Halfway House

This morning, I was at 231.6, which is a 2.6 drop from last week, tipping me over the line to more than 40 pounds lost, total! It also means I've hit about the halfway point on the current 10% goal mark -- my new fancy purse is only thirteen pounds away!

A fair amount of stuff to report this week, too:

I bought a Wii and Wii Fit this weekend. So far I've done two workout sessions on it (well, one and two halves, since Monday night's workout got interrupted in the middle for an hour). I find the talking balance-board icon to be unbearably irritating, and I resent the fact that when it demands to know why you've gained weight, there's no option to account for it just being a different time of day since the last time you logged in -- my weight shifts as much as four pounds across the course of a day, dammit! But I mostly enjoy the games (I actually got all the way through the ball-rolly game Monday night!) and I like the yoga. Well, "like" is probably too strong a word, but I appreciate it. Doing yoga only once a week when I was pregnant made a huge difference in my foot problems; I got the same sort of aches in my ankles and arches from the Wii's yoga positions, so I have some hope that it will help keep the podiatrist at bay if I keep it up.

The Wii Fit isn't exactly a workout, but it's better than sitting on my duff. My current plan is to use the Wii on days that I don't go to the gym -- allergy shot days and weekends. Or days where I have a packed work schedule or (like today) a sick kid at home to make getting to the gym even more difficult to fit in. (It's a trade-off. Going to the gym takes an hour and a half and earns me 4 points; the Wii Fit takes about half an hour or so and earns me only 1 point.)

We'll see how it works out.

I had a neat moment on Sunday: I'd pulled my hair back into a ponytail despite the cold weather because I couldn't take one more second of frizzy static hair in my face, and when I went into the bathroom, I caught sight of my face in the mirror and was startled to realize that my cheekbones have come back.

I have, if I may be permitted a moment of vanity, excellent cheekbones. They're my sole inheritance from my few drops of Indian blood: they're high, long, and narrow, and when I'm not completely porked out, fairly prominent. They make my face look thinner than it actually is, and I was quite happy to see that they had returned. (Interestingly, when I take my hair down from the ponytail, they disappear again. I'm not sure why, since my hair doesn't fall over my face, but there you have it. I've been wearing my hair in a ponytail ever since. I admit it is not entirely because of the static issue, anymore.)

And yesterday, I went to my OB/GYN for the annual checkup. The less said about that, the better, except that he was very excited on my behalf about the weight loss and increased exercise, so that was nice.

I had a co-worker ask how much weight I'd lost, this morning. That was nice, too.

I declare it a good-diet week. May there be many, many more.

Inch By Inch

Weigh-in: 234.2, down 1.8 from last week for a grand total of 38.8 lost. My chart continues its steady slope downward. I'm still feeling pretty blah about the rate of loss, even though I'm still sticking close to the recommended two pounds per week, and rationally I know that's the fastest healthy rare, and logically I understand that it took me years to put all this weight on, so it's going to take years for it all to come off... But I'm still feeling blah about it.

I expect I'll continue to feel blah about it until I cross that 220 mark. That's the point at which I'll be able to say something like, "This is the smallest I've been since before I got married." Right now, I'm not just starting out or meeting any exciting challenges (like getting through the birthday/holiday season), and all I can say about 235-ish is that it's the smallest I've been since... the last time I was on a diet. Not very exciting.

On the non-blah side, though, I made it through Valentine's Day with nary a scratch. I budgeted for popcorn at the movies, and even had points left over to have steak for dinner. And I worked in the coffee-flavored chocolates that snuck into Matt's candy (I swear, I checked the box label!) without any problems. And it's one of my long-held secrets that I actually kind of like conversation hearts, so I've been noshing on those -- but since the little gift bags of them are 1 point each, that hasn't been too much of an issue. (I like them, but I can stop after 2 bags. They're not a Danger Food.)

I'm doing an experiment with breakfast this week; I saw somewhere that it's a good idea to change around your meals some, to keep your body from falling into a rut. And I saw a microwave omelet-maker at the grocery store. So three days this week, I'm having an omelet, made with egg-beaters, a piece of vegetarian sausage, and a slice of low-fat cheese. I added a couple of diced tomatoes to it today. It needs a lot of salt, because egg-beaters have zero flavor, but it does seem to hold the hunger at bay fairly well until lunch.

We tried to buy a Wii Fit this weekend, but couldn't find one. Alas. Guess I'll end up ordering it online. I'd like to be able to fit in some exercise on non-gym days, even if it's only 15 minutes.

And I think I need new bras again. I either need to go down to a 42DD or a 44D, I'm not sure which, but my 44-DDDs are sagging around the boob and riding up in the back.

Kthunk

Another week, another 2 pounds. Well, 2.2, but that makes up for last week's 1.8, right? So: 236, a grand total of 37 down. The Weight Watchers site is tsking at me again for losing weight too fast. Hey, WW site? Bite me.

I did a Bad Thing yesterday: I built a chart to calculate how long it should take me to get to my various goal weights. It's based on my average loss over the most recent 12 weeks, and will update continuously as I go, so it's at least got one foot in reality -- if I start to plateau, those dates will slide out appropriately, and once I'm past a plateau, they'll bunch back up again.

