Take It

Weigh-in this morning was exactly the same as weigh-in last week: 175.8. Which, considering how badly (and deliberately) I fell off the wagon for Christmas, is not bad at all. I'll take it.

Since Thanksgiving, I've gained about one pound, overall. One pound, between Thanksgiving and two family birthdays and multiple Christmas parties and feasts? I'll take it.

This year, in 2009, I've lost about 70 pounds. I've also lost about 90% of the knee pain I was having this time last year, and 75% of the pain in my feet. I gained some shoulder pain, but I think I'm starting to make progress on that, so... I'll take it.

Even if I don't lose any more weight from this point forward -- and I don't for an instant believe I'm done, but if I were -- then I'm still thinner and healthier than I've been at any time in the last fifteen years.

I'll take it.

...And Up

Today's weigh-in: 175.8, which is up 1.8 pounds from last week. Can't say I'm terribly surprised, what with the party, and the other party, and the third party, and the stress-eating, and then the friend over for dinner and margaritas last night.

Looking at my chart, though, it looks like I've been more or less maintaining since Thanksgiving (down and then up and down and then up and down and then...) which is not horribly unreasonable, what with all the birthdays and holidays and such. So my son's birthday is today, and we're having my parents over tomorrow for Christmas Eve dinner, and then Friday is Christmas.

And then it'll be time to throw out or give away any leftover candy and cookies and other goodies, and get my behind back into the gym, and get back on the diet wagon and start making some serious progress.

Bracing

Well, I weighed in at 174 this morning, which is down 1.2 from last week's "real" weight, so good job, me! (Also, it's a grand total of 99 pounds lost, which doesn't even seem real.)

Of course, I suspect I'm about to fall right the heck back off the wagon, here. Friday is my office's holiday party -- and since I was the coordinator, I already know exactly what awesome food is going to be there. And Saturday is our Christmas party at home (again with the tasty treats). And Sunday is the family party to celebrate my son's birthday.

No matter how restrained I am, getting on the scale Monday morning is going to be painful, I expect.

Oh, well. Let's talk about realistic expectations: I told myself that I'd be satisfied with maintaining through the holidays, which means that my weigh-in on January 6th (the first weigh-in that's completely out of the holiday block) should be no more than 175.6, which is where I was at the beginning of December. And the last time I addressed my goals, back in October, I talked about wanting to hit my 100 total pounds lost mark by the end of January. Which, I think, is still eminently reasonable and perfectly doable, despite the temptations of the next few days.

Which is not so much giving myself permission to misbehave as it is acknowledging reality, taking responsibility for correcting any slip-ups, and promising to move forward without too many glances backward.

Addendum

I totally called it. I ate (more or less) on-plan yesterday, drank plenty of fluids to rehydrate after the alcohol and flush the late-night stuff, and this morning? 175.2. (Both the bathroom scale and the Wii Fit agreed on the size of the drop, even, so it's not just that the scale is getting flaky and random on me again.) Not just a less-egregious gain, but even a 0.4-pound loss. If I call that my official weigh-in for the week (which I think I will), then that's a total loss of 97.8 pounds. I'm 2.2 pounds away from breaking the triple-digit barrier!

Falling Off the Wagon

I'm up 1.2 pounds this morning, to 176.8. Though yesterday I was at 175 (which would have been a .6 loss) and I'm thinking the damage isn't quite as bad as it looks.

Certainly, I've earned some gain. I sort of quit tracking food over the weekend. We had our annual cookie party on Sunday, after which we went out to eat; and then Monday I skipped the gym, and then yesterday I went out for lunch and indulged in french fries, and then last night went to my book club and had both alcohol and egregious amounts of sugar -- enough to make me actually slightly nauseous. And then I had a stomach cramp around 2:30 this morning, and I didn't get back to sleep for a good hour or so.

Now usually, book club is on Wednesday, after my weigh-in, which gives me the week to recover. Late-night eating often results in an artificial morning bump, and alcohol always gives me a half-pound or so bump the next day, due to water retention, and poor sleep sometimes gives me a weight spike, too. So it's entirely possible that anywhere from a half-pound to a pound of that gain might be gone again by tomorrow. If it is, I may revise my official weigh-in for this week to reflect the more realistic number.

Which by no means lets me off the hook. I need to get back to tracking my food, and I need to stop eating so much junk, and I need to get back to my workouts. I'm okay with more or less maintaining my weight through the holidays, but a net gain is not what I want. Time to get back on the wagon.

Zeno

Weigh-in today: 175.6, up 1 pound from last week. So total loss is 97.4.
Last year, when I was averaging a loss of about 2 pounds a week, I got a bad case of uck just before Thanksgiving, lost six pounds in one week, and then gained 2 of them back the next.

This year, averaging about 1 pound a week, I got a mild case of uck just before Thanksgiving, lost three pounds in one week, and then gained 1 of them back. The halving of last year's numbers amuses me mightily. It's like the Zeno's paradox of weight loss.

Maybe next year (when I'll hopefully be maintaining), I'll have a vague case of queasies, lose a pound and a half, and then gain three-quarters of it back.

Like A Rock

I'm down to 174.6 this morning - a drop of 3.4 pounds (98.4 total). At least a pound and a half of it is suspect, though, since I was sick yesterday and only ate about half my points. And even if it's real, well, tomorrow is Thanksgiving. So I might gain some of that back before next week. We'll see, I guess.

BUT! But but but! I've been mostly keeping up with doing my yoga on the Wii Fit every weekday morning (with some breaks in recent days due to illness) and this week, for the first time, the Wii moved me from "obese" to merely "overweight"! I don't know if it'll survive the holidays, but at last I'm out of that whole horrible obese category!

Shooting Distance

Well. I guess my trip wasn't as bad for me as I'd worried it would be -- all that walking around doing tourist things must have balanced out the eating. I'm down 2 pounds this morning, which puts me at 178 -- that's 95 total pounds lost.

That means I've passed my 4th 10% goal! I'd say it's time to decide on a reward for it, except...

Five more pounds gets me to 100 total pounds lost, and under the 30.0 BMI threshold for obesity (I'll be merely "overweight") for the first time in over 20 years. (I'm not sure exactly when I crossed that line the first time. The summer after my first year of grad school, I was horrified to realize I'd stress-eaten my way all the way up to 195, and I dieted and exercised my way down to about 175 before my feet betrayed me. The 30.0 BMI threshold for me is at about 174 or so.)

Anyway, those are some milestones really worthy of a major celebration, so I think I'll hold off and have one big reward when I get to them. Not sure when that will be, with the holidays right on top of us to lure me into Temptation and interrupt my exercise routines. But that's okay, really, because I don't know what my reward should be, either. Feel free to chime in with ideas!

Big and Round

This morning's weigh-in was 180 on the nose: down 1.4 for the week and 93 overall. That puts me exactly 1 pound from my 4th 10% goal.

I'm just pleased that I managed to avoid gaining weight through both Hallowe'en and my birthday, honestly.

Of course, I'm about to go out of town for four days, which upsets both my exercise and eating schedules, so I'm probably not expecting to hit that goal next week. On the other hand, I'll be doing a fair amount of walking on this trip, and the relatives I'm staying with are used to be sort of health-nut-y the last time I checked, so it's possible that I'll be able to stay on plan and hit it. You never know!

After that, the next big hurdle is Thanksgiving. I'm planning on bringing roasted pumpkin soup and the Weight Watchers recipe for candied yams, to help reduce the damages, but I think aside from that and some common-sense damage control (have a glass of water before eating and take big servings of the soup and veggies to help fill me up, be the one to get up and chase the kids after dessert so I'm not tempted into seconds, etc.), I might give myself permission to ignore the points counter for the day.

We'll see how I do in the two weeks between now and then, I guess. 'Tis the season for diet backsliding, but I really don't want to lose too much ground.

Dodge!

This morning's weigh-in was 181.4, which is .6 lost this week, 91.6 total.  Not an outstanding loss, but given the lack of control I was having with the Hallowe'en candy, I'm happy to have lost at all.

This week's challenge:  my birthday.  We're having dinner with my family on Sunday, and my actual birthday is Monday.  I executed some preemptive damage-reduction and told my mom and husband that I'd make my own cake, and then I spent a day or so trolling the Weight Watchers recipe database for lower-point desserts.  (I finally decided to make two of them:  a two-layer meringue/mousse, and gingerbread cupcakes.  I'm doing the cupcakes for the family party because my sister-in-law is allergic to both strawberries and chocolate, and also because I can slather the cupcakes with cream cheese frosting and no one will need to know that they're diet friendly.)  Still, the possibility for excessive dessert consumption lingers, so that's what I'll need to try to avoid.

I'm also looking ahead to the challenge that is Thanksgiving.  I've volunteered to bring pumpkin soup; I may also offer to bring lightened dressing and sweet potato dishes.  And possibly dessert.  (Honestly, I was going to volunteer to have Thanksgiving dinner at our house this year, but my mom is insisting.  I don't think she'll object, however, if I take some of the cooking off her hands.)

I also dusted off the Wii Fit this morning (pretty much literally -- I haven't so much as looked at it for three months or more) and did a little yoga.  That's got less to do with weight loss (yoga isn't exactly a calorie-burner) and more to do with my noticing twinges in my feet again lately, and yoga did more to help that than anything else, ever.  So I want to try to do a little Wii Fit yoga in the mornings.  The goal right now is to do about 15 minutes of yoga, at least 3 times a week.  Ideally, I'd like to make it part of my weekday routine, but I don't want to get too ambitious too fast -- and I need to see how it fits into the morning schedule, anyway.  If it works out well (and I can adjust to not hitting the snooze on my alarm three or four times in a row) I might start to tack on some of the strength training exercises, as well.  But for now, just the yoga, just 15 minutes, to get my feet back in line.

