Um....wow.

Note: sorry Belinda for pushing your post down - I can't get the 'post scheduling' option to work! I tried to schedule this to post two days from now but....failed. So, SEE BELOW FOR BELINDA'S LAST POST.
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Okay, so you know how I had put on like ten pounds in one month, not riding my bike? Well, on that day (Thanksgiving) I got my motivation. I said "Enough is enough". Since then, since October 13, I have lost the following:

15 pounds (I'm at 178 now)
3.5 inches off my waist
2 inches off my bust
2 inches off my hips

!!!!

How did I do it, you ask? This is how I did it.

I plan to carry on with Cinch indefinitely. I am doing the two-a-day loss plan right now, and will switch to one-a-day maintenance when I have reduced my waist and weight to the high end of my recommended body mass (as defined by the Index). I am supposed to be 160 pounds, but I will be happy if I can hover around 170. We'll see.

When I started out on this Stopping the Slide journey, I had no real intention to do any sort of concerted plan. I normally don't approve of them because I feel they don't change your habits in any long-term way. After gaining all that weight and feeling, frankly, physically uncomfortable, I just had to put my foot down and try something drastic. I'm so glad I did, not just because I am shrinking as we speak, but because normally my weight loss is so slow that the lack of visible progress tempts me to give up. This plan gave me a huge kick start and a solid reason not to cheat...and I could see the benefits after a mere couple of days.

Plus, there is a whack of nutritional advice given with the plan, and it has changed my eating habits noticeably...I am way, way down on my starches and I don't think I can ever go back. When I eat those now, after six weeks on Cinch, I feel so stodgy. I certainly don't have the capacity I once had.

So we'll see how this works out in the long term. For now, it feels great and I am loving it. The first week was hard, naturally, with the lower amount of starch and with trying to get creative with my protein choices (I have to have 8 servings per day), but everything is going so beautifully now...I'm really wondering if this could be the leg up I needed.