It all started because I had to lose fifty-seven pounds.

 

I didn’t want to have to lose that much weight. I had begged, pleaded, and bargained with God repeatedly on this one, but He wasn’t budging an inch, and neither was my ass.

 

So I gave up and joined Weight Watchers for the third time. What made this joining different from the previous two tries was that now I had the internet to look at. So, right after coming home from that dispiriting weigh in, I looked online and found a bulletin board community dedicated to losing weight, primarily with WW.

Over the next couple of years, I managed to pry off the weight and wound up making friends around the world. We talked about weight, of course, but also about our lives, and one day, after reading another one of my discourses/diatribes about my hectic life, a member of this community contacted me privately and said a) that I should find a way to write a column about all this and b) that she was in a position to know, being a newspaper editor herself.

Over time, she helped me draft some sample columns and connected me to a fellow editor, John Conway at the Ahwatukee Foothills News. Based on her recommendation, he met with me and decided to run my column.

That was over five years ago.  I’m still writing, mostly because my kids are still running amok and my husband has decided to join in the fun. I started this blog as an adjunct to my column, since there’s so much more to talk about than just the humorous side of being a woman, mother, wife, daughter, and professional in this day and age. 

Normally, no one is happy that they had to lose their weight in dog chow, but for the record: I am.