The Great Pumpkin

When we went to our favorite pumpkin patch this year to pick out our Hallowe'en pumpkins, we got a pumpkin for each member of the family.  My husband and I each picked out nice-sized carving pumpkins with sturdy stems, and our daughter picked out her own smaller stemless pumpkin, and I grabbed a small "pie" pumpkin for our son, because he's not quite two yet and had no idea what was going on, and he's not going to be carving his own jack-o-lantern for several years yet.

At some point, it occurred to me that the thing to do, once Hallowe'en was over and we no longer required the pumpkins for decorative purposes, would be to make some pumpkin-based culinary treats.  My daughter's been crazy about "helping" me cook lately, and I thought if I could find a diet-friendly recipe or two, I might give it a go.  All in all, the experiment was a wild success, so I'm sharing it here, if for no other reason than it'll be handy when I want to repeat it later.


Step One:  Preparing the Pumpkin.
Most recipes call for your pumpkin to be precooked and pureed.  So Hallowe'en night, after we'd turned off our porch light, I brought in the pumpkin.  I cut off the top (just like for a carving pumpkin, though with more difficulty, since pie pumpkins have thicker skin and meat), then cut it in half and scooped out the seeds and the goopy strands they hang in.

(As a side note, pie pumpkins have fatter seeds than carving pumpkins, and I was tempted to collect these and roast them...  but pumpkin seeds have an insane amount of calories and/or fat, even if you toast them without using butter.  And while I like pumpkin seeds, I don't like them enough to burn that many points on 'em!)

I got a baking sheet out, lightly sprayed it with some cooking spray, then put the two pumpkin halves flat-side down on the sheet, then covered them with foil.  I put the sheet in a 375-degree (F) oven for about 90 minutes.  (A little less than that, actually, when I started to smell something burning.  The burning turned out to be some juice that had leaked out from under the foil and run to the far edge of the pan.  The pumpkin itself was not burnt at all, though the skin had turned dark brown.)  By then, it was bedtime, so I left the baking sheet on the stove to cool overnight.

In the morning, I went to turn one over and got a fun surprise:  The inedible outer skin of the pumpkin lifted straight off the meat.  So much for having to "scoop it out"!  The instructions I was following recommended that I go through all sorts of weird steps to puree and strain the pumpkin, but I wasn't planning on making haute cuisine with it - a few lumps would be fine.  So I just dumped the meat into a large plastic mixing bowl and took my stick blender to it.  (I love my stick blender.  Though I should mention that it probably wasn't necessary in this case.  The pumpkin was so soft that it probably would've been perfectly pureed given about two minutes with a manual potato masher.)

Anyway, when it was all done, I spooned the puree into one-cup tupperware containers.  I got three full cups out of the pumpkin (which was probably about 5 pounds?).  Plus a couple of spoonfuls for my son, who was wandering around underfoot.  He was pretty enthusiastic about the stuff, and I tried a bite, myself:  All by itself, without any seasoning at all, the pumpkin puree tasted almost just like sweet potato.  And it was weird to know that I hadn't seasoned it at all, because I would otherwise have sworn it had some cinnamon and cloves in it already.  Very tasty stuff!

Recipe #1:  Pumpkin Muffins
I got this recipe from the Weight Watchers site, and if you're a WW member, you can probably go straight to it at this link.  But in case you're not a member, or they get rid of the recipe at some point in the future, here it is:

2 cups all-purpose flour
1 Tbsp baking powder
1 tsp table salt
1 tsp baking soda
1/2 tsp ground cloves
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/2 tsp ground nutmeg
2/3 cup unsweetened applesauce
1 cup pumpkin puree (can use canned, but fresh is better!)
2/3 cup sugar
1/2 cup egg substitute (e.g., Egg Beaters)
2/3 cup fat-free skim milk

1. Preheat oven to 400ºF. Coat a 12-hole muffin tin with cooking spray. (I recommend not using cupcake papers, because this is an oil-less recipe and they will stick to the muffins. If you really want to use them, spray the insides of the liners as well.)
2. Combine flour, baking powder, salt , baking soda, and spices in a large bowl.
3. Combine applesauce, pumpkin, sugar, egg substitute and milk in a medium bowl; mix thoroughly with a wooden spoon.
4. Add applesauce mixture to flour mixture and mix until completely incorporated.
5. Pour batter into muffin tins so each hole is about 2/3 full. Bake for 20 to 25 minutes, or until a tester inserted in the center of a muffin comes out clean.

• Note #1:  If you compare to the original WW recipe, you might note that I reduced the amount of nutmeg and added some ginger.  I did that because I love ginger and I don't much care for nutmeg.  Adjust spices at your own whim; just try to keep the total amount more or less the same.
• Note #2:  I made both mini-muffins and regular-sized ones.  I used 1 heaping Tbsp of batter for each mini-muffin (baking for only 12-13 minutes), and 3 heaping Tbsp of batter for each  normal muffin, and that netted me 24 minis and 10 regular muffins -- which works out to 18 servings, if you assume a serving is 3 minis or 1 normal.  The WW recipe says it makes 12 servings of 3 points each, but if you get 18 servings like I did, then they're 2 points each.  Either way, they were really tasty!

But when that was done, I was still left with 2 cups of pumpkin puree, and I didn't really want to make that many muffins.  Which led me to...

Recipe #2:  Pumpkin Soup
I adapted this from another recipe online, so I'll just post what I've got:

2 cups cooked pumpkin, pureed
8 oz sweet (e.g., vidalia) onion, diced
1 tsp butter
4 cups chicken broth
1/4 tsp salt (may need a touch more if using low-sodium broth, but this is a good starting place)
1 tsp ground cinnamon
1/2 tsp ground ginger
1/4 tsp ground cloves
1/4 tsp ground nutmeg
1/4 tsp black pepper
2 Tbsp packed brown sugar
12 oz fat-free evaporated milk (1 can)

1. Saute onion in butter (and some cooking spray, if needed) until it just begins to brown.
2. Add 1-2c of broth, remove from heat, and puree until smooth.  (I have mentioned that I love my stick blender, right?  You can also do this in a regular blender or food processor, but then you have a larger doodad to clean.)
   
3. Put it back over heat, and add remaining broth, pumpkin, spices, and sugar.  Bring to a boil and simmer 10 min.
4. Remove from heat and add milk.

• Note #1:  The entire recipe is about 13 points; I got 4 meal-sized servings of about 2 cups each out of this, so that's 3 points per serving.  I want to make this again for Thanksgiving dinner (if not before that), but that will probably be smaller 1-cup servings for half the points.
  
• Note #2:  The recipe I adapted it from recommended serving it with cinnamon toast, which sounds really quite lovely.
• Note #3:  The soup was wonderful, but a) a touch thin, and b) almost too sweet.  For future batches, I might reduce the amount of brown sugar (just 1 Tbsp for that dark flavor, maybe) and add a tablespoon or two of either cornstarch or flour to thicken it up a bit.

I had a muffin last night for a snack, and the soup today for lunch.  Both were absolutely wonderful, well-worth the effort involved in cleaning/roasting/pureeing the pumpkin.  And as a bonus, my daughter really enjoyed helping me cook!  I've definitely found myself some new fall favorites.

Landmarkes and Mileposts

I'm at 182 this morning, which means I lost 1.2 this week and 91 total. I finally passed the 90-pound mark, yay!

I've been averaging about a pound a week for the last three months, so if that holds, I should hit my fourth 10% goal in about three weeks. I should figure out what my reward will be for that pretty soon, eh?

(It may turn out to be more than 3 weeks, though, as I've got a lot of speedbumps between now and then, including book club tonight, Hallowe'en this weekend, my birthday next weekend, and then a trip to visit family the weekend after that. We'll see how it goes, I guess.)

At any rate, I'm hoping to get there before the end of November. And from there, it's only another 5 pounds to my next exciting landmark: I'll finally be saying farewell to the "obese" tag and falling into the merely "overweight" category! Even allowing a few extra weeks for things to stall out a bit around Christmas, I should make that milestone by the end of January.

And if I stay at about 1 pound/week, then I could get to the "normal" category -- which coincides with my 6th and final 10% goal -- by the end of next summer. (My 5th 10% goal will happen somewhere in the spring, by this estimation.) And then I'll try to figure out where I want my final goal weight to be, and hopefully get there by around this time next year.

It seems like a long way off, but it's been a while since I've done any long-range goal-setting. My original goal (almost exactly a year ago) was to be under 200 by the end of September, and I beat that by a couple of months. I'd rather plan realistically than ambitiously.

But that's the end of the road that I can see. The end of it. A year ago, I wasn't sure I could even get below 200. Next year at this time, I hope to be figuring out the ins and outs of maintenance after having lost very close to half my starting weight. Two years, give or take, to lose 130 pounds, give or take. Sounds pretty reasonable to me.

Here's to the coming year.

Chugging Along

Didn't post yesterday because I didn't have my little chart with me. But here it is: I'm down to 183.2 pounds, which is just 0.2 away from reaching the "90 pounds lost" milestone. That's 2.2 for the week -- unless you take into account the inexplicable, 1-day-only uptick I had last week on Wednesday. If you assume I was actually at 185 last week, then this was a 1.8 loss. Either way, pretty darned good, for lately.

