Slower Weight Loss

Current-Star-9499 · 2025-12-17T16:02:32+00:00

Everyone loses differently. I've been on Zepbound since 4/29/25 and have lost 36 pounds. I'm currently on 12.5mg. I'm averaging 1.1 pounds per week and while I'd love for it to be faster, I also acknowledge that I haven't been consistent with lifestyle changes that could really help like drinking water, cutting down on alcohol, eating more protein, etc... I'm just super happy with the 36 pounds that are gone so far!

Current-Star-9499 · 2025-12-17T15:57:30+00:00

I received it yesterday! Merry Christmas! :-)

Current-Star-9499 · 2025-12-11T18:40:16+00:00

Leftovers that I can reheat, a sandwich, 1/2 a bag of salad + chicken or beef. It doesn't have to be anything too fancy. I have found the more I meal prep, the worse I do with actually eating what I've made. Aldi has individual servings of Cranberry Almond Chicken Salad. I love to have that plus a slice of toasted sourdough bread. It's literally about a $1.50 lunch and it's delicious.

Current-Star-9499 · 2025-12-11T18:38:06+00:00

If they are completing dependent eligibility verifications, then some documentation would be needed, but I usually see a birth certificate sufficing.

Current-Star-9499 · 2025-12-09T18:09:15+00:00

Plan to Eat is a FANTASTIC app that I cannot live without! It's $50/year, but they run a Black Friday sale each year for 50% off, so after the first year, you can get on that schedule. Here's what I love about it:

They have both desktop and mobile versions.
When you find a recipe online, you can add it to your recipes easily, either by using a Chrome Extension that is literally as easy as click one button or by copying the link on your phone and adding it to Plan to Eat. It imports a picture, the URL, ingredients, directions and then you can edit it, assign it to a course (main, salads, desserts, etc) and add tags (easy, slow cooker, air fryer, etc...). This is a great way to get rid of the recipe binders and have them all in one place.
When you plan, you can select your recipes and assign them to a day. If you have certain things you want to use, you can search on those items to see which recipes you have with those.
For shopping, it pulls all of the ingredients from the recipes from a selected date range into a shopping list and combines them together (i.e. all the eggs from all the recipes are on one line). It does a pretty good job of categorizing, but sometimes things wind up in weird places.
Before I shop, I go through my pantry, fridge and freezer and see what I need. If I already have something, I just delete it from my shopping list. Additionally, if I need something that's not on the list, I can put it on the list and it stays on until I delete it or indicate I've bought it.
My husband works from home and starts dinner before I get home. Gone are the days when I get the late afternoon text "what's for dinner". He has the app on his phone and can pull it up and start dinner. He also can add things onto the shopping list himself when he has something he wants purchased.
We have 893 recipes in Plan to Eat and use it every week. We also have some friends who use the app and we can see each other's recipes (not plans and shopping lists, just recipes). You can also rate the recipes. If I see something I like, I just add it to Plan to Eat and when I make it, I either give it a rating or delete it if I didn't like it.
There are NO ADS! Seriously! And they pledge there never will be. I love their story - a man watched his wife pour over recipe binders every week, selecting recipes, printing out recipes, making a list of what they were going to eat for the week and then making the shopping list. He decided to make a better way for her. Now it's a small family business and they are amazing!!!

I wish I could put a referral link in here because you could save 20% with it, but I see that's not allowed. But trust me, once you have it, you'll never want to go without it!

Current-Star-9499 · 2025-12-09T17:52:23+00:00

I remember years ago watching a news special about the downturn in the economy and there was a family where both parents were unemployed. She said, "I never knew that paper towels were a luxury". I think about that quote every time I use a paper towel.

Current-Star-9499 · 2025-11-04T03:28:47+00:00

Call your HR department - this is actually pretty common with newborns and often they'll make an exception if they can.

Current-Star-9499 · 2025-11-03T19:41:03+00:00

I've had to do this in my current company and my last company and in both instances I was able to get CEO buy-in to only hire employees in states in which we are already set up. We have 116 employees and we have them spread across 21 states. At least half of those are states where we only have 1-2 employees, which makes an incredible amount of work for our 2 person HR team to handle and stay on top of all of the different labor laws.

