Here I am, back at the very beginning.

It's a lovely feeling and a terrifying one.

Almost twenty years ago, sometime between when I turned nine and when I turned ten, I developed hypothyroidism. I was sixteen when it was diagnosed and I began treatment. I was twenty-six when I began recieving the kind of treatment that I actually needed.

The first seven years were rough because I was ill to the point where I desperately wanted to kill myself but couldn't muster the energy to do so, and nobody noticed. The next ten years were difficult because I knew what was wrong and I also knew that the things I was doing to fix it weren't enough.

I won't go into detail here, but let's just say that I have a habit of maintaining a very steady weight for years on end (I've been at my current weight for two and a half years) and then, when I have a thyroid crisis, I gain thirty to fifty pounds over the space of a few months. Crises can be caused by changes in my medications, illnesses where my immune system goes wonky in order to try and fight it, or severe stress.

And, of course, it doesn't come off when the crisis is over, because all it means is that my metabolism has a new setpoint,and it's just lower than it used to be.

I've done a number of diet-type things over the years. I was on Protien Power for a long time, and had good results; however, I was only able to do it because I had no social life (thus reducing the situations in which I eat socially). And when I had a social life again and and began the process of buying a house, back again the weight came.

I am not happy with this. So not very happy. I am self-concious about my body, I have a hard time finding clothes I like, and I hate the feeling that I am marked so visibly by the disease that ate seven years of my life entirely and will never, ever go away.

So, on something of a whim, I signed up for a weight-loss class through the Curves I go to. It couldn't hurt, and it could help.

At the moment, it's sort of like Weight Watches crossed with Atkins. The diet itself for the first couple of weeks is strict low-carb, which i've done before and I don't mind. There's a whole support-group aspect that I'm a little leery of, but I'm giving it a shot.

It's weird being at a support group when you know you have medical issues that make losing weight difficult. I'm not sure i want to talk much about it, because, well, it doesn't really apply to anyone but me. Willpower, I have pretty much in spades. I've kicked my sugar addiction, my caffiene addiction, I am a damned saint most days substance-wise. The will is strong. It's just the flesh that's terribly weak.

I realize, too, that I am ahead of the game in some ways. Though I may be fat, I've also kept up with the strength training, and can lift heavy things. I've never been particularly averse to exercise, even when it hurts like hell. My normal diet is not particularly bad when I'm not working 60-hour weeks, and even when I am it's not entirely terrible. (I don't subsist on corn chips and Mountain Dew.)

My one downfall is a huge one--social eating. And it's not because I'm anxious in social situations, usually. It's because I think so much better when I'm chewing on something, and social stuff takes a lot of foreground processing time. Me nibbling on things or chewing on pens is the Kris equivalent of the sound a computer makes when it's doing a seek on the hard disk--the more processing I need to do, the more I need to be able to gnaw on something while I'm doing it. This is most of the reason I've never taken up smoking--if I started, it would quickly become totally necessary to any sort of problem solving, and I work in a smoke-free place.

There's that, and the fact that I am an introvert and tend to be quiet in social situations. I don't talk a lot, preferring to listen, and thus i have a lot more time to eat than the person who's talking.

So there's something I'm going to be trying to work through. I've got rules and scripts set up in my head; I just need to go through and attempt to adjust them, and put them into practice.

But, really, there's nothing like starting out on something new like this. Combined hope and trepidation. Let's see how far I get, this time.