I haven’t talked about actual weight loss for a while, so it’s time.

Just this morning, I managed to push through a new low; the last was achieved last October on the day I left for a cruise. I knew that would be my low for a while, since I was heading into vacation, holidays, and my second knee surgery. Now I’m at a new low, so of course, I have spring break next week (camping) and I’m leaving on another cruise after that. In other words, I’ll have some retracing to do, but it’s also life. I’ve learned how to deal with such things without feeling as if I’m punishing myself.

This path has never been linear; it’s more like a twisting dirt road through the mountains (with an occasional plow over a low water bridge that’s flooding) than it is a sunny interstate, with plenty of obstacles that have required me to figure out ways to work through and around them.

And that’s exactly what I have needed.

I think most of us who are or have been morbidly obese and dream of losing the weight that complicates our lives have dreamed of miracles, where we wake up the next day to find that our previous issues were just a bad dream. That’s part of the fascination with television shows that show massive weight loss, the before-and-after pics, and so much more. We want to know it’s possible.

The glimmer of hope that I have to offer is that it is possible, but having lost a massive amount of weight relatively easily and fast a number of years ago, I know that these battles I wage, now, are actually much better indicators of success down the road. I have tackled — and learned from — the experiences I’ve encountered along the way. I’ve accepted that there isn’t just one way to slay this particular dragon; there is no magic way, no best way. Only the way that I find works for me personally, which is why I urge people to find their own paths rather than hoping to glean my methods.

It sure would have been easier to wake up from a nightmare and be skinny. I’ll grant you that. I’ve failed enough times at this that I didn’t quite believe what I’ve achieved to this point could happen to me, personally. Someone else? Sure! But me? Nope. There are still times when I feel like I’m living a dream, and tomorrow, I’ll wake up and find all 192 pounds I’ve lost were just fiction.

If I were on the outside and reading this, I would think that anyone who’s been actively working on weight loss since 2013 has settled in and knows they’re gonna kick this. From the inside, though, I’ve been working my way along by focusing on the next thing — and the number of obstacles that stand between me and my eventual maintenance are now very few. My horizon, once mountainous, is leveling out and I can see where I just might end up. But it still feels a bit dreamlike.

Me? No longer obese? That’s a mere 15 pounds away. Someone pinch me! 15 pounds is nothing — not even ten percent of what I’ve left behind me.

Will I likely gain weight while camping and then going on a cruise? Probably. There was a day when I would have simply never gone back on my diet after vacation, partly from a sense of unfairness that I should have to deal with this, but life is unfair. Whining about it while doing nothing gets us exactly nothing, right? Or worse — the something we get is weight we didn’t want!

The difference now is that I’m not on a diet. This is my not-so-new normal — for the rest of my life — and dealing with weight gains and losses will be in my personal geography for the rest of my life.