When I started losing weight it began slowly. The only thing that gets me to commit to a diet is vanity. Not my health, unfortunately. However, I’m now reaping the benefits of being healthier. It began with arthritis pain disappearing from my hands and neck, and now I would like to really get my knees, ankles, and feet better. It’s a lot of work and I have to be both patient and persistent, and not skip a day. I thought I’d try to work towards the 10,000 daily steps people have started using as a yardstick. Nittineedles got pretty far with it, I think.

The ankles gave me problems at first. I found by cutting my walking speed in half that I could go the same distance without waking any pain there. By doing that for a while I found I could soon speed up to a normal pace. Now my knees are the project. I’m doing range-of-motion exercises about 3-4 times daily, very slowly, along with my hour of nighttime walking. After the walk I put a heating pad on my knees. It seems to be helping.

What I want to work towards is being able to jog again. The exercise is making the diet work, now. It started getting hard to keep up a weekly weight loss when I felt weak and hungry all the time. Now, I eat a little more but do a bunch more exercise, and the weight started coming off again.

I ordered some maca powder to use in the shakes I drink, and am paying attention to other so-called superfoods. Still waiting to hear what my sister thinks of the Niagen… it would be nice to have more energy. It’s very funny to hear myself talk about nutrition all the time, because I’ve thought ice cream was one of man’s greatest inventions (especially the chocolate-chocolate Klondike) and bread and fried things are wonderful. But I tend to be obsessive, so I may as well make obsessiveness work for me. When someone talks to friends about doing this kind of thing -- improving their diet and health -- I'm sure it tends to make you sound like a religious nut.