I'm trying to remember to eat my activity points, either the day I earn them or the day after. I didn't quite manage it last week, mostly because work was doing this crazy thing where I was working absurd hours (no, really -- I went into the office at 10AM Sunday and didn't leave until 3:30 Monday morning) and it completely threw my eating out of joint. I'm actually really proud of myself for sticking to the diet through all that and not diving headfirst into the pizza and Chinese food that was being offered around.

So I really don't know whether it was the stress or the eating of APs or the screwed up sleep or what that helped me along. We'll see what happens, I suppose.

Did I mention that my brand new size 40-D bras are all on their tightest hooks, already? It's snug, but it's there. Which means it's about time for me to order some 38s. The "D" portion is still a bit in question -- I have to moosh things around to get everything to fit in the cups right, so I'm about half-pondering ordering 38-DDs instead of 38Ds. But I'm excited that I can see the end of the 40s.

It's worth noting that I was a 36C in high school, and a 38C in college -- and given the way boobs change for pregnancy and then don't change back, 38D may be the smallest chest size I can hope for. It's also worth noting that it's exclusively my chest that's keeping me from moving solidly into size Medium clothes -- when Ms don't fit, it's because they pull awkwardly across my boobs. Another couple of inches will probably get me into Ms for good, but if I'm giving up hope of a C cup, I might also have to give up hope of ever getting into a Small.

(Given that I started out at a 3X, though... I can live with M. Y'know?)

Danger Zone approaching. Hallowe'en looms! But aside from the caramel candy corn (which I'd happily eat by the pound), I'm not too terribly tempted, this year. If candy gets put in front of me, I'd certainly eat it (let's be honest) but I'm not eying the fun-sized chocolates and nerds and laffy taffy up on top of our fridge with unbridled longing, like I was last year. I think I'll be okay with 2-3 pieces on Hallowe'en night, and then making sure the rest all gets passed out to the neighborhood kids.

Matt and I talked about my birthday, and I suggested that I make my own cake/cupcakes/whatever -- that way I can both pick a lower-point option and have more confidence in my serving sizes. Of course, that means I need to start researching my options.

The weekend after my birthday, I'm taking a trip to Atlanta, so that will probably interfere with my diet a bit, but the family I'm staying with is extremely health-conscious, so it should only be a real problem on the travel days (airport food, whee) and if we're eating at the zoo or aquarium or other tourist-y places with standard junk food fare.

Clawing My Way

Pff. I dropped to 185 Friday morning, spent the rest of the week there, and then -- naturally! -- popped up to 185.4 this morning, so officially I only lost 0.6 pounds last week, 87.6 total.

At least it's not another maintain. I missed a workout this week, and ate out twice on Saturday, and had chocolate cake last night (which might account for this morning's bump up, actually -- concentrated sugar makes me retain water for a bit).

The fact that Saturday's indulgences on top of Friday's lack of exercise didn't affect my weight does make me wonder if it's time for me to start playing around with, oddly, eating a little bit more. Specifically: I wonder if I ought to start eating my Activity Points, within, say, 24 hours of earning them. It's not like I rack up a lot of them; usually 3 points at a time. That's an apple and a half-cup of milk. Or a yogurt and a couple of crackers. Or two slices of low-fat cheese. (I've been craving dairy lately; can you tell? Might need to step up the calcium intake a bit.) Also, I should buy some more fruit and snack healthier when I'm trying to use up points to get to my minimum for the day. Jello sugar-free mousse cups are very tasty (2.5 points for 2 cups!) but possibly not quite in the spirit of the law, as it were.

Other signs of progress, though: I finally got around to ordering new bras. The 40D fits! I'm down to a D cup! (Though it's a bit of a squeeze, so I might have to go back up to a DD for certain styles.) The 40 part is definitely not a squeeze, though. Fresh out of the packaging, all three bras fit comfortably on the middle set of hooks, and two of them fit (snugly) on the tightest set. I might have waited a little too long to order those, hehe.

I tried on the too-tight Medium shirts with the new bras, and it no longer looks completely ridiculous, though I'm still not quite ready for them, yet. (Which means I still need to buy a few more long-sleeved shirts for the fall/winter. Even with my heater running, my office is freezing half the time.)

Any way, I'm not backsliding, but I really need to get a grip and start paying closer attention. The Danger Zone is only two weeks away: Hallowe'en, my birthday, Thanksgiving, Matt's birthday, and then the whole Christmas season... I need to set goals and plan strategies and stick to it!

One Year Later

On October 8, 2008, I joined Weight Watchers Online. Mostly because I'd been goaded to by my therapist, and also because I was tired of feeling left out by all my friends who were doing WW.

I didn't take a "before" shot. I'm not sure why. Maybe because I expected it to be a depressingly long time before I'd be able to see a difference. But this picture was taken about two months before I joined, and I can pretty much guarantee I didn't lose any weight between this picture and when I joined.


Six months later, I was closing in on 50 pounds lost, and even I could see the difference.

At the nine month mark, I was down nearly 75 pounds.

And now, it's been a full 52 weeks. I've lost a year, I've lost the therapist (she wasn't that much help anyway), and most of all, I've lost more than 85 pounds.

I can't see much difference between the last two pictures. Part of that is the difference between summer and winter clothes, and part of it is that there's only about 15 pounds of difference there -- I've slowed down a lot, the last few months. But just for reference, the summer clothes are a size L, and the fall clothes are a size M. I can't wear every M I try on, yet, but I'm getting there.



As of this morning, I weigh 186 (no change this week). Which means that over the last year, I've lost 87 pounds.

My two kids together weigh less than that. That's nearly eleven full jugs of milk (11 gallons, less one pint, to be precise). And I used to carry it around with me, all the time.

Not losing is irritating when I've been feeling deprived all week anyway. This crawling pace I've suddenly dropped to can be frustrating, even disheartening. At least it's crawling in the right direction. But I'll be frustrated another day. Today, it's time to pause and celebrate just how far I've come.

I'm not done yet -- I'm still technically obese, according to the BMI charts, in fact. But I think I'm allowed, just this once, to pause and pat myself on the back. And to be impressed that I can reach my own back again. And cross my legs. And squat down to pick up my son. And a dozen other things that, one year ago, I couldn't even consider.

Happy diet-versary, me. Here's to another year of being a loser.

Fast Checkin

Weekly weigh-in: 186 on the nose. That's 1.2 for the week, 87 altogether. Diet progress is progressing.

As I explained over here, I'm up against the wall with work and stress, so I don't have time to say much else here. Remind me later to tell you about my pants, though. And I finally got around to ordering some new bras. I'm taking a chance on the 40D. Wish me luck.

Next week will mark the end of my first full year with Weight Watchers. I'm hoping the stress will have faded enough by then that I can do it some justice.

Dooby Down

Weighed in at 187.2 this morning -- that's 2.2 lost this week, nudging my total over 85. Which feels a little weird, because I honestly don't think I did anything much different this week from last. Stupid scale, phase of the moon, moisture in the air, blah blah blah. (I ought to be jumping with excitement, but it's just not that kind of day, for reasons having nothing whatever to do with dieting.)

I feel smaller this week, though. Last week, I was thinking I should probably get around to ordering some new bras soonish, as all mine are on their tightest hooks. This week, I'm thinking I need to hurry up and get on with it, because they're feeling loose and not terribly supportive. Maybe last week's smaller loss was accompanied by some internal shifting-and-tightening that's only now making itself felt.

And speaking of progress: It's impressive enough to have lost 85 pounds since I started this diet, but I've been heavier, and this is really close to being an unofficial milestone for me: When I got pregnant with Penny, I weighed 285 pounds. Which means that right now, I'm nearly 100 pounds lighter than I was about seven years ago. That's pretty cool, I have to admit.

Addendum

Okay, I'm not quite ready to go full-time with the M. I put on another shirt this morning, and it pulled sort of unpleasantly and obviously across the chest. Alas.

Which doesn't make the shirt a wash -- another ten pounds or so, and it'll probably fit fine, so I'm confident I'll be able to wear it eventually. It's even a year-round color. It just means I need to set it aside for a little while. And in the meantime, I need to keep trying on clothes in multiple sizes.

Shrinking

Weigh-in was yesterday: 189.4 means 0.6 lost last week, and 83.6 total. Not fantastic, but after the taco-and-chips fest this weekend, I'll take any loss and call it a victory.

I'm about 10 pounds from my fourth 10% goal (and maybe 15 from finally dropping out of the "obese" BMI category and into merely "overweight"), though given how much my loss has slowed, I'm thinking it may take me to the end of the year to get there.

Which is fine, really, since I think the last time I reviewed my loss goals, I'd been hoping to get to my third 10% goal by the end of this year. I should probably re-consider those, but I'm kind of saving it for a few weeks from now, for my one-year diet anniversary. Dietversary? Whatever.

