If you’re a regular reader of Kalyn’s Kitchen, you’ve probably noticed my wonderful blog header. Designed by my super talented brother, Rand, the header tells how I came to create Kalyn’s Kitchen after I lost 35 pounds on the South Beach Diet while still eating lots and lots of delicious food, and friends started asking me for recipes. All that is still true, except for the part about the 35 pounds.

Now if you subscribe to the e-mail list to get a weekly update of what is new on the blog, you have already heard this news. I wasn’t really planning to announce it to the world, instead I was just going to have Rand quietly change the number when we update the header. But several friends have encouraged me to announce it in a regular post, telling me that others who are trying the South Beach Diet or any other lower carb way of eating will be encouraged by my success.

So, without further fanfare, let me tell you that as of Monday morning, October 10, I have officially lost 41 pounds.

I started the South Beach Diet in July of 2004. My goal was to lose 40 pounds, or wear a loose size 10 pants. I have kind of a curvaceous body style, so a 10 is a reasonable size for me, and not too thin for a woman my age (which I am NOT going to reveal). I lost the first 35 pounds in about four months. Then for months and months and months my weight was like a yo-yo, up 2 pounds, down 1 pound, up 1 pound, down 3 pounds. It seemed like no matter what I did (and I was not completely faithful all this time on my diet, which by then had morphed into my own version of South Beach / Lower Carb eating) I simply could not get down to 140, the goal I had set. I even got to 140.5 a few times (darn that digital scale anyway) but I could not get to 140.

Then on Monday, October 10, my scale registered 139.0. I was so excited I announced it to everyone I met for a few days, and sent the news out to my blog mailing list. To celebrate I gave away the old size 12 and 14 pants that I had been keeping in the back of my closet, and went to my old favorite burger joint, Hires Hamburgers, and had a burger and fries, with fry sauce, a Utah creation I used to be seriously addicted to.

Don’t think that burger and fries means that I am abandoning my lower carb way of eating. It would not be overstating it to say that the South Beach Diet changed my life. I had always figured that I had two choices as far as maintaining my weight: exercise obsessively (I knew that would work, but it was hard to stick to it), or follow a diet made up of boring, tasteless, low fat food. The South Beach Diet allowed me to eat lots and lots of my favorite foods without feeling deprived. I was able to quit taking cholesterol medication after being on it for seven years. And best of all, the lower carb way of eating gave me energy I never imagined back in the days when I was suffering those mid-afternoon “sugar slumps” nearly every day.

I don’t plan on becoming a diet fanatic any time soon, and I consider this blog to be mainly about good tasting food. I just hope that by reading my blog anyone who wants to lose weight and is considering the lower carb, lower glycemic way of eating, will get some ideas of all the truly delicious food that you can enjoy on a low glycemic eating plan. And for people who don’t need to lose weight, or who don’t want to follow that kind of plan, I hope you will enjoy my recipes simply because they taste good.

By the way, I can now wear a size 8 pants, or at Chicos (my favorite store) a size 1. Big smile. 🙂

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