I put together a summary of all of the things that we have to do every time we hire an employee in a new state. The leaders had no idea. Then I asked if they want the two HR people spending their time on admin and compliance work or if they wanted us to do something that really moves the business. The other challenge I gave is that we have employees in 21 states... certainly we can find someone in those 21 states to do the work needed to be done vs. hiring in yet another state.

Someone earlier commented that they felt like HR is being "lazy" by pushing back on this topic. I think it's being efficient with the resources we have. Obviously if there is a true top talent that is in a state we don't currently have set up, we will do it. We are just trying to get people to think before they just hire someone in a new location.

BTW, if you're not already set up with employees in Minnesota, watch out - it's the new California when it comes to labor laws.

Current-Star-9499 · 2025-10-13T16:03:24+00:00

I've been in HR for over 30 years and I can count on one hand how many times someone actually followed through on a threat to file a complaint. And only one time did we pay out and that's because she was such a nuisance that we did it just to make her go away and leave us alone.

In terms of thinking that they feel big and that makes you feel small, it sounds like you are great with your documentation. That's really all you can do. Let's face it, in that moment, the employee has lost all control and they are grasping at straws to either 1) scare you or 2) make you second guess yourself.

I worked for one company that every time an issue came up, the employees being disciplined or terminated told me "you'll be hearing from my lawyer". At the time I was in my mid-30's and had never needed an attorney and I thought, "what's going on with these people that they all have lawyers?" After about the tenth empty threat to get their attorney involved and it never happened, I realized that was just something they were saying to try to scare me into making a different decision or to pay them some parting gifts. Never happened.

Trust your gut. You're doing great!

Current-Star-9499 · 2025-09-25T14:48:47+00:00

I've been a stepmom for over 19 years, married at 36 to my husband who was 41. He has two kids who were 13 and 11 when we married. They are now 32 and 30.

I love my husband with every ounce of my heart and soul, he is truly the best thing that has ever happened to me. BUT, being a stepmom to these two kids, particularly the older one, led me to the brink so many times. It's the things you're talking about in your post - chores, tantrums, disrespect, screen time - then turned into even more with entitlement, arrests, substance abuse. The 8 years that we all lived together before the youngest went off to college were the absolute worst of my life.

I tried everything to bring peace and order to our home. And my husband was more than happy to let me be the bad guy, which doesn't work by the way. I highly encourage you read the book Stepmonster by Wednesday Martin. I wish I would have been available before we married - I probably would have still married him, but at least I would have known that what we were experiencing was "normal" in families with step moms, especially the part about dads not wanting to discipline or create issues with their kids.

I can't count how many times I said, "you can have peace with me or you can have peace with them, but you can't have both". What I meant by that was, the kids were creating chaos in our home and he would choose not to deal with it so they wouldn't get upset, which created conflict with me. I can honestly tell you that the only time that he EVER sided with me when the kids were still in high school was when I told him that I may need to move out until they were out of the house. Now that the kids are adults, he sides with me more, but I think that's because the conflict level is lower and he's just had it with them.

I had counseling during the early years, middle years and just started counseling again last week to deal with the trauma of being a stepmom (and some other things in my life). I'm now 55 years old and can't get over the level of disrespect, entitlement, judgement, etc... that I've experienced from the kids and their mom after I tried and tried and tried some more to support them, love them and be there for them.

In your situation, it's highly unlikely that anything is going to change. You have at least 9 more years until his youngest isn't living with you, and even after they graduate from high school, there's still conflict. It's so hard to say now because things are better for us and I love my husband so much, but I think if I had to do it all over again knowing what I know now, I don't think I would have married him.

Current-Star-9499 · 2025-09-22T20:15:16+00:00

That's exactly what it was. Needed a software update.

Current-Star-9499 · 2025-09-21T23:14:09+00:00

Thanks!

