I’ve been away from ReadSteve for a long time – too long, by any reasonable standard.  A lot of things have happened –and, instead of recording them here as they happened, I let them pile up.  The time has come to get back.  I’ll continue some of my other threads, and I’ll catch you up a bit.  I do not want to make this too much about Steve, and I don’t ReadSteve to ever be reduced to a series of life blurbs too long to be tweets.

But one of the things I’ve been doing is losing weight.  I may cover my move to the Seattle area some other time, but I am now a Microsoft spouse, working my old Virginia job from home.  One of Microsoft’s benefits is a program called 20/20.  It’s a weight loss and management program that many Microsoft employees, including some very high up, have gone through, and I’ve never been in a company that covered anything like this.

I was in the program for a total of 28 weeks – 16 weeks of active weight loss and 12 weeks of “maintenance”, though I still lost weight during maintenance.  When others ask me how I did it, or how they can do it, it’s hard for me to form an answer – hard for me to really put my finger on what the real difference was, apart from this Microsoft-paid benefit, which most of my friends don’t get.

Steve, Before and After -- 60 pounds gone!

As you can see from the photos (I can see it, anyway) it worked.  I went from over 250 pounds to about 190 – over 60 pounds!  It took a lot of time, which may be part of why I let ReadSteve slip – along with moving across the continent, etc.

The program involved weekly dietitian appointments; exercise, including workouts with a personal trainer; counseling, including individual and group therapy; educational programs, including videos; and meal tracking.  It’s all stuff that I’d tried before, on one level or another, but never so close together, and never in such a coordinated way.

Because I was doing so many different things at once, I don’t have the information necessary to pick out exactly what the winning combination was for me.  I do know that there were times when my diet lapsed, and times when I let exercise slip – but I never let everything slip.  There was always something I was doing that helped me lose weight.

Of course, even if I could pick out the winning combination, which I may be able to do over the years as I pin down what it takes to stay fit, it’s still just my winning combination, and everybody is different.  So, next time somebody asks how I did it, I have a ready-made reply.  It may not be a very satisfying reply, but it’s all I’ve got for now.