And I know you're not really supposed to look at the final destination from this far out -- it's discouraging, to know just how far you have to go and how long it will take. You're supposed to just focus on the near-term goal.

But I've been feeling kind of discouraged about the speed of this anyway, lately. And I know, I know it's dumb; I didn't pile on the fat in six months, and I can't expect it to go away that fast, either. But the near-term goal is around 220, and I've been there, inside the last five years. It's not an exciting goal for me. More exciting is the under-200 goal, and more exciting still are various landmarks beyond that.

So I built the chart. And actually, it didn't really discourage me. Well, no more than I was already discouraged, anyway. I don't know how much it helped, but at least it gives me some ball-park dates to work toward. At my current rate of loss, I should hit my near-term goal around mid-April, the under-200 goal in July, and what I'm currently thinking of as my "ultimate" goal right around this time next year.

I'm aware those numbers are a bit optimistic -- they don't take into account any plateaus, or weeks that I don't lose because of various events or holidays or whatnot, or the fact that my rate of loss is likely to even out, the closer I get to my goal. But I've been doing this now for four and a half months, and even though my clothes are all much looser than they used to be, I don't really feel any different. It makes it feel like this is going to be going on forever. Another year? I can hang in there for another year, I think.

We shall see.

Carrot

Historically, I've always had trouble coming up with good dieting rewards for myself.

How often is often enough? How much of a reward is really rewarding -- and how much is too much? Do I reward the good behavior, or the good results (as they don't always match up exactly)?

The last time I got really serious about a diet, when I got down to about 225, I decided that when I got below 200, I was going to buy myself the new laptop I'd been lusting after.

Finally, I thought, I'd hit upon a good one. The goal was not so far away as to be completely out of sight, and the reward itself was something I wanted but didn't actually need (my old computer was doing its job adequately, after all). It was big enough to be a serious expenditure, but not so big that I couldn't afford it at all.

Naturally, then, I hit a plateau and hovered around 220 for two straight months. And then the maid service dropped my computer and broke it, which made getting a new one more or less a necessity.

So much for that idea.

I'm still working on it, this time. And I'm working on it hard right now, because I'm currently in a bad state of mind for dieting where every little bit of progress seems to take forever and I'm feeling discouraged, like I'll never get there.

When I hit my 10% goal (and also to reward myself for getting through Christmas without gaining anything), I got myself a full 90-minute massage. That was lovely and decadent, but it wasn't really planned. More of a spur-of-the-moment thing.

Lately I've found myself eying purses whenever I'm in a store that stocks them. My current purse is about three years old, and it's starting to get pretty beat up and pitiful-looking. And boring. I want something with color and pizazz. And sure, I could pick up a $25 bag from Target, but then I thought maybe I could get one of these terrifically expensive but oh-so-gorgeous Anuschka bags as a diet-goal reward. Maybe when I hit my next 10% mark, which currently looks like it will happen in April. Yeah, it's more than I spent on the massage, but surely the smaller, prettier me deserves a pretty bag?

I'm going for the big-big reward again, too: I've been pondering an SLR camera for some time now, and I love the pictures that they take, but I'm not entirely sure I could justify spending that much on a camera that I'm mostly going to use to take shots of the kids. (Especially since most SLRs do not come with video capability, so I'd probably be losing that function if I didn't want to lug multiple cameras around.) Anyway, I've been waffling for a long time. It's a lot of money to drop on a piece of equipment... which makes it a perfect reward item, yes? So I've pretty much pegged it as my reward for my next 10% goal, which (not coincidentally) will be the one that drops me below 200 for the first time in almost 15 years.

And I'll worry about rewards beyond that point when I get closer to them -- I think that's plenty to be going on with.

What I'm pondering are rewards for smaller goals and triumphs: 5-pound marks, maybe, or successfully negotiating events and holidays. Something to focus my mind on to keep myself going for just another couple of days without mounting a raid on the Pepperidge Farm outlet store...

I have... no ideas. I am not restrained about buying books or music, and I'm trying to declutter my house anyway. Food is obviously a counterproductive idea. Spa treatments (massages or whatever) are too expensive for rewards that could hit two or three times a month. Movies and similar activities are too much trouble to arrange. Clothes shopping is a chore, not a reward.

I need ideas. Something in the $30 or under range that can be obtained without completely rearranging my schedule and which could reasonably be called a reward, something to make it worth the struggle of putting down the snacks and going to the gym... Ug. I just don't know. C'mon, help me out here.

Move It Move It

I lost 1.8 pounds this week -- for those of you playing along at home, that's 34.8 pounds lost, putting me at 238.2 pounds total. I'm actually slightly surprised that I lost, since I dipped pretty significantly into my weekly points for Book Club (even though I thought it would only be one or two), and then had "portion estimation" problems all weekend. I did, however, kick in an extra 10 minutes on the bike when I went to the gym Saturday. (Twenty minutes and thirty minutes of biking both work out to the same number of points on the website, so I didn't get any extra for it -- but according to the bike's readout, it was worth an extra fifty calories or so.)

Keeping this short and sweet, as work is smacking me with a baseball bat.