I agree its not as "hopping" but glad we are here to support each other regardless!

How is everyone doing? where has everyone gone? does anyone need support or encouragment? want to share any struggles or triumphs?? whats new?? as for me I am preparing to go on a short 3 night trip to Florida in April, my husband won this trip from his employer and the whole thing flight, stay, meals and activitiy are being paid for! what a surpise and a blessing! I would like to be able to lose some more weight before then (time is ticking) and feel confident in some pretty spring outfits, BUT I need to make sure my goals and focus are in the right place and that I have a proper heart attitude, I have seen far too many times in this weight loss journey that when I make it all about the scale and I start to put pressure on myself it backfires and I get into unhealthy thinking patterns.... So I am prayerfully considering how to prepare my body, mind and heart for this trip! how about you all? anything you are looking forward to this spring?

Same to you!!!!

any plans anyone? how are you doing with all the sweets and treats circulating during this holiday? I made valentine cookies with my kiddos yesterday and the cookie dough was a real temptation for me, I did indulge a little too much ! today I wrapped up all the cookies to give away, to my kids, my husband and our firends and I did not eat 1 at all , I know that is a slippery sloap that I have slid down waaaay too many times before! As for tomorrow I have no idea if my husband is taking me out or not, guess he is waiting till the last minute to surprise me  but I just want to encourage you all to stay the course, holidays and celebrations have always been the roughest time for me while trying to stay the course, enjoy your Valentines  day!

If this is common knowledge in these forums, sorry for talking about boring things.  I'm posting this in the event that there is someone that doesn't know about this amazing tool. 

In my years of being obese and my many failures, I did happen to find one shining light that did exactly what it said it would do.  It's the ONLY "program" that I followed that gave consistent results week after week.  Best of all, it was free.  Even more besterer, it was easy and maintainable.  

The tool is a website called sparkpeople.com  It's a free weight loss website.  I don't mean free as in you get a subpar product until you upgrade; it's just free.  

It provides many many services to its users that you'll have to explore for yourself but in general it provides: 

Nutrition tracker - This wonderful, wonderful tool helps you input the things you've eaten for the day.  It has a massive catalog of foods and the ability to add items that aren't already in the catalog if you find something weird.  It doesn't just track calories but also all of the other food metrics such as vitamins, sodium, fats, carbs, etc etc etc.  It also saves this data and gives you nice graphs to evaluate your metrics over time.  Using your weight, measurements, etc. it calculates how many calories you need, carbs, fats, etc.  By the way, my weight metric was an almost straight line which suggests that, at least for me, the science worked 100%. 

Meal Plans - Very flexible tool to plan meal plans for you or an entire family.  It already knows how many calories you need (or your whole family, if they all use SP you can group yourselves together!!), you pick the foods you like and it will spit a whole week of meal plans including recipes.  It will even generate a shopping list of the items needed.  Everything is customizable so you can remove items, add items, as you wish.

Fitness program - using what you are scheduled to eat that day, it generates an exercise plan for you and each exercise is accompanied by a diagram or video explaining how it's done.  This plan is customizable.  For me, I didn't have any weights so I limited myself to calisthenics and SP fitness planner did all of that for me.

Free exercise videos - videos of all kinds of exercise available anytime.

Support forums - much like the forums here although they also add "communities" and they try to add a friendly competetive side to it where you earn points based upon exercise, meeting goals like drinking a certain amount of water every day for a week/month/etc, stuff like that.  This points are used to give you trophies and allow you to purchase gift badges for your SP friends.  

Information - articles on just about any and everything related to losing weight and health in general.

Database of medical terms, conditions, medicines, and treatments.  

Those are all of the things I can remember although perhaps there's quite a bit more.  As for me, I lost 30lbs on SP before I moved out of the country to a place where there are no food labels and basically just fell off the wagon (again) but while I was using SP it never failed me.  It worked for my father, my mother, and my sister too.  I highly, highly recommend it.  

I hope this helps.