37 Years of Loving Me Through Thick and Thin

Today is my 37th wedding anniversary and I want to wish my sweet husband a very happy anniversary!

We met in college - I was 18 and he was 19 and we started dating a year later and married a year after that. When we got married, I was thin and he wasn't ;-), and by the time we celebrated our first anniversary, we'd both put on weight (him more than I) due to my new-found love of cooking. That began a series of diets that we did together. I was generally dealing with 10-15 pounds I wanted to drop and he was usually needing to lose 50 or more pounds. We had good intentions, but wow, did we try some crazy things!

When the Atkins diet first came out, my husband thought this was the answer to a meat-lover's prayers. I remember one day when he ate 12 hot dogs, stuffed with cheese and wrapped in bacon - for LUNCH! Yep, the carbs were little to none, but the calories and artery-clogging fat grams? Nobody counted those and it's probably just as well we didn't know! I didn't eat quite that many, but I think I probably ate 3 or 4 of those "on plan" food items as well. Needless to say, we didn't lose very much weight and we also didn't feel that great (who could, with all that sodium and lack of nutrition?).

Then there was the "eat all of your calories first thing in the day" diet. We read an article that claimed if you ate all of your calories at the beginning of the day in one big meal, you'd lose weight. That sounded like a good idea so we got up one morning before work and made the breakfast to end all breakfasts - eggs, sausage, pancakes and I don't remember what else. We ate until we were stuffed, convinced we'd eaten enough to easily tide ourselves over until the next morning. Of course, by late afternoon we were hungry and by dinner time we were starving and ended up eating dinner. I think that's the only diet we did that only lasted one day.

There were other diets we tried together, too, and some of them worked temporarily. Since I was usually only fighting 10 pounds, these fad diets usually kept me close to where I wanted to be, but they didn't begin to teach me how to lose weight and keep it off in a healthy way. I was a stay-home, from-scratch cook for twelve years, starting when we had our oldest daughter, and our food was very healthy, even if the portions weren't.

By the time my weight started piling on and I went from needing to lose 10 pounds to being 126 pounds overweight, my husband had pretty much given up any attempts at losing weight. I went from one program to another and he ate, and we were both at very unhealthy weights.

Three years ago this month, everything began to change when I started on Take Shape for Life/Medifast. My husband was very supportive, but he watched from the sidelines for over six months, until he finally decided to go on the program himself in January of 2008. He lost 50 pounds and reached his goal weight in three months and I reached my goal about five weeks later. We have now celebrated two years of both of us being at a healthy weight for one of the first times in our entire married life!

I thank the Lord for my wonderful husband who have loved me through thick and thin (literally) and who supported me on my 20+ year odyssey to a healthy weight. He never criticized either my weight or any of the methods I tried to lose weight, and when I finally found something that worked - Take Shape for Life/Medifast - he cheered and encouraged me each step of the way.

Thanks to both of us getting healthy on this program, I'm looking forward to at least 37 more years with this man. He reads my blogs every day, so Happy Anniversary, honey! I love you with all my heart!

For the rest of you reading this, I really care about you, too. And because I care so much about you, I'll end this blog like I end them all - choose wisely :-)