About

Hi, I’m Julie, and I’ve been a yo-yo dieter for most of my adult life. The first time I lost weight I was in my mid-20s. I lost 80 pounds on Weight Watchers and kept it off for a few years. The weight slowly crept back, though, and in my late 30s I went on the Atkins diet. I lost 70 pounds or so. I think I kept it off for about a month :( All the weight, and more, came back. Add to that an increasingly sedentary career and the onset of menopause, and you can imagine where I’ve ended up.

For me, the hardest thing about losing weight is getting started. It just seems like such a daunting undertaking. I keep wishing I could flip a motivation switch to make it easier.

Well, I found the motivation switch while I was on vacation a couple of months ago.

I’ve done some fairly extensive traveling in the past, including a solo trip around the world, but hadn’t taken a “real” vacation in about 7 years. I convinced myself I didn’t really miss traveling all that much, and that I’d get back to it at some point. A golden opportunity presented itself in the form of a 3-week trip to Egypt, and on Christmas Day of 2010 I left for Cairo.

I found I was so happy to be traveling again, and I had in fact missed it a great deal. But the trip was hard — much harder than it should have been. Hours of walking were hard on my knees and feet and I was downing pain medication daily just to keep up. I worried every step of the way about physically fitting into places. Will the seatbelts fit? Will the deck chair stick to my ass when I stand up? Can I even get up into that carriage (and will the donkey pulling it have a heart attack)?

I realized that I want to do a lot more traveling. I’m 48 years old. It’s way too young to be “done”. And I knew that if I stayed on the trajectory I was on, I wouldn’t be doing any serious traveling any more.

So when I returned (the week before the revolution started, in case you’re wondering) I joined Weight Watchers. And just like last time, once I got started it wasn’t difficult at all to keep going.

One of the ways I keep my motivation up is cooking. I started adapting recipes to work with the Weight Watchers Points Plus program and sharing them with friends. Putting these recipes up on a blog seemed like a natural progression, since I do marketing & design for a living.

If you have any recipes or tips you’d like to share, by all means let me know. You can leave a comment here or on the blog, or you can send an email to ideas@queenofpoints.com.

And since I’m feeling brave, here are a few BEFORE pictures. I can hardly bear to look at these, I’m so appalled at how I look. But that’s all changing. At this writing I’ve lost 17.8 pounds, and I’m feeling really good.

Update: I’ve lost 20.2 lbs. Here are comparison pics.