Also, a mild dilemma: This loss pinged the WW website into dropping another daily point from my minimum. I'm now at 24 points a day, and I need to figure something out. If you estimate a point as about 50 calories (give or take, depending on fat and fiber, but that's a reasonable rule of thumb) then I'm right on the cusp of the rule I heard in college, which was that no diet should ever drop you below 1200 calories a day. Anyone else ever heard that rule? Anyway, I'd been having my best and steadiest success with losing when I was eating about 25-26 points a day -- but at the time, that was also a good 2-3 points a day less that my daily minimum. So was it eating under minimum that was making me lose weight, or is it just that 25-26 points is about the right amount of calories for my metabolism to burn at optimum efficiency? Because starting now, eating 25ish points a day is going to be cutting into my weekly points, which I almost never actually do. And when I do, it usually shows... but those tend to be splurges or screw-ups rather than a steady 1-2 points a day, so I don't know how much difference it makes.

So I'm waffling about whether I should be eating 23-24 points a day, or 25-26. Which is only maybe 100-150 calories' difference (ish), but... bleh. I just don't know.

Anyway, I could've posted this yesterday morning, even though I was taking a vacation day (to clean house -- I surely got my APs in for the day!) but then I wouldn't have been able to wrap it up with this bit of triumph: Among other errands, I dropped by Old Navy to try to find some fall shirts, because everything with long sleeves in my closet is from last year and almost 85 pounds ago. And I grabbed a few cute things, still reveling in that simple, unadorned "L" tag... and one of the shirts was positively baggy, so just on a whim, I tried it in a "M". (I am, after all, hoping to lose more weight, and it would be nice if my fall-weight shirts were also available to be worn if we have a warm snap in the winter, or even in the spring.)

And whaddya know -- it fit! It wasn't even stretched tight over my chest. Granted, it was a loose-fitting style. So out of curiosity, I tried on some of the other styles in a M as well, just to see.

And only one style actually looked better on me as a L than a M (and at that, more because I liked it a bit on the baggy side rather than skin-tight). I came home with one size L shirt... and four glorious Ms!

Resuming

Today's weigh in: 190.0, which is down 2.6 from last week, for a grand total of 83 pounds lost. This despite my having not one but two fairly large pieces of cake this weekend (I did count those points, though!) and only going to the gym once during the week.

Obviously, the path to my success is to eat more cake and exercise less!

Nah, I don't really believe that. I suspect it has something to do with my tightening up control on the random grazing and the nighttime snacks. And possibly also to do with the fact that my scale is crap.

Though taking most of a week off from exercising might have turned out to be a good idea for other reasons: when I finally got back to the gym yesterday, I thought I'd try running the elliptical backwards a little bit, because it's a nice litmus test for my knee. Usually, I get all of about three revolutions done before I start getting a screaming, tearing sensation under my kneecap. Yesterday -- not even a twinge. So I did a whole 2 minutes backwards, which doesn't sound like much but trust me, if you'd felt the pain I was having, you'd want to be cautious about encountering it again, too. And the whole time, the worst I got out of it was a little twinge. Even more tellingly, it doesn't hurt today, either. So maybe a week of rest helped it finally finish healing? It's not a totally preposterous notion.

At any rate, I hope this means I'm over the little diet-slump (can't quite call it a plateau, but it sure was flatter than I like!) I've been on for the last few weeks.

FINALLY.

I only lost half a pound this week (0.6, technically, since the scale said 192.6) but that finally puts me officially over the 80-pound mark that I've been flirting with for the last four weeks or so. So even though it wasn't a big loss, I feel mostly satisfied.

I'm trying to decide if I've been getting careless/sloppy about my eating habits, or if my metabolism has shifted and I'm just going to be losing weight that much slower, now. Both seem vaguely likely. I could deal with an overall slowdown if I knew I wasn't doing anything wrong.

(Except that I am doing some things wrong, and I just can't seem to help myself. I need to figure out how to get a grip and get my sense of discipline back into line. And also to stop having food in the house that pushes my triggers.)

This week will be challenging -- big family birthday meal Saturday, plus my gym is closed today and tomorrow and Monday. Even if I dust off the Wii Fit (and it is very hard to do that in the evenings when I'd rather be doing... well, almost anything else, really) it's not as good a workout as the gym.

So we'll see what we see, I guess. Wish me luck.

Underwhelmed

Weigh-in day.

I confess, I was secretly hoping that last week's bump up had been a twitch of the scale and that this week I'd have one of those suspiciously large losses that made the two-week average into something perfectly reasonable. It's happened before, several times. And this week, all my bras are on their third (tightest) row of hooks, which was promising.

For the last three days, my unofficial morning weigh-in has been 192.8, which isn't a large loss, but it was respectable. It would have meant that last week's gain was honest, but that I was firmly back on track. And it would have put me, officially, at 80 pounds lost. So if I couldn't have my secret hope, this was a perfectly acceptable fallback, and this is, hopes aside, more or less what I was expecting.

Instead, I got on the scale this morning and found 193.2. Not quite enough to make the 80 pound mark (79.8). Exactly one pound lost from last week, a grand total of 0.2 pounds lost over the last two weeks.

...The hell? What did I do yesterday that made me gain half a pound? Nothing, that's what. I've been really good this week, trying to make up for the Hungry Hippo weekend I had. Was it the three Tums I ate at three this morning to dispel a (likewise inexplicable) case of heartburn? Do Tums make you retain water or something?

Sigh.

I know I said I'd just be happy to lose what I'd gained last week, but if anyone believed me, they should probably get their heads examined. I'm not quite ready to kick puppies over it, but I'd be lying if I said I wasn't a little... underwhelmed.

Cheater, Cheater, Soup-Eater

There are lots of ways to "cheat" on the Weight Watchers diet without actually cheating. Most of them involve abusing the way points are calculated so that you're skating as close as possible to having to spend another point without quite getting there... This is one reason why, the first time I was on this diet (ten or so years ago), I lost twenty-five pounds and then slammed into a brick wall. This time around, I promised myself that I would try to follow the spirit of the law in addition to its letter, and I'm doing much better.

They didn't have the online tools back then. The online tools are handy, and mean I don't have to carry a converter doohickey with me everywhere I go. (Which is good, because I'm an online-only member, so they don't give me a converter doohickey to carry.) It's worth noting that the sidebar calculator doesn't work quite the same way as the database's calculator. The sidebar rounds to the nearest whole point, whereas the database will calculate to the nearest half unit, if your idea of a serving size doesn't match up with its default stored serving size.

You either already know all this, or else I'm boring you silly, or both, but this is worth mentioning so you can understand my complaint.

For a while now, I've enjoyed Campbell's Select Harvest Light soups. WW granted its countenance to the Progresso light soup line, but I think the Campbell's tastes better. When I first found them, they weren't in the WW database, so I had to add them, which wasn't a big deal -- I do that a lot. Let's take, for example, the Italian-Style Vegetable, which is the diet-friendliest of the bunch. According to the can, a serving is 50 calories, 0g fat, and 4g fiber, which is 0 points. But there's 2 servings in the can, and I dunno about anyone else, but I usually eat the whole can. So when I put it in the database, I put it in for "my" serving, which is 100 calories, 0g fat, and 8g fiber, which works out to 1 point. (It's worth nothing that Nutrition Facts labels are allowed to round their numbers off quite a bit, but even if you assume the posted 0g fat is almost 1g, and the 4g fiber is closer to 3g -- moving both of those numbers in the least advantageous direction for me -- it still works out to 1 point for the can of soup.) Which is a pretty damn good deal, and this is why I try to keep a few cans of this stuff around, in case I'm having a Hungry Hungry Hippo day. The other varieties of the soup go up to 3 points/can, and I keep them around too, because 3 points is a good deal for a reasonably filling lunch on a day I'm planning a big dinner.

With me so far? Good.

So the other day, I went to add a snack of some soup to my day's tally, and because I don't want to type "Campbell's Select Harvest Light Italian-Style Vegetable Soup, 1 can" every time, I just put "Campbell Harvest" into the search bar, assuming it would pull up my three or four hand-entered entries and I could click on the one I wanted from there.

Much to my surprise, it pulled up about twelve options: Apparently, WW has added some of the line to its own internal database! Wahoo! I clicked on their entry, and right away was confused. It said 1 cup of soup was 1 point. Well, it's a rounding thing, maybe, I thought. I changed the 1 to a 2, since the whole can is about 2 cups. The points changed to 2.

I blinked. It should have read 1.5, at most.

Now, I was eating a variety of crackers for a while that, between one batch and the next, changed nutrition data on me -- I actually had the two boxes side-by-side, and they were different, even though nothing else about them seemed to have changed. Maybe I hadn't noticed a change in the soup's data? I pulled out a can, but it didn't look different to me. Just to be sure, I re-entered everything into the calculator. It still told me 0 points for 1 cup, and 1 point for the 2-serving can.

Unfortunately, WW doesn't tell you what nutrition data they're basing their points on in the database. So as near as I can guess, what's happening is that for whatever reason, they're not accounting for the fiber. What frustrates me is that I'm not sure why -- and the cynical commentator in my brain tells me that it's deliberate, that they're not counting the fiber portion for the Campbell's soup because that makes it look like it's more points than the Progresso, which after all, still has the Weight Watcher's logo on its cans and (presumably) is paying a premium for that endorsement... Shall we do a compare?

The Progresso Light Italian-Style Vegetable has 10 more calories per serving, the same fat and fiber, about 2 fewer grams of non-fiber carbohydrates, and... fewer vitamins/minerals (on average, though Progresso wins on Vitamin C), and more than 50% more sodium (700mg vs 480mg). I'm not kidding: check out the published nutrition information here and here.

I'd like to believe that whoever put the Campbell's data into their database just didn't have the fiber information available, but how likely is that? Not very, considering that, even in absence of an actual can, I managed to find the information online in about thirty seconds.

