Why am I here?

I'm 37 years old and I weigh 315 pounds. I need to lose weight, and it's not about being healthy or fitting into pretty clothes. My weight is keeping me from doing things that I want to do. I love photography, but for me it's all about nature photography. I don't like to pose people and take pictures of them. I don't like to use Photoshop and do wacky things with photography. I like to just go out into nature and take pictures of what's out there. For me, the hunt for something interesting is a huge part of the fun. I love close up shots of tree bark that form interesting patterns or green slime on the top of a pond that looks like a face. I try to find Bev Doolittle type moments in real life. I also love to take pictures of flowers. I have spent hours in a rose garden just walking around looking for the perfect flowers. At 315 pounds, I'm fairly limited with the places that I can go.

I've tried numerous diets and have had some success with a few of them, but I always let something get in the way of my goals. I can't count the number of times that I found something that worked for me, but then I got sick, so I let a few days derail several months of progress. I've also let me job get in the way. I would be on a roll and going to the gym every day, but then it gets busy at work, so I skip a few days at the gym and go into work early, but then I don't go back to the gym. Once I'm derailed, I slowly gain the weight again, but not only do I gain everything I lost, but I go to a new high. This just makes me feel like it will be that much more difficult to lose it all so why bother.

I started this blog to try to gain some accountability. I plan to write something here every day, and if I don't have good news to report, maybe it will prompt me to work harder at it. This will be more than a daily journal of my daily diet and work out logs though. I'm sure that would be pretty boring to read. I plan on including some other things that I'm interested in such as online shopping, online rewards programs, recipe reviews from Biggest Loser, reviews of diets and products that I have tried, and mystery shopping.