After 50 years, countless sessions of therapy, many, many diets, and many more "I'll start on Monday!" diet attempts, I've come to a place where I firmly believe that dieting is counter productive. Since I started dieting at the age of 6, I think that if dieting worked I would have succeeded at it by now. Taking pounds off actually is the easy part. Keeping pounds off is the impossible part. I always return to my pre-diet weight plus 5 to 10 pounds. I'll actually go so far as to say diets are very, very bad for me. Physically and mentally they exact a heavy toll.

My overall health depends on both my mental and physical well being. If I treat myself with care and love I feel good. If I feel good I treat myself with care and love. I don't diet but I do exercise and eat healthy food. I also surround myself with a loving caring community, which is supportive of me.

My exercise of choice is swimming. It's been hard to find an accessible indoor pool, but they are out there. It just takes a little more time to find them. Next thing is making time. Swimming has top priority on my weekly schedule. With access to a pool and time set aside to swim, the only thing needed is the right attitude. I'm usually very tired by the end of my workday. I deal with this by making bargains with myself. I will go to the pool and get in the water whether I am tired or not. If I swim laps that is wonderful! If I exercise or walk around in the pool that is okay, too! Anything I do that is movement is to my benefit.

Don't let society's image of you stop you from doing the things you like. Below are some links to sites on the internet offering products and services specifically for larger people.

Here are some sites on the net that offer exercise help for people of size.

"Let's face biological reality. Some people are naturally meant to be thin, some naturally meant to be fat. ... I don't like the term 'ideal weight.' I don't think we know what any person's ideal weight is. Human beings come in different sizes and shapes. On any characteristic you care to name, there's tremendous variation, from eye color to hair color, for those who have hair and those who don't have hair, and we vary. Some of us are short and stocky. Some are tall and skinny. So to claim that some formula can produce a so-called 'ideal weight' that we can then apply to an individual I think is faulty logic." -- Dr. Steven Blair, Cooper Institute