And how likely is it now that I'm going to stop trusting their database to have the correct data for brand names? That... That's pretty darned likely.

Guests

Hello, if you've wandered over to check me out from my guest post on Hungry Little Caterpillar! (And if you haven't, then you should go check her out, and read my guest post there!)

This isn't my best week, diet-wise -- I gained most of a pound, probably because I've been stress-eating. But I invite you to look around and check things out anyway. Go on, poke into the cabinets, put your feet up, whatever. I'm not picky. I've got lemonade here, and some veggies with hummus dip; help yourself.

Feel free to check out my other blog, as well, which is less focused on dieting and more just a stream-of-consciousness rambling about whatever's going on in my life on any given day. But it's got cute pictures of my kids, so that's a bonus, right?

Oops.

Gained 0.8 this week - 194.2.

I'm a bit disappointed, but not horribly stressed over it, since there's not much question of why it happened.

Guess my metabolism is crap enough that I'm just not able to dip significantly into my weekly or activity points. I earned 9 APs this week, and used a total of maybe 10 points above my daily minimum. Oh, well. Back to the drawing board.

I also should probably take a tighter grip on the evening snacks. I've been slipping, there, all week. The points are logged -- and sometimes I'm having them specifically to get up to my daily minimum -- but late-night calories just don't burn as efficiently. I'm tempted, in fact, to lay at least 3/4 of this gain on Monday night, when for whatever reason, I just could not stop eating. Need to make up my plan early in the day, stick to it as closely as possible, and come up with things to do in the evenings that make it hard for me to snack.

On the other hand, it's my first actual gain since I started the diet. (Not counting the one that happened the week after I had the stomach flu, which was arguably nothing more than rehydration; or the probable small gain I had the week of Christmas when I wasn't here to weigh in, but which was already gone by the next week.) So that's not bad, for ten months worth of dieting.

I Am That Woman

When I started out on this diet, it was in secret. Thus the blog title, which I still like, even though it's not a secret any more.

That lasted for maybe three weeks before I had one of those moments of triumph that I just had to share with someone... So in strictest confidence, I told my friend Karen. And like opening a floodgate in a dam, I found myself running for her whenever I had something I wanted to say about the diet, good or bad.

I remember one such observation very clearly. I don't remember how the subject came up, but I confessed to her that one of the things that terrified me about losing weight -- and subsequently, losing points -- was that I'd have to deprive myself on a daily basis in order to maintain a "healthy" body. I brought up my mother-in-law as an example, because the last time she'd visited us (which had been about a month before I started the diet) I had watched her have a breakfast of black coffee and a lunch consisting of a single 4-oz cup of (light!) yogurt, and an admittedly normal-to-large dinner... But it terrified me. Was I going to be confined to snacks for my meals, or else sacrifice two meals to get one decent one?

She came to town last week for a visit. (She comes every year for a few days, somewhere in the vicinity of my daughter's birthday.) I don't know what she ate for breakfast and lunch, because this year her visit was during the work week, so I wasn't around. But she was very complimentary of the meals I cooked, which was nice.

We hadn't planned ahead, though, and I wasn't sure if she would suggest, one day, that we go out to eat. So to be on the safe side and make sure I had the points for it, I cut back on my breakfast and lunch. (I don't mind doing that occasionally -- it was the notion of having to do it daily that freaked me out.) I had a 6-oz cup of light yogurt for breakfast, and a can of light soup that worked out to 1 point, along with about half a point's worth of tomatoes and cucumbers with a little balsamic vinegar for lunch. Three and a half points, total.

The breakfast -- the yogurt cup -- was... surprisingly satisfying. I'd expected to be hungry all morning, but I wasn't. I wasn't full, by any stretch, but I wasn't clutching my stomach and watching the clock for the earliest possible moment I could eat lunch, either.

(My weight actually popped up a tiny bit, the next day, because it turned out that we didn't go out to eat after all, and I ended up eating a huge snack before bed to make up some of the extra points. Oddly, I didn't panic at the minor increase. I knew where it had come from, and I knew it would go away in a day or so. And it did.)

I did it again, over the weekend, when I knew I had a heavy lunch planned on Saturday. Same result: No gnawing hunger.

Tuesdays and Thursdays are usually my yogurt-and-oatmeal breakfasts. Monday night, as I was packing my stuff for Tuesday, I looked at my yogurt cup, and wondered: should I drop the oatmeal for good? Just a yogurt? Am I that woman, now, inconceivable as the notion was less than a year ago? I packed the oatmeal anyway, and told myself I'd hold off on it. If I got hungry, I wouldn't deprive myself -- I'd have it as a late-morning snack.

I ate the yogurt (and learned that I like Yoplait's key lime pie yogurt better than Breyer's) and went on to my work. It was even a slow morning, work-wise, which tends to lead me into trouble with the diet.

I didn't get hungry.

My 11:00 meeting was canceled, so I took care of a few minor things, then changed and went to the gym a bit early. I got back to my office a little after 1:00, hungry but not famished, pretty much like I always feel after a lunchtime trip to the gym. I ate my lunch and went on to have a normal day, diet-wise. Skipping the oatmeal even let me have a little dessert after dinner.

Apparently, I am that woman.

I'm not entirely sure how I feel about it. Part of me feels proud and excited that I've come so far and changed so much. But part of me wants to cling to the terror: just a yogurt? How is that possibly enough food to keep me going for four hours? I can't tell if that part of me has a valid point, or if it's just a remnant of the 3X me. Am I going crazy, or going sane?

Whatever. Despite the late-night snacking and the big lunch and everything... I lost 1.2 pounds this week, putting me at 193.4 -- that's 79.6 pounds lost, total.

Steady March

A 1.4 pound loss this week (194.6 - total loss of 78.4 pounds). That's the fourth week in a row that I've had a loss of approximately a pound and a half; my little spreadsheet chart looks very neat and orderly for these last few weeks. I don't know if my weight loss has actually evened out, or if it's just that I've been stepping on the scale more often, the last few weeks, so it's stopped pulling its stupid "don't change for two weeks and then suddenly report a three-pound drop" trick. (It does still tend to say the same thing for 4-6 days and then suddenly show the pound and a half drop. Stupid scale.)

I'm continuing to notice external signs of shrinkage, though. I can actually see my wrist bone again! And my 42-band bras are on their second or third set of hooks (depending on which bra it is and whether it's fresh out of the laundry) so it won't be too long until I'm in need of more bras. (Though I still appear to be a DD cup. Don't get me wrong, I like having nice curves, but I wouldn't mind dropping to a D! Any time now.)

And my size XL shorts that I bought expecting them to last the rest of the summer are... not unwearable, but definitely a bit loose. Which is surprising, as my hips/butt/thigh region is usually a size bigger than the rest of me, and I was expecting to stay in XL pants into the fall. I guess we'll see. (On the other hand, the size L stuff I picked up from Sam's Club is way too snug, and I'll have to wait a while before I can reasonably squash into it. No more buying clothes without trying them on!)

Two more ladies in my office have joined Weight Watchers, and one more is planning to join in the fall, after her baby arrives. They're all serial dieters who've been on the program before, though, so I didn't have that proprietary, "Did I do this?" reaction. But it'll still be nice to have some more people to swap tips and recipes with. (This is the social benefit that one is supposed to get out of going to the meetings, but that never quite worked out for me.)

Quick

Forgot to post yesterday, but the diet marches along. Down to 196 yesterday morning, which is 1.6 for the week and 77 total.

I feel like I'm in a sort of grey zone of diet loss, right now. I passed a lot of milestones and markers in the last few weeks, all at once: I got past the big 200, and made that third 10% goal, and I'm officially thinner than I've been since Matt and I started dating, and I can't shop at Lane Bryant anymore...

The next milestone isn't until the next 10% goal, so it's nearly twenty pounds away, which at the current rate won't be until sometime in October. I just bought new clothes, so that won't be necessary again until it's time for fall and winter things. August and September are kind of stretching out before me as an endless grey monotony.

I need to come up with a goal that can be met in a shorter time, something to pin my sights on. Maybe I should take up the sit-up challenge.

Inspirational

The last couple of weeks, I've been getting a lot of compliments on my weight loss. Probably because I've been wearing my new clothes that actually show it off. Several people have asked me what I was doing, to which I usually respond with the truth: Weight Watchers and going to the gym three days a week.

Monday, one of my co-workers came into my office and said, "You have inspired me! I joined Weight Watchers over the weekend."

I was unprepared for my reaction, which was proud and... proprietary. As if this woman's weight loss belonged to me, somehow.

I'll have to try to rein that in. Her triumphs should be hers, not mine. And if she falls off the wagon or gives up, I don't want to own that, too. But it was still nice to chat for a while about recipes and stuff.

Today's weigh-in: 197.6, which is down 1.2 pounds, for a total loss that's officially over 75 pounds. Go, me!

Third Time's the Charm?

Well... I did it. The scale read 198.8 this morning, which both drops me below 200 and meets my third 10% goal. (That's 1.6 pounds for the week, and 74.2 pounds lost total, but that doesn't sound nearly as awesome as the other two.)

I feel so awesome, I could dance. And sing.

Now I get to shop for a new camera, and figure out what I want for my fourth 10% goal reward. Any ideas?

Photographic Evidence

So I'm not quite to my third 10% goal yet -- I'm about a pound and a half away, but that's close enough that I don't think you could tell the difference on casual examination.

