walk between the neighbouring houses in her bedroom slippers.

That was what 50 looked like to me.

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Swimming – Day 1

It’s like this.  I can swim – kind of.  I had lessons when I was at school, but  those lessons were next to useless.  They took place in the local echo-y, Victorian, swimming baths.  I hated the noise, and I also carried with me some unpleasant memories of family visits from somewhere in my distant past.  The teacher was an old man with a walking stick (you know how every adult looks ancient when you’re 9 years old), and we were all terrified of both him and his booming echoing voice, not to mention that bloomin’ stick.

I eventually learned how to swim by watching and copying other people, and as a result I can do an OK breaststroke.  However, my crawl (freestyle) never really moved forward from the point when I stopped having swimming lessons, and overall I considered/consider myself to be a fairly weak swimmer.

Fast-forwarding to 2014.

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Hello & Welcome

Hi, and welcome to the first blog post of justFreda.com.  Tricky things, first blog posts,  and exactly where is the best place to start anyway?  I guess that the important thing is to go ahead and post something – and here it is!  You could say that the whole concept of taking that first step, even if that means just turning up, is the theme of this blog.