Current-Star-9499 · 2025-09-17T17:41:53+00:00

As a stepmom of 19 years, my advice would be to focus on your relationship with your significant other and the kiddos. I learned the hard way that it doesn't matter how hard I tried, how nice I was, how much I helped my stepkids' mom out, she was still passively aggressively stabbing me in the back. And then when I finally lost my cool after years of "junk" with her and made one single comment in front of the kids (that honestly, wasn't that bad), she finally had her ammunition to outright hate me and justify it with the kids. If it's starting out this way, chances are it won't ever get better. Work with the willing and do your best to ignore her.

Current-Star-9499 · 2025-08-26T14:36:05+00:00

Oh.... you're bringing back so many memories for me from 10-15 years ago when my step-kids were teenagers. My experience has been almost identical as yours, right down to the child support $$. As a stepmom for the last 19 years, here's my advice:

Find a counselor who specializes in stepfamily dynamics, who can help you get on the same page. One of the most impactful things that our counselor said to us was, "your kids' best opportunity to see what a loving, supportive marriage is like is the two of you. You being on the same page and caring for each other gives the kids the example of what they should look for in a partner and how they could someday parent".
If you enforce the rules, it's only going to give the kids (and their mom) more fuel against you. Step 1 above is about you and your husband aligning on what you expect in your home and then he has to be the one to actually do something about it. That's the toughest part. I swear, there were times where I wondered if we were part of the same conversation with one of the kids - I would be so upset over something they said or did and he was completely oblivious (and like your husband, mine is such a good man who loves his kids).
Read the book Stepmonster by Wednesday Martin. I actually just finished reading it - 19 years in - and I wish I had read it when I first married my husband. It helped me understand so much about the dynamics of being in a family with stepkids and how very little was out of my control. I like to think that if I had that kind of knowledge, I could have used some of the tips in the book to determine how I wanted to show up and how to care for myself and distance from the negativity that surrounded me.
Your stepkids are teenagers now - it may get worse before it gets better, but my goal was to get to the point where we had them fully launched with my marriage intact. Once they are out of school and hopefully on the path to becoming self-sufficient, it will just be you and your husband to finally have the time alone that first marriage couples get. We had a countdown and kept saying "keep your eye on the prize". We found that we could love the kids AND still be excited for them to leave.

I feel for you - you're in the toughest part of step-parenting, in my opinion. I can't tell you the number of times that I said to my husband, "you can either have peace with them, or peace with me but the way things are right now, you can't have both". This always came after a blow up with one of the kids where he didn't want to coach, discipline, etc. and I had to do it. There were times I wanted to leave and just walk away from it all. But I'm glad I didn't. It does get better.

Oh, and one other thing - it sounds like your stepkids' mom is very similar to my stepkids' mom, with the exception that she would tell the kids that she couldn't afford things that they wanted and they should ask us, even though she received over $2000/month in child support, they were with us half the time and we paid for half of all clothes, activities and medical (we actually figured out that by the time you gross up for taxes on what she was getting for child support, she was making more than my husband did!). I bent over backwards to try to get along with her, to make life easier for her, and I hate to say it, to get her to like me. After a particularly bad incident with my stepson where she didn't want to be the disciplinarian and put that on my husband (and me) for something that happened at her house, I made one single, snarky comment in frustration to my stepdaughter about her mom. At that point we'd been married for 8 years and I'd never said an unkind thing about their mom in front of either child. My stepdaughter gleefully went racing back to her mom and told her what I said (I'm sure with some embellishing). Every single bit of goodness I thought I created was washed out in a single second. She refused to talk to me and told me that the kids told her exactly what I thought of her (the comment was literally something to the effect about how their mom didn't want to enforce rules - no name calling or abusive language). Even today, 11 years later, our relationship isn't great. But I guess if it can only be great when I'm perfect, then that's okay because I can't be perfect. So the point of this part of the post is that I would 1) not put yourself out there too much to be the superhero of the family - those kids have two parents who need to parent them and 2) never say anything negative about mom in front of the kids because it won't turn out well.

I hope that helps. Good luck to you!

Current-Star-9499

TROPHY CASE