Also, it's been just about exactly a year since the picture was taken that I'm using for my "before" shot (it was another few months before I actually went on the diet, so I haven't been on the diet for a full year). And we had another picnic. So... Time for a progress picture. Why not?

Here's the before:


And here's the now:


That's what almost 75 pounds looks like.

I confess to being in love with this picture. I'm not just thinner, I'm... (despite the Ugliest Shoes In The World and having another 50-60 pounds left to go) actually... kind of hot.

Huhn.

Size...

I took the day off today. Spent my morning running errands -- dropped the kids off at daycare, went to the gym, went to the doctor for a blood draw, got dinner prepped, that kind of stuff.

And then I went to lunch with my husband and some friends, and after lunch, I went clothes shopping with three girlfriends, which was an absolute blast. I haven't tried on clothes with numbered sizes for a while, but I was fairly sure I'd be about a 16.

Except I wasn't. Four stores we went to, and in all four stores, I fit neatly into a Large or a 14. At Lane Bryant, the size 14/16 stuff was all just a little too big for me -- I bought a loose shirt anyway, but the form-fitting dresses I'd hoped to snag for my high school reunion were Right Out.

Apparently, without realizing it, I skipped over 16 entirely and am now looking at the downward side of 14. And it's just about time for me to stop shopping at Lane Bryant and return to the "normal" sized stores.

Wow.

Stupid Scale

So after not losing any weight last week, this week I'm down to 200.4 -- that's 4.6 pounds in one week (72.6 since I started). I'm not buying it. I really think the scale is getting flaky.

(It's that, or the fact that I tightened up control on my evening snacks -- I didn't eat anything after the kids were in bed beyond my usual diet soda and 0-point ice cream bar, and if I didn't make my minimum points for the day, then I just didn't make my minimum points.)

200.4 is a pound and a half from my third 10% mini-goal, though. Also, "under 200" is the goal that my doctor set me, when I saw him back in February and he was being impressed with the 30-odd pounds I'd lost up to that point. Given the flakiness of my scale, I'm not betting on getting to goal next week, but it's definitely coming soon.

I already changed my goal on the Weight Watchers site (once you make goal, you can't change it again, which is stupid, but now that I know, I make sure to change it when I get down to the last few pounds). And I've started researching fancy SLR cameras, which is what I'd promised myself for getting below 200.

And now I need to think up a reward for the next 10% goal, which is 179. Which, by the by, will be the thinnest I've been since grad school.

I was 190-ish the summer after my first year, and I was so horrified that I went on a diet/exercise spree, walking on my parents' treadmill every single morning and drastically cutting my calories. It lasted about six weeks, during which I got down to 175, but then the problems with my feet completely wiped out my ability to use the treadmill (or even walk at all, for a few days), and the diet fell apart shortly thereafter. I'd speculate I was back up to 190 before I got back to school in the fall.

That was 1994. I'm approaching a weight I haven't been for fifteen years.

Cool.

Holding Pattern

No loss again this week. Stuck at 205.

I'm not quite as irritable about it as the last one, because I have some idea of what happened, I think. Or at least, there are several factors at play.

Item one is that it's probably a partial bounce-back from when I was sick the week before.

Item two is that my daughter has been taking swimming lessons, which has resulted in us having dinner on-the-go -- namely, a sandwich. Which, since my sandwiches are about 4 points each, leaves me with rather a lot of points at the end of the day, so I've been having late evening snacks to make up the difference. Eating late in the day is bad for weight loss.

Item three is my current position on the menstrual roller coaster.

So there's that.

On the other hand, I can't say I'm happy about it, either. I'd bought new (smaller) clothes this week and was feeling pretty good about them. I'd made some changes to my routine at the gym and my Wii Fit workout that (I felt) stepped things up a little. I thought I'd have at least a pound to show, this week.

And the kid is still in swim lessons this week, and Saturday is the Fourth of July, which we will be celebrating with a cook-out with my family, so... Next week doesn't look terribly promising, either. And the week after that is the Summer Bash...

Bleh and bleh and bleh. I would really, really like to drop below 200 in the next three weeks, in time for my high school reunion. Though I acknowledge the stupidity of that -- no one who will be there has seen me since graduation, so I will still look fat to them (I was 135 when they last saw me, after all) and it's not like the difference between 205 and 199 will actually be visible, even to me. It's strictly psychological.

Bleh.

Results Not Typical

Whew. Good loss this week -- 3 pounds, enough to make this week and last average out to something reasonable. That means I've lost 68 pounds, and puts me at 205, which is staring right down the barrel of my next big goal. It won't come next week, or the week after, but I think I can be fairly confident about getting there before the end of summer, which was my stated goal, and even probably before the end of July. So that's something to look forward to, and I can start researching which fancy-pants camera I'm going to get as my reward.

Unfortunately, like last week, I'm not really sure why.

I was sick for most of this week (something somewhere between strep throat and bronchitis) so I wound up skipping almost all my exercise -- I went to the gym Wednesday, but Thursday and Friday I felt too miserable to even try, and over the weekend I was still coughing too much to want to breathe hard. I didn't get back on the Wii Fit until Monday.

To confuse things further, there were a couple of days where I didn't even try to eat my usual number of points (though I did make myself eat meals, at least, since I wasn't nauseous). I think there were three days there where I came in between 4-6 points under minimum. Did that help me lose, or hamstring my metabolism? No idea.

Or was the scale just feeling irritable last week and refusing to register a mild loss? It does that, and not infrequently.

So.. I dunno. Yay, loss, but boo, not really grokking the loss. Oh, well. You take what you can get, I guess.

Not Shrinking

No change this week. This is the first non-loss that I don't have an answer for; I missed my weekend wiirkout and didn't feel all that challenged by the gym, but that shouldn't be enough to make me not lose at all. I didn't eat anything particularly horrible. (Well, I had some samples at Sam's Club Sunday, but I counted points for them, and even if I massively underestimated, it wasn't enough to use up my APs, much less touch my flex points.) And I don't think I "snitch" ate enough to account for it.

Nor do I think I've reached the point where more is less -- I'm not working out more than 45 minutes a day (and only 5 days a week, at that), and I'm eating 25 or so points a day.

So I have no explanation, and I'm feeling pretty irritable about it. So much for my lingering faint hope of making it below 200 in time for the summer bash in July.

Well, fuck.

Meh.

Down 0.4 pounds. 208.0 = 65 total lost. Which, I might add, is up a pound from where I was Sunday morning when I did my mid-week check, so despite it being a loss that some people would envy, in that it's a loss at all, I'm feeling irritable about it.

Meh.

Weigh-in day. Before I went to Texas for the weekend, I stepped on the scale and saw 209.something, and I thought -- if I can just manage to keep it at 210 or lower, I'll be happy. It's really, really hard to diet while traveling.

But I managed it. Thank goodness for online nutrition databases and my iPhone.

I discovered that, dangerous though it is, Olive Garden has a couple of reasonable options -- their salad dressing is horrible stuff, but if you like salad undressed, that's only 2 points a serving (though the website doesn't tell you how many "servings" is in a bowl) and the minestrone soup is only 2 points a bowl. A breadstick is only 3 points, surprisingly (I had half of one) and there are two reasonable entrees -- the Linguini Marinara for 8 points, or the Venetian Apricot Chicken for (surprisingly) 7. I had the chicken, and it was really quite good. Though if I hadn't been traveling the next day, I would have had a second bowl of soup (it's bottomless, after all) and saved half the chicken for lunch. (On the other hand, if temptation is a problem for you, stay away: the number of entrees over 30 points was pretty crazy.)

And I walked with my dad both mornings I was there. It was only about a mile, and at what I figured was a "leisure" pace, because I didn't want to push my knee too hard. Interestingly, though, my knee hurt far less than I expected. I may start to swap out the bike for the treadmill once or twice a week at the gym for my "warm-up" activity.

Sunday was rough, food-wise, though -- I had a banana and coffee for breakfast, and then because of the way my flights lined up, only a packet of airline peanuts to tide me over until about 3:30 in the afternoon, when I stopped at a Chinese fast food place (it was the closest thing to my gate) and got some egg drop soup and something sort of like General Tso's Chicken. I only ate about half the chicken, though, before they started to board the plane. I thought about taking it with me, then realized that I really wasn't hungry anymore, so I dumped it.

(As a note -- General Tso's chicken is a lot of freaking points. It's a good thing I dumped it. Sheesh.)

Anyway, this morning I reminded myself that weighed in at 208.4, down 2.6 this week for a total loss of 64.6 pounds.

Whoo! Travel pit traps successfully negotiated!

Advice

And now, the fatty offers unsolicited advice: Eat dessert first.

Here's the thing: I'm going to eat everything on my plate. I'm not six anymore. The number of times in the last five years that I've walked away from a plate with food on it can probably be counted on one hand -- and most of them can probably be attributed to either illness or really quite unappetizing food. In which case I wasn't going to eat it anyway. So I am certainly not going to "spoil" my appetite for the healthy portion of my meal by eating the yummiest bit first.

And here's another thing: The flavor that lingers in my mouth is the flavor of whatever it is I ate last. If what I ate last was dessert, then tasting its lingering flavor on my tongue is going to make me want more of it. (Because if there was such a thing as "enough," I would not be fat to begin with.) But if what I ate last was something a little less compelling, then continuing to taste it is at least less torturous.

I'm aware that it's not the best practice ever. I certainly don't advocate dessert first at dinnertime, when the kids are watching and (hopefully) preparing to follow my example.

