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7 Weight Loss Strategies That Don’t Work For Me

California Woman
7 min readApr 22, 2021

I am a middle-aged white woman who has been struggling with being overweight since I was about 11 years old. At my highest weight, in Feb 2017, I was 225 pounds and absolutely miserable. I had tried focusing on body positivity for a few years, but seeing what both my parents were going through (they were both obese for most of their lives) was scary. They were both using wheelchairs in their sixties, among numerous other health problems. I have been having knee and back trouble since my late thirties and very little scares me more than losing the ability to walk if it doesn’t have to be that way.

So I got serious, and by that I mean I decided that I need to find ways to lose weight in the long-term. I needed sustainable strategies, because in order to be healthy enough to be mobile and pain-free, I needed strategies that I could stick to for the rest of my life. And I have been pretty successful: I lost 60 pounds in the first fifteen months or so. I managed to keep off most of that until the pandemic (gained 15 pounds, oops), but recently I’ve gotten on-track again and I’m happy to say I weigh 174 as of the writing of this article. I’m not yet at my goal weight of 150, but I am fifty pounds down from four years ago and that still feels pretty successful.

I can’t say that I have tried everything under the sun to lose weight, as I know…

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California Woman
California Woman

Written by California Woman

Musician, wife and kitty mother living in Southern California

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