theroz1

I use plain yogurt and add either agave or stevia as a sweetener. I don't use any artificial sweeteners, they taste awful and incredibly toxic. Same for drink mixes, crystal lite pur uses stevia, u can add lemon juice and stevia, and market pantry makes one that is stevia sweetened . Also, Vitamin Water zero is naturally sweetened with stevia. My fav is the squeezed lemonade

As for the emotional side, the biggest thing I had to do was confront my baggage.
I thought that losing the weight would make me insta-happy. Surely my lack of confidence, my anger, my unhappiness were all tied up in the obesity I'd been battling since fourteen.
Once I got close to goal I really had to reevaluate that idea. Because I still wasn't happy. I wasn't overeating or using food as a crutch - I'd shaken most of those habits. But I still felt angry. I still wasn't happy. I couldn't figure out what was going on.
And then I started to really think about why I was obese in the first place. And it all led back to hurts from my upbringing and bad relationships with family members. For the first time I confronted my parents on the truly miserable and rotten job they did. I'm not exaggerating here or being melodramatic. Plenty of kids grow up thinking they could do things better or differently than their parents. But mine were truly awful. No kid should know the names of the state DCFS investigators and social workers by name and sight, but they visited our house more often than my grandparents.
I was able to really get through to my mom and it was huge. We're never going to be the absolute best of friends but we've come a really long way and are pretty close now. I had to eliminate the toxic relationships. I had not realized how much having certain people in my life was damaging me. But it was! And I was angry and resentful without really even realizing that I was the one in control - I could very easily choose to simply walk away from those relationships.
So I did. I don't speak to entire branches of my messed up family tree anymore. And that's fine. It's actually really, really liberating.
For me, a lot of what I had to shake was the anger - I had to either forgive people or forget them entirely. And I had to forgive myself and accept that I deserved to be happy despite mistakes in my own past and despite the fact that people had been tearing me down my entire life.
I am not perfect. We all carry around things from our past. I still struggle sometimes but I really feel like the bigger part of the journey (and I say this all the time) is finding out what makes us obese in the first place. Because in my case, I had a lot of issues that I was burying under food.
I'm very different now. I like the changes in myself. I'm happy and can't really remember a time in my life before this when I ever just accepted myself for who I am, faults and all.
I'm also more friendly (though it took a while to learn this) and affectionate. I don't feel shame - not of my body, not of my past - and I think that really helps me.
Anyway. I think this is the real thing people should focus on. For some people, this is just a way to shed fifty pounds. But for so many more I think it's a way to shed years and years of bad feelings, bad habits and bad experiences. I think that without overcoming these obstacles, I might not have been able to maintain. Being unhappy all the time probably would have made it easier to fall into those old emotional eating patterns.
~Cheri