Hi!  Welcome to My DIY Experience, the Diet Channel’s first blog that isn’t written about any one particular diet.   My name is Hillary.  I started trying to change my diet and my life back in March, when I was diagnosed with high cholesterol and diabetes.  Since then, I’ve completely overhauled my diet, my exercise routine (as in actually having an exercise routine) and learned a whole new way to live.  It’s working – I’ve lost 28.4 pounds and gone from being a size 16 and miserable, to being a size 10 and sometimes even a size 8, and hopeful. 

Why aren’t I following a particular diet?  Well, I have a bunch of reasons.  First of all, I’m terrible at following the rules, unless I’m the one making the rules, of course.  That’s just part of my personality, I guess.  I’m also an incredibly picky eater, which makes it difficult for me to eat pre-packaged food.  Plus, I’m a hippie crunchy vegetarian type who worries about eating a lot of processed foods, and goes out of her way to buy local and organic.  And finally, the more I learned about diabetes, the more I realized that for me, just going on a short term diet won’t do the trick.  I have to make permanent changes to way I eat so that I can control my blood sugar.  All sorts of scary health issues pile up for people who don’t manage this disease properly, and I don’t intend to end up like that.

Right now I’m concentrating on losing weight and getting as fit as I can, by counting carbs, paying attention to portion control and exercising regularly.   Ultimately, I’d like to be able to control my blood sugar without medication, and if I lose enough weight, that might happen.  So, the hard numbers: Back in March, I weighed in at 178 pounds.  Ugh.  Do you know how hard it is to type that number?  I’m currently at 149.6 pounds, which means I have at least 29.6 more pounds to lose.  120 pounds is my goal right now, although I change my mind about my target weight a lot, which we can go into in more detail later. 

I’ve made plenty of progress over the last six and a half months or so, but I still have a long way to go, and that’s what I’ll talk about here.