This is going to contain a lot of talk about diet. Read—or don’t!—with your own self-care in mind.

In 2025, I really thought I was going to lose weight. I got back on Carb Manager, which is the app that I use for tracking calories. I counted and weighed and all the things.

And was spectacularly unsuccessful. I took too many detours, too often when I’d eat a treat, just this once.

I gave up after just a short while.

Part of my problem is that I’m continuing to have stomach issues, namely, I can’t eat vegetables. (No advice please!) So I told myself that I’d lose weight after I dealt with my stomach issues.

Had a bunch of other health issues that I’ve had to deal with, so the stomach issues and my weight just kept being put off.

At this point, it’s the end of the year. There’s a long rambling course of things that got me to my ah-ha moment. I’m going to summarize here.

I love to travel outside the US in places where I don’t speak the language. I have not been able to do anywhere near the amount of travel I would like to do. I really want to take another trip. Cheapest time to travel to some of the places on my list are the first three months of the year.

That means 2027 for the travel.

Now, put that to one side.

People always talk about “knowing your why” when it comes to a large change in behavior. I knew my whys for losing weight: my knees and hips were going to feel better and I would be in less physical pain, I would feel better about myself, it’s part of the whole longevity thing, it’s good for my health, etc.

None of those were enough. They have been enough in the past. They no longer are.

I’ve said before that I work much better with carrots than with sticks. An accountability partner is the last thing that I need when it comes to losing weight. That’s a stick, and honestly, that’s what the Carb Manager app is, and why that doesn’t really work for me.

Instead, I needed a carrot.

What was my carrot for losing weight?

Travel.

If I lose the weight, and built up my stamina and strength, I get to go traveling in early 2027. There is going to be a mid-year accounting, so I really have to get on it early.

If I did gifs, there would be the tenor gif at this point. Because it was like the heavens aligned, the gears that had been spinning or clanking together suddenly meshed, and my spirit and my body synched.

Another way that I’ve been talking about it—a big-ass breaker switch got flipped.

One of the things I know about myself is that up until 2015-2016, food wasn’t that important to me. Sure, I liked to eat good things. But I wasn’t constantly hungry, and I sometimes forgot to eat meals.

2015-2016 was when I started having migraines all the time. I remember noticing when my body changed. Before that time, I would get stressed and I’d stop eating. It seemed very weird to me that I felt both stressed and hungry at the same time. That was the start of frequently feeling hungry for me and stress eating.

Back to the present. The day after I told myself that if I lost weight I would go traveling, I missed lunch. I started working and it wasn’t until 2 PM that I looked up and realized that I had a touch of hunger, not a lot, and I’d forgotten to eat.

I haven’t been able to do that for ten years. At that time, my brain told me, “It’s okay to miss meals, now.”

I was pretty floored by that.

Later that day, I was looking at the snacks that I have on the counter of TH2. I told myself that I was going to have to eat through all those and then I would stop snacking.

Brain told me, “You make fucking amazing food. Eat that during proper meals. You don’t need to snack anymore.”

Again, wow. But I could feel the rightness of that deep down in my bones. It wasn’t just a statement. It was a conviction.

I have been doing either full workouts or mini workouts every day since then. It’s so easy to get up and move again.

This sort of switch happens in other areas of my life. When I’m done with something, I’m done. There’s no going back. I know others in my family are the same way. My mom was like this, and my nephew is as well (we talked about it once).

How am I planning on losing weight? Eating less is key. You cannot outrun your fork. I’m going back to my old favorite, which is intermittent fasting. At least one day per week, possibly two, I’ll eat breakfast, have my tea, then not eat again until the next morning. At this point, I’m not eating lunches anymore. I don’t need them. Instead, I’m eating breakfasts, which are important because I will frequently have those with my husband. I’ll also eat dinners, which are important, because I will frequently have those with friends. There will be times when I eat lunch with friends, and on those days, that might be the only meal for the day.

I don’t know how to describe this well enough for people who don’t have this sort of switch. I was going down one path and now suddenly I’m on a different path. The old path is closed off, no longer an option. There is no going back.

I’d like to think that it’s going to be easy to lose weight at this point. We’ll see. I won’t back slide as much as will sometimes overeat. I will say, though, that no longer being constantly hungry is going to make it so much easier.

So what about you? Do you have that sort of switch, or do you know other people who do?

Next up—2026 and looking forward