But at work, when it's time for my afternoon snack, which is almost always an apple and a chocolate or caramel-flavored chewy granola bar, then I eat the granola bar first, and finish up with the apple. And at lunch, when I sometimes have some fruit leather, I make sure to save a bite or two of sandwich or some pickles for after that's done with.

Losing weight is about psyching yourself out.

Minimal

When I first got on the scale this morning, it said I'd lost a bit over 2 pounds, and then it said "ERR0" which means it needs to be zeroed. So I zeroed it out and stepped on again, and this time it said I lost only half a pound this week. Bleh.

It probably didn't help my case any that I only went to the gym twice this week (it was closed for Memorial Day, and I didn't plan ahead enough to take that into account) and skipped my Wii Fit workout on Sunday after walking all over the museum (but the walk was probably not quite enough to make up for the Fit workout, pointwise). Still, it might be an artificial partial-gain, since I went to a luncheon at work yesterday. Chinese buffet food, even when I plan it out in advance so I don't blow my points, is pretty heavy on salt and makes me retain water for a while.

But it's still slightly disappointing. Especially on top of the extremely craptastic Wii Fit workout I had last night.

So today I'm hoping to be able to hide in my office and get some work done that I've had on my plate for a bit, and to go over to the gym at lunchtime and really get back into the swing of things there, too.

But hey, I'm wearing new pants! Size XL! (I squeezed into a size 16, actually, but it wasn't very comfortable. I would've bought them to fit into in about a month, but like most non-elastic-waisted pants, they gaped hugely at the back, and UGH. I'm never going to be able to get away from tunic-length shirts. And in another twenty pounds or so, I won't be able to buy Lane Bryant's wonderful shape-tailored jeans that actually fit right, waaah! Maybe when I get all the way down to my goal weight, I should splurge on actual tailored pants.)

...Yeah, attempting to be positive just isn't working for me today. Maybe next week.

Pantsed

Weigh-in isn't until tomorrow morning, so I don't know how much things have officially changed between last week and this week, but...

Last week, my work pants were baggy to the point of ridiculousness, but serviceable.

This morning, I pulled on a pair of pants and let go and... they slid nearly all the way down my hips. They were sort of hanging precariously from the very widest bit of my butt, like Harrison Ford on the edge of a cliff, tremulously grasping for a handhold. If I'd taken a few brisk steps, were going to fall off.

Huhn. Okay, well... I dug out another pair of pants I'd been hanging onto because they fit oddly. Those, also, were rather suddenly in danger of exposing everyone in the office to my cherry-print undies.

Uh, well... Can't wear jeans or shorts to work. I wore my culottes over the weekend and they're dirty. Skirt it is!

The skirt is kind of loose around the hips, too; I cinched in the drawstring as tight as it would go -- pulling out a good eight inches of string -- and chose a longish shirt that would hide the waistline.

So I guess I need to take a long lunch and run over to Target and try to find a couple of pairs of pants that I can wear to work.

And I'll be curious to see, tomorrow morning, just how much weight I've lost this week. (Though to be fair, it might not be strictly weight. I recently made a couple of changes to my workouts that put a lot more effort into my legs -- my hips and butt were aching all weekend -- so it might be that, instead.)

Feeling Fat

I did not feel encouraged about the diet this week. I felt fat, and like I was not going anywhere, and since the scale on Sunday said I was the same weight that I'd been last Wednesday, it seemed my feelings were pretty well justified.

That, or my scale just likes to mess with my head. This morning, it said 211.6, which is a 1.4 pound drop. That's 61.4 pounds lost total, and my projection calculations have me dropping below 200 sometime in mid-July. (Possibly a bit later; we'll see if I manage to behave over the week of the Summer Bash, when Karen's in town.)

It means I can enter "210" as my weight at the gym (I round to the nearest 5 pounds) which is kind of cool, seeing as how when I started going to the gym, I was entering 250 -- and it was a lie, because I felt ashamed to enter my real weight.

Though I'm still not feeling it. Guess it's just a fat, discouraged kind of week.

Briefly

So. Good loss this week -- 3 pounds puts me at 213 and a total of 60 pounds lost. Big round numbers, whoo.

I'm in a heck of a mood this morning, and corporate paperwork is not making my life easlier, so I'm just going to leave this one brief.

Good Food: Maple-Lemon Chicken and Carrots

cooking spray
1 lb (16 oz) chicken breast meat, cut into bite-sized pieces
4 oz baby carrots (about 1 1/2 cups)
1/4 tsp salt + 1/4 tsp salt
2 Tbsp lemon juice
1/4 c maple syrup (yes, the real stuff)
1 tsp lemon zest

Coat a skillet with cooking spray and place over medium-high heat. When the pan is hot, add the chicken and sprinkle lightly with 1/4 tsp salt. Cook until browned, stirring/turning occasionally.

While the chicken cooks, quarter the baby carrots lengthwise. (You'll end up with long slender pieces, slightly thicker than matchsticked carrots.)

When the chicken is done, remove it to a plate, re-spray the pan, and add the carrots. Sprinkle with the remaining 1/4 tsp salt and the lemon zest, and cook until carrots are just beginning to soften, about 5 minutes.

Add the lemon juice and the maple syrup, return the chicken to the pan, and stir until everything is coated. Let the syrup boil until thickened, and serve warm. (The sauce is nice next to a green vegetable like peas or green beans.)

4 servings, approx. 4 points and 16g CHO each.

Falling

Two pounds exactly down this morning - I'm at 216, which is 57 pounds lost, whoo! Guess it was a leftover from the anniversary meal after all, and not a plateau.

Recent signs of shrinkage: I've moved my wedding/engagement rings over to my index finger, and today I'm wearing a size 42D bra that I had to shelve a couple of months ago because it did that thing cutting across the tops of my boobs that made me look like I had 4 of them.

Also, I bought new clothes about a week ago, and they're all size XL, whoo!. Purchased from the "normal people" side of the store, no less! (Can't fit into 16s yet, but I've got some 18s that are nearly loose enough to remove without unbuttoning them first, so I'm getting there.)

In less positive weight-loss progress, I've also started losing my hair. Great clumps of it end up in the hair-catcher in the shower every night, and since my husband shaves his head in the sink, it's pretty much all mine. It's a known side-effect of weight loss (well, more precisely, a side-effect of reduction of fats in the diet, which is a pretty necessary component of weight loss). The spots just above my temples are looking kind of patchy. Whee.

Ugh.

I was good this week. Ate well, no leftover Easter candy to tempt me, even managed to stick to soup and salad at the birthday luncheon I went to yesterday, consistently came in under my points for the day all week, moderate exercise every day. Three separate people mentioned, completely out of the blue, how good I look and how impressed they are with my weight loss.

I was feeling good and positive as I got on the scale this morning, wondering where it would be. 217? Possibly even a smidge below that?

But... I only lost .4 pounds. 218, for a total loss of 55 pounds. (It couldn't even give me 217.8, for the psychological benefit of a new number. Stupid scale.)

Given that I was good this week, I can only really think of two reasons for it: either I've hit a plateau, or there's some holdover weight gain from last week's anniversary splurge. (I suppose it could also be feminine-cycle weight, but my cycle is completely flipping unpredictable these days. Four weeks? Six? Nine? Whatever.)

Anyway, I won't know if it's a temporary cause or a plateau until next week's weigh-in (assuming I'm good this week, of course). It's a little disheartening, though, to have to consider the possibility that I've gotten rid of all the "easy-come, easy-go" weight that I put on since my last diet a few years ago, and now I'm going to have to struggle for every loss, because from here on out, this is all weight I've been harboring for ten years or more.

That's just the kind of day I'm having, I guess.

Working Woman's Diet

A friend at work forwarded this to me in an email, and it made me grin, so I figured, why not? After all, I'm pretty sure I've had this day:

The Working Woman's Stress-Coping Diet

Breakfast
1/2 grapefruit
1 slice whole wheat toast
1 cup skim milk

Lunch
1 small portion lean, steamed chicken breast
1 cup spinach
1 cup herbal tea
1 Hershey's kiss

Afternoon Snack
The rest of the Hershey kisses in the bag
1 tub of Hagen-Daaz ice cream with chocolate chips

Dinner
4 glasses of wine (red or white)
2 loaves garlic bread
1 family size supreme pizza
3 Snickers Bars

Late Night Snack
1 whole Sarah Lee cheesecake (eaten directly from the freezer)

Wait, What?

Apparently, chocolate-peanut butter confections are on the list of things I can't have in the house because I will not eat Just One. And also, possibly, malted candy (Whoppers and its kin). Leftover Easter candy in the house was pretty dangerous, and though I mostly held off during the day, there were a lot of evenings this week when I'd go into the kitchen to feed the cat before I went to bed and that bag of junk food would call to me, and I'd stand at the counter (because, apparently, if no one sees me eating candy, it doesn't count?) and eat two or three pieces of candy. (Just one mini cadbury egg -- they're only one point each. Oh, well, okay, and a Reese egg. Oooh, and there's a packet of Robin Eggs left! Like that.)

Admittedly, this is still an improvement in habit over previous years, where I wouldn't have managed to restrain myself until bedtime, and I most certainly wouldn't have stopped at only two or three pieces. But still, not that good.

