You sound very much like an emotional eater--someone who eats to comfort themselves from the stresses of life. If so, this is the primary problem you must solve.

Paul McKenna's book [I Can Make You Thin][1] was the best book I came across for solving this, suffering from emotional eating myself, and I must have read about 30. [Why We Get Fat][2] and [Wheat Belly][3] were also fantastic, making me realize it's not just about calories in versus calories out, but what constitutes those calories. I discovered that the foods I used to somehow be attracted to most caused me to want to eat again very soon, because of the addictive 'high' I was getting from them and eventual blood-sugar crash.

**Exercise is the hard way lose weight**. It takes a lot of work, typically unsustainable over a long period (especially when time challenged), to burn off the extra calories from poor food choices. It's almost unfair that you'd have to walk an hour to burn off the excess calories from a single, poorly chosen meal. You don't have to eat salads and please don't go on a diet, just learn what poor food choices are and make them the exception rather than the norm. Don't be in a rush, it takes time to change your lifestyle.

Exercise also **increases your appetite**, making you feel hungrier than if you hadn't exercised. A positive of exercise however is that it can make you mentally stronger in resisting bad food choices, knowing a painful exercise session was all for nothing if you indulge.

I would try to **incorporate exercise into your current activities** rather than dedicating time for it, simple things like parking a short distance from the school and walking to collect the kids, or from the mall. You'll enjoy ease of parking and instil some good habits into the kids as well. Park a little farther as you find it getting easier.

**Learn to see chores as exercise** and they become more tolerable. By sprinkling exercise throughout the day, it'll serve as a constant reminder to make good food choices, something we can easily forget when our blood-sugar levels are screaming for attention.

Don't look at TV weight-loss shows and compare your weight losses to theirs. These TV shows have full time trainers, dieticians, the contestants dangerously dehydrate themselves for the weigh-ins and the shows scale time down for dramatic effect, with one weeks loss really being two.

You can try joining an online weight-loss site like [MyFitnessPal][4] to get a good gauge on just how many calories you are eating, but having run an online community weight-loss program for 6 seasons, I came to disbelieve in the community aspect of losing weight. If you need a community to answer to, losing weight is not as important as it should be for you. More learning and/or reinforcement as to the disastrous health effects is required. You have to want this for yourself, not because you have to answer to someone, or for their admiration.

  [1]: http://tinyurl.com/co6toy3
  [2]: http://tinyurl.com/d53xy7w
  [3]: http://tinyurl.com/cv5nlan
  [4]: http://myfitnesspal.com