Occasionally, I share my numbers here at DietHobby to show some personal details about my years of working to maintain a very large weight-loss.

I post many of my thoughts about my Maintenance struggles here at my website, DietHobby, where I've scrapbooked a great many articles, pictures, and videos. To learn more about my personal history, SEE: ABOUT ME.

Many of these are articles and videos that I've created myself, and many are those of others which I find helpful, interesting, or amusing. I named my website, DietHobby, because I've found it personally necessary to treat "dieting" as a "hobby". To learn more about how and why I do that, SEE:   Dieting is my Hobby.

Today I am sharing about my own personal experience, as a small, inactive, "reduced obese" elderly woman.  It is not a one-size-fits-all-world so my experience may be vastly different from your own.  Even people who are the SAME size, age, and activity levels often have bodies with different metabolisms. Some bodies burn through their fuel like large luxury cars, and some bodies burn fuel like really efficient economy cars.  The Metabolic Process is an involuntary one, like breathing and temperature, and .... despite what many Diet Guru's, including medical doctors, say, ... an individual's voluntary behavior can do almost nothing to change their personal long-term Metabolic Rate.

Furthermore, you might not share my personal Values.  Food may not be as important to you as it is to me, or we might prefer entirely different foods and different eating styles.  Your body might be capable of more physical activity, and you might even find some types of strenuous exercise to be enjoyable.  Your standards of beauty might be different than mine, and you might consider Thin to be more attractive than I do, or even consider Fat to be less attractive than I do.

So that being said.... here's where I am.  Below is a chart that is self-explanatory.  It shows my monthly weight totals for the past 8 years.  These monthly weight totals are my daily weights AVERAGED out over a 1 month period.  Therefore, these monthly weight totals include both the UP-Bounces and the DOWN-Bounces that happen during each month's period.

This weight chart demonstrates an upward Trend, which is an ongoing problem that I struggle with here in maintenance.  The chart shows my most recent 8 year period, however, I am now in my 11th year of maintenance.  The first 3 years I was able to keep my weight mostly between 110 and 120 pounds, while eating an average of around 1300 daily calories.  Then, my weight began to climb, and I began working hard to keep my calorie average lower to drop off the extra pounds or to at-least-compensate in order to...

I find the article below intriguing as well as appealing. Throughout my lifetime of dieting, I’ve seen a great deal of evidence supporting many of the statements it contains, such as: 

“The desire for more life … grew into an obsession with transforming the self into a perfected object.”

When we make the choice to follow the rules of any “recommended” diet, we do this because we want to make our bodies conform to cultural standards of “beauty” and/or “health”.  Which means, of course, our goal is … to transform our bodies into a more “perfected object”.

Another such statement is:

“People willingly, happily, hand over their freedom in exchange for the bondage of a diet that forbids their most cherished foods, all for the promise of relief from choice.”

Every voluntary action we make, or don’t make, is a choice.  When we choose one action, … it eliminates the ability to choose an alternative action  …. at least for that present time. So, when we choose to follow any specific outside dieting rules, our choice is also to give up making our own ongoing individual food choices.

My current choice is to read, think about, and share the concepts contained within this following article. 

Eating Toward Immortality
Diet culture is just another way of dealing with the fear of death.
by MICHELLE ALLISON posted in The Atlantic in 2/2017

Knowing a thing means you don’t need to believe in it. Whatever can be known, or proven by logic or evidence, doesn’t need to be taken on faith.

Certain details of nutrition and the physiology of eating are known and knowable: the fact that humans require certain nutrients; the fact that our bodies convert food into energy and then into new flesh (and back to energy again when needed).

But there are bigger questions that don’t have definitive answers, like what is the best diet for all people? For me?

Nutrition is a young science that lies at the intersection of several complex disciplines—chemistry, biochemistry, physiology, microbiology, psychology—and though we are far from having figured it all out, we still have to eat to survive. When there are no guarantees or easy answers, every act of eating is something like a leap of faith.

Eating is the first magic ritual, an act that transmits life energy from one object to another, according to cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker in his posthumously published book Escape From Evil. All animals must feed on other life to sustain themselves, whether in the form of breastmilk, plants, or the corpses of other animals. The act of incorporation, of taking a once-living thing into your own body, is necessary for all animals’ existence. It is also disturbing and unsavory to think about, since it draws a ...