One day I finally decided to turn my life around and joined Weight Watchers. I learned how to read labels, watch my portion sizes, and exercise in moderation.

The meetings were extremely helpful in keeping me motivated. My leader was an inspiration and being around people dealing with the same weight issues as myself aided in my weight loss.

I lost 40 pounds almost exclusively through dieting. Exercise has never appealed to me and my only form of it consists of walking my dog.

I currently weigh 175 and my goal weight is 160. I hope to achieve this weight within the next six months.

My boyfriend is currently on deployment and a group of us women from the boat have decided to do the biggest loser. We are basically weighing ourselves at our monthly meetings and the woman who loses the most at the end of deployment wins a pot of about $300.

This time around I’m using the money, and the look of shock on my boyfriend’s face as my motivation. I have stepped up my walking and would like to join a gym once the weather gets cooler.

These last 15 lbs are going to be the hardest to lose. It’s more difficult to lose weight when you are alone, especially for someone who eats when she is bored.

I keep a lot of low-calorie snacks in the house in case I get the munchies.

You really need to rely on yourself and your personal self control to see through it to the end. Being healthy for my family is very important to me and I want to reach my goal weight before I start having children.

One must understand that in order to keep the weight off, you can’t go on a diet, you need to change your lifestyle. I continue to work on that and hope that the end result will come soon.

I have had success losing weight in the past with the Weight Watchers Core plan.

I lost about 50 pounds with this plan before getting pregnant. On Core, there is a list of foods you can eat “until satisfied”.

Anything else, you can eat, but you have to count points.

This plan worked well for me because I never felt tempted to starve myself, then binge on junk later.

It also motivated me to exercise, since workouts helped me earn points I could then use for non-Core foods.

I also like Weight Watchers because of the accountability involved. Each week, you have to show up and weigh in with your leader.

After a few weeks, you feel like your leader is becoming a friend, and not losing weight would disappoint her.

So when I would think about overeating, I would think about how I would feel at weigh in that week.

Unfortunately, this can backfire if you overeat anyway and then just don’t go to the meetings. As for exercise, I mostly walked.