Hello my friend, hello.

Those are the very eloquent and apt words of Neil Diamond. Call me cheesy or dorky..and that's OK!! You will soon get to know me and see that I can be a bit of a goofball.  Life is too short to be so serious all the time. 

I am a weight loss success. I yo-yo'ed through my 20's. And at an all time high weight of 275 lbs I decided enough is enough. That was September, 2007. My oldest son J.T. was 9 months old at the time and I could barely do anything with him. Flying was humiliating. I just realized my quality of life was horrible. I know now a huge part of my weight issues stemmed from being miserable within myself. I was in an awful, verbally/emotionally abusive marriage and allowed him to brow beat me into thinking I wasn't worth very much. I will go into all of this more but for now I wanted to talk about the positive things that have occurred since then. 

It took me 16 months to lose 135 pounds. I met my goal weight in January of 2009. That same week I found out I was pregnant with my second child Sammy. Talk about a test! But I kept my weight under control and even had people tell me I was the healthiest pregnant woman they had seen. 

I have been maintaining over four years now. I ended up asking for a divorce at six months pregnant. Things got pretty tough there for awhile but I kept going. And now here I am. I finally feel able to devote the time necessary to a blog. I wanted it to be about nutrition but also about life and fun and the beauty all around us. I think nutrition and health can be fun and sexy!

I have been active on a website called My Fitness Pal for years and have written threads about my success and the response by the other people on the site made me feel like this is something I should do as a living. I am working on being certified as a nutritionist but want to write and inspire until then. A health coach is my ultimate goal. 

I hope you enjoy and engage in this blog and hopefully in my future website. I truly love knowing my success is so helpful to others. It really does make it that much sweeter. 

God bless!

Tami

The first two are before pictures obviously. The first is from April, 2007. (Easter) and the second is from August, 2007 about a month before I began my life lift. The 3rd photo is from about two weeks ago.