vetswife ,
How old are your children?
I was never considered thin but I wasn't fat either. However when I had my kids to gain weight and it just never came off. I was totally obsessed with my parenting role and would never take time for myself. After this past year I'm starting to see that this obsession is not good for my kids or me. Since I've TRIED to find a little time just for myself, a lot of other things have fallen into better balance.

Do you have any time to dedicate to yourself daily? Nap time, early morning, before dinner, late at night. Pick an 1 hour time block and then block out just for you. During this time just commit yourself to doing something active that you like. I didn't think I could handle early morning workouts. When my friend suggested we workout together from 6-7 am I about laughed her out of my house. The first 2 wks about killed me but then I got into a routine. I was able to workout and get home in time to get a shower and the kids off to school. My H was home at that time so I didn't have to worry about leaving the kids home along.

You said you picked up an interest in cooking. On a previous weight loss quest I logged on to e-diet.com. There are a lot of free recipes and helpful hints at on this site. I actually joined the site for a few months to get ideas for different meals. It was fairly cheap ($5/ month). I have few domestic skills and am clueless in the kitchen. I would log on and select some of their meal ideas. I could even choose like ..chicken meals that had less than 5 ingredients (anything over that I get lost ) , and 30 minutes or less prep time. This site helped me see other food options. It also gave me some snacking ideas and an option to print out a shopping list. For me a short term membership dramatically improved the variety of my diet. My H liked having something different than boiled chicken over and over again too. If I did it again I would sign up for a month and download a zillion of meal ideas then discontinue my membership.

Also if you are interested, I can back track my steps and find the free website I used to find out the number of calories in different foods. This was also helpful to get a general sense of how many calories I was consuming a day. I thought ... "I don't eat much, why am I still so fat?" When I actually log my intake, counted the calories, and found out why I was so fat... the grazing I was doing added up. I get a bit obsessive with calorie counting so this time I have done that, but I needed to do it at first to get a better sense of serving size and caloric content of different foods.

Let me know if you are interested in some of the sites I used.