I wasn't born with whatever wisdom I now have. It happened as a part of experiencing life, and during that process I made many, many choices that in hindsight seem to have been mistaken ... or simply wrong.  But everything I've ever done, or ever been, or ever experienced has led me to be the person I now am. I have strengths and I have weaknesses.  I find it important to Accept all of my personal traits as simpy parts of myself as I currently exist.  This is who I am, for now. 

As we live, we change, but the traces of what we were still exist. 
Inside me still lives the toddler, the small child, the adolescent, the young adult, the young mother, and the me of every stage I've experienced throughout my life. Inside is the young me, the old me, the fat me, the thin me.  

In my present life, I have the task of loving, comforting, and accepting all these parts of myself, while continuing to make daily behavior choices which are leading me toward my future self.  It seems to me that All of us are doing this Alone but Together.

                             
 I passed out tons of buttons at VidCon 2012, and I enjoyed the experience.
Now I’m home. I’m glad to be here with my husband and my cat, Boodie.
I feel tired, bloated, a bit heavier,  AND motivated to step up my diet and exercise activities. Recently I’ve been overeating, and underexercising mainly because I’ve been directing my attention and energy elsewhere. So, here in my maintenance lifestyle, I need to refocus and shift some of my priorities, moving my food and exercise up on that list, and some of my other activities further down on the list.

Even after all these years, it takes a great deal of effort for me to keep the focus that is necessary for me, personally, to maintain my weight-loss. When my focus shifts, I overeat, and my weight goes up. My lifetime of overeating tendencies and habits have not disappeared, but are always lurking, ready to return during periods of inattention.
There is an inner part of me that says… “just take a bit of time to rest up before diving back into your quest for a better diet and more exercise”… but I’ve learned that a day, turns into several days, into a week, into a month… with resulting upward weights. So it is important for me to face myself immediately. To hold myself accountable for my past overeating, and to focus on immediately following through with making the effort it takes me to eat and exercise in a healthy manner.

So, today, it’s back to work.

This next week I will be attending VidCon 2012, which is the 3rd annual YouTube Video Conference.
My adult-tech-son and I both have Industry passes, which means that we will be able to attend meetings about the technical aspects of YouTube, led by the "movers-and-shakers" of YouTube.
I expect to learn a lot, and my son is hoping that someone there will be willing to help us fix the problems that the Hacker caused for my DietHobby YouTube Channel.

Many of you may remember that at VidCon 2011, I passed out about 1,100 homemade, individually wrapped cookies. This year, I bought 2,500 custom-made promotional buttons to pass out.  As I say in the video below, I paid for these buttons just ONE DAY BEFORE the hacker hit my DietHobby youtube channel,and this DietHobby website. 
I told my son what I wanted to say on the button, and the design was created by him.
I love it.

                                 
If this thought has never crossed your mind, you are a very rare person.

"No matter what I do, it's never good enough."

When this happens, first ask yourself, "Good enough for whom?"
Who are we trying to please? Who gets to judge whether or not we are good enough?

If your answer is "the world, the universe", then you're right
because there's nothing we can ever do that will please everyone.

The only person we have to be good enough for, is ourself.
So, if the standards I have set for myself are impossible to meet
because I require perfection of myself at all times, then I need to lower my standards.

It is important to stop expecting to be perfect, stop thinking that I know everything,
and open my mind to learning and moving forward in that ever changing process.

When something I'm doing isn't working, I need to change what I'm doing.
I've learned in maintenance, that doing what I've been doing doesn't work forever,
because the body adapts.

When we become fitter, we have to push ourselves harder.
When we become thinner, we have to lower our caloric intake.
When we get older, we have to lower our caloric intake.
Doing the same thing we've always done really isn't good enough.
We have to accept that we must continually evolve to keep making progress.

Good enough is not perfect.
There is no such thing as perfect.
There's only a little better than before.

 Recently it has taken a lot of effort (internet problems) to get the message out,
and this has affected the quality of the contents of my message here in DietHobby.
Getting and keeping the system running has been using up most of my energy,
and it takes the rest of my energy just to deal with the practicalities of eating at maintenance level.
Frequently, I find that when I sit down to write about dieting and maintenance concepts to post here,
I'm coming up empty.

Actually, that's a concept in itself.
Something that happens to all of us.
Our lives get busy. We become absorbed in some individual problem, 
involving our work, our family, our friends,
and our dieting and maintenance efforts get shoved to the side,
because there's only so much personal energy available to us
and we direct that energy toward our highest priorities.

The days, weeks, and months pass, and when there is a break between those Life Crises,
not only have we not lost weight, but we find that we are heavier and less fit than ever. 

 So, what's the answer?
Somehow, we need to shift our priorities.
We need to place more value on what we eat and how we exercise.
That's really what the concept "Lifestyle" means.

The way we nurture and care for ourselves and our food
needs to become a strong thread running through all of our lives.
We need to develop individual ways of dealing with food that become habit.
and allow habit to take over during those times when we are distracted by those Life Crisis situations.

How?
There we have the individual question that each of us must answer for ourselves.