On top of that, my husband and I celebrated our anniversary by going out to eat for lunch Monday, and I very carefully and deliberately chose to go off-diet. I did not want to fret over how many points I had. I had a buttered roll and french onion soup (with cheese and croutons, thank you) and filet mignon (which is actually pretty low in points, for beef, but that's not why I chose it) with garlic mashed potatoes and buttered vegetables. And I had coconut cake and caramel ice cream for dessert. It was lovely and decadent and strictly out of curiosity, I came home and put it in the tracker (though I was totally guessing at the points on the cake and the amount of butter) and it turned out that the meal exceeded my daily points allowance. By a significant amount.

But damn, it was worth it, and I approached the scale this morning having already accepted that I had probably gained. I hoped it wasn't more than a pound. I was secretly hoping for a "maintain."

The scale said 218.4. Well, that's not so bad, I thought. I didn't go back up over 220, at least-- Wait, what? Wasn't I at 219.something last week?

Obviously, Penny had jumped on it and upset the alignment. I re-zeroed it and stepped on again. 218.4. That's a 1.4 pound loss. 54.6 pounds total.

Well, then. We'll see. As a friend pointed out, sometimes the weight gain holds off somehow until the next weigh-in, so I don't expect I can completely relax.

But at least the Easter candy is all gone.

Moderation

Well, despite the house being loaded with Easter candy, I managed to lose 1.2 pounds this week, which wasn't as much as I was hoping for, but any loss is good loss, right? So I'm at 219.8, which is a total of 53.2 pounds lost.

I got my new purse yesterday, and it's exactly as gorgeous as it looked, and I'm loving it. Though I'm some kind of freak of nature that doesn't like the smell of fresh leather, so I'm hoping that will fade soon.

So I got my weekly email from Weight Watchers this morning, and it had a link to an article on how to eat healthy on a budget, and I went to look, because who couldn't stand to save a little, right?

Of course, the article was mostly things I already knew, like "buy produce in-season" and "don't buy pre-portioned food" and "make your own sauces", but there was a sidebar offering a sample menu on how to eat healthy for only $6 a day!

Six dollars a day, really? It sounds like such a good deal, doesn't it? Six dollars a day, for a family of four, works out to $168 a week. That's not that much of a deal, really. I usually manage to come in at less than $150 a week, and that includes non-food items like cat litter and toiletry items, and each week usually includes a handful of "occasional" items that the sample menu didn't account for, like spices. Sure, $168 a week is cheaper than eating out every day, but you know what? It's still a hell of a lot more expensive to eat healthy.

(It also doesn't address the fact that their sample menu was pretty damned boring. I'm not a gourmet or anything, but seriously? Oatmeal and meatless sandwiches and turkey chili? Yawn.)

Yeah, I know, it's Weight Watchers, they have to try to put a positive spin on it. But seriously, I found it kind of insulting. I'd really rather they didn't try to candy-coat this. Eating healthy costs more. It's a fact. If they're going to just wave their hands and say, "Oh, this isn't really a problem," then they're denying a serious issue for a lot of their customers.

Progress Picture

I didn't take a "before" picture. I don't really know why, except maybe that it was going to seem like such a long time before I could see a difference that it was too depressing to contemplate.

And since I'm the one who takes pictures, among my friends, there aren't that many pictures of me. The only picture I have of myself from around the time I started the diet is a group picture that was taken at a JDRF walk, and you can't really use it for comparison, because I've got three family members blocking off most of my body.

So this is a picture from last summer, several months before I joined Weight Watchers, that a friend took. This is probably even a bit heavier than I was when I started dieting, because sometime after this picture was taken, but before I went on the diet, I started working out, and that probably lost me a few pounds. But it's pretty close. So here's my "before" (I'm the one with the baby):



And this is where I am today, some fifty-odd pounds later:

Score!

Okay, so it wasn't a huge loss, but it was 1.2 pounds, which was just enough to put me smack on top of my second 10% target, getting me down to 221. (That's 52 pounds total lost.)

So if my weekend splurging wasn't precisely good for me, it didn't completely kill me, either. Hooray!

Checking out my spreadsheet: I lost that 25 pounds over 13 weeks, averaging just under 2 pounds per week. If I keep that rate up, I'll hit my next 10% goal around the end of June -- though I'm giving myself until the end of summer, to allow for plateaus and, well, other weekends of splurging.

And when I get a chance later today, I'll order my new purse. And start comparing features and prices for that new camera.

Confessions

I burned through some extra points this weekend.

I stayed inside my weekly points, but I exceeded my daily points for three straight days, which I don't usually do. So on Wednesday morning, I'm either going to lose some weight and find out that no really, I can use some of my activity or weekly points without completely falling apart, or I'm going to maintain/gain and learn that no, really, I need to keep my intake to somewhere just below my daily allowance.

I honestly have no idea which it's going to be.

On Friday, I'd planned a spectacularly low-point dinner. I worked everything out and discovered that I had ample space in my dietary budget for a candy bar in the afternoon. About ten seconds after I licked the last delicious chocolate off my fingers, my husband called to tell me that some friends had called and wanted to take us out for Mexican. Well... heck.

To cut down on the damage, I forbade myself even a single chip, and I had vegetarian fajitas. I didn't eat the tortillas, but then I never do -- I dump the lettuce and sour cream and guacamole onto the fajita plate and add about half of my refried beans and mix it all up into a fajita salad. (Yes, the restaurant offers a fajita salad already made, but it doesn't taste the same, and it's only about half as much food once you ignore the fried tortilla bowl thingy.)

So I think, all in all, I didn't do too badly, there. It was certainly more points than I'd planned on having that day, but I don't think I exceeded the boundaries of reasonableness too much.

Saturday was a birthday party, and I went fully intending to fix myself a single plate of food, with a pre-figured amount of specific foods on it, and to skip the cake.

But there were no plates (and I was apparently too dumb to just ask for one) so I found myself wandering back to the food table and grazing and I ate crackers and paté that I hadn't banked on, and more mini-muffins than I'd planned, and only a fraction of the veggies, and then I had chili and... well, heck, might as well have just a small piece of cake, right?

Sigh. Next time, I will remember to ask for a plate, and then I will get my planned amount of food and go plant my butt on the couch and not keep walking back over to the food table. And then, if I give in and have cake anyway, at least it will not be on top of extra muffins and paté and chili that I hadn't planned on.

Sunday was an early Easter dinner with my family. I brought low-cal biscuits, only took one, filled my plate once and did not have any seconds. I also brought my own dessert and managed to avoid the temptation of cookies. So the only real problem for the day was that 1) I have no idea whether my guesstimates of how much ham and potato salad I ate were correct, and 2) I have no idea how many points my mom's potato salad is. (It ranges from 3 to 8 points per half cup, in the WW database. I'm quite sure I ate more than half a cup of the stuff.)

As an aside, have you ever noticed that for certain foods -- potato salad, or mac-and-cheese, or other really common dishes where every family has its own variant -- the one you grew up with is always the Right One? And everyone else's variant is always just a bit... off? Could be really good, but it's not THE food? Which is sad, because I have no idea what my mom's recipe is for potato salad. (At least I have her mac-and-cheese recipe.)

So anyway, there's my confession. We'll find out Wednesday if my damage control efforts did any good, or if I completely blew it.

Fifty

Weighed in at 222.2 today, which is 2.2 pounds lost and puts me at over fifty pounds lost. Another fifty pounds, and I'll be able to see the end of the road. Or at least, figure out where the end of the road should be. But that's far enough away that I don't really want to contemplate it yet. Right now, I'll take pleasure in having come this far, and being within spitting distance of my second 10% goal -- as long as I lose a pound or more next week, that'll be it! Knock on wood... I have stalled before, just before a goal... And we're celebrating Easter with my parents this weekend.

(Speaking of 10% goals, someone made her fourth 10% goal this week! Whoo!!!)

I'm tentatively hoping to make my third 10% goal by the end of the summer. It's plausible and even probable -- my Shrinking Spreadsheet says that if I can keep up this rate of weight loss, it'll happen in June, but I like to build in some fudge factor in case I run into a plateau, or something happens to sabotage my exercise routine (like the kids getting sick, or a twisted ankle, etc).

My Discovery

This was a complete accident.

We started eating Blue Bunny ice cream because it gave us pre-measured portions of low-carb ice cream, which was an excellent option for my diabetic daughter.

When I started Weight Watchers, I discovered that the Blue Bunny ice cream bars we had in the house were pretty much the same number of points as the WW ice cream (2-3 points each) at significantly lower prices. (My favorite was English toffee, while my daughter prefers butter pecan.)

I went looking for something different this weekend, though, and I saw these fudge bars. In case you don't feel like looking at the link, let me entice you: One ice cream bar is zero points. Two ice cream bars is only one point. It actually says on the box that a serving is two bars. I ate two of them last night. And then I followed it with some Girl Scout cookies. And I was still under my minimum points for the day.

I'm going to start bringing a box of these to my parents' house for big family dinners, for dessert. "Me? I'll have two bars of chocolate ice cream, thanks!" Scrape it off the stick and into a bowl, and no one in the family would know the difference, I expect.

And lest you dismiss it as probably being flavorless or otherwise flawed (like, say, the WW "giant " chocolate ice cream that has so much air whipped into it that I can't eat it on the stick; it droops as soon as I take it out of the wrapping) I'll tell you that the Blue Bunny variety is pretty gosh darned similar to the fudge bars I had in school as a kid -- possibly better, as the outer crust of barely-flavored ice was thinner. Chocolatey and delicious.

Go ye forth, and eat chocolate ice cream, and get skinny.