Welcome to the dump...

Today is my 30th birthday. What better way to celebrate than to make my first post on my shiny new weight-loss blog? Nothing makes you want to face the beast that is losing weight like the day on which you are supposed to eat copious amounts of cake in celebration of your entrance into this world. Not to mention that today is the day I have taken off from the struggle - I spent the morning in bed rather than doing my workout, had hot chocolate and strawberry Belgian waffles with whipped cream out at breakfast with my dad, and completely intend on getting three different kinds of cake at this fabulous cafe and bakery tonight (three slices, that is - not three whole cakes - for all the difference that makes!) Tomorrow I will be back to the good fight.

I guess that now is as good a time as any to introduce myself to you all. I'm Morgan, a somewhat neurotic now-30-year-old with a husband and four kidlets who is unfortunate enough at this point in my life to be living with my mother-in-law instead of being master and commander of my own home. I've never really been thin - in high school I was a size 14 who sometimes squeezed herself into a 12, much to the dismay of all who encountered her on those days. I piled on weight with my first pregnancy (an issue which I am sure to discuss in more depth at some point on this blog - bet you can't wait for that!) and at my heaviest weighed in around 235 - or at least that was the highest weight at which I ever weighed myself.

I lost some and lived at 220 for a loooong time, going up and down a bit through the years surrounding the two middle pregnancies, my all-time low during that period being 212 right before i got knocked up for the fourth time. Finally about two years ago I started walking regularly and said goodbye to 21 pounds, and a year ago I managed to force off another 12 pounds, bringing my low to 187 lbs on my 5'6" frame. For the past 12 months I have lived right around that neighborhood, visiting a few more pounds or saying adieu to a few here and there throughout the year.

On January 4 of this year, I decided to once again embark on a voyage of the S.S. Diet and Exercise. While the exercise portion of the crew has been working hard to get out to sea, the diet portion has been content to tool around the harbor, making a good show of readying for the trip but not really going anywhere. After reading countless blogs, I was inspired to start my own, in the hopes that what I really need is a place to talk about the dirty day-to-day details of trying to change who I am and what I do. So here I am, throwing it out there to all of the good people on the world wide web, looking for a way to kick my trash into gear.