About this blog

This blog is posted in the hopes it may be useful to other people who struggle with weight control issues, as do I.  My hope is that something in it may be useful for you as well.

Background

I’m a 54 year old male psychologist who have been overweight virtually my whole life (I think I was about 8 when I first realized that I was the kid who had to wear the “husky” sized clothes, and that I wasn’t as athletic as other kids.)  While I had a few brief periods of being of more “normal” weight during my late teens and then again in my early 20s, I basically have been above-average and above-optimal weight my whole life.

At this point, I am working on a goal of losing a lot of weight.  I say “100 pounds” in the title of the blog; frankly, that would not be a bad accomplishment: at five feet 10.5″, I weighed 252# at my last medical visit (minus a few for clothes, blah blah blah.)  So if I did manage to lose a whole hundred pounds, my BMI would still be basicallly okay, and I’d have a very high chance of stopping or at least dramatically reducing any serious health risks (assuming I lost the weight in a healthful manner.)  My main risk is that I’m type 2 diabetic — no real complications yet, but as we now know, the really great mortality risk with diabetes isn’t the parade of horrors like blindness, kidney disease, amputations, and so on which often result, but the fact that almost all diabetics sooner or later die of heart attacks or other cardiovascular effects. Plus, we also now know that most of us very obese folks stand to lose about ten years off our otherwise expected lifespans!  Literally, my extra hundred pounds are like having had a death sentence imposed.

Why might this blog be useful?  After all, there are hundreds of “lose weight” sites on the ‘net, and zillions of overweight bloggers.  I guess the fact that as a psychologist, I tend to accumulate a lot of both facts, techniques, and “insights” into not just the process of weight gain/loss, but also into the many, many difficulties that overweight people face that tend to be underestimated or poorly understood, even by (or sometimes, especially by) medical professionals.  While there is certainly no magic answer to the problem of weight control, my hope is that sharing one shrink’s honest struggle and thoughts along the way may help others.

One Little Caveat

Though I’m a licensed psychologist in “real life,” this blog is not in any way a professional consultation or part of a “professional practice.”  It’s not to promote some practice or sell services or products, and even if I reply to a comment, that’s not a professional service either.  If it were those things, I’d have to be much less informal, less self-disclosing, and I’d have to research the heck out of just about anything I say on this thing.  The reader is responsible for whatever they do with any comments, ideas, suggestions, etc. that I write here, okay?  Thanks for understanding.