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.

Whee!

Weekly weigh-in report is a bit late this week, due to my working from home on Wednesday (I always forget to blog when I'm at home) and the insane-ass day I had Thursday. But here it is Friday, and this is what happened when I got on the scale Wednesday morning:

I lost weight. 3.6 pounds, in fact, which seems a little ridiculous. I got The Lecture from the WW website, which I thought was really unnecessary (yet again), since that precipitous drop bring my average for the past month to just a smidge less than two pounds per week, which is well within the safety guidelines. Anyway, that puts me at 224.4 pounds, meaning that I've lost a total of 48.6 pounds.

As Lynn is fond of saying, biology is not chemistry. You can eat the exact same number of calories and do the exact same amount of exercise for two weeks and come up with vastly different results for the stupidest of petty reasons. Stress will put the brakes on your metabolism. So will lack of sleep. Being sick can screw up your metabolism too, in different ways depending on what kind of sickness -- and that can linger for a while even after you're better. Different women react differently to different points in their fertility cycles, but there's always some metabolic or water-retention factor happening somewhere in there. Exercise affects you differently depending on what time of day it happens. Different foods, even with the same number of calories, can affect your metabolism. (Maybe cabbage and tomatoes are my secret weight-loss weapon? I could live with that.)

Which all boils down to my not having the slightest clue what was different this past week, that made me drop so much.

Not that I'm complaining, mind. I'm eager to get to that 10% goal so I can get my new purse and fit a little less muffin-toppy into my new jeans. (I have no idea what size they are. Lane Bryant jeans-size 2 -- which I think means 18/20, but I'm not sure. At any rate, my old jeans were a size 4, so whoo, me!)

Appreciative

I guess that .8 last week was there to make me feel appreciative for this week's 1.6. Otherwise, it might've been a little disappointing.

1.6 takes me to 228, which is an even 45 pounds lost. Not too shabby, really, and my projection spreadsheet still has me on-target to reach my second 10% goal right before my anniversary. (And I will promptly back it up by going off-plan for my anniversary dinner. Though it currently looks like we're not going to be able to have that dinner until a month later, anyway. Who gave my parents permission to have lives of their own?!)

Except for the corned beef I made for St. Patrick's Day (9 points for a meal that was smaller than what the five-year-old usually eats!!!) I thought I did pretty well staying on-plan this week. And I was good about my exercise, too -- three trips to the gym (40 minutes each) and at least half an hour on the Wii Fit every day that I didn't go to the gym. So I'm feeling pretty good about things, just now.

Blah.

I was feeling pretty good about this week, but alas, I only lost .8 pounds (229.6, total loss of 43.4). Which is a loss, so it's a win, I guess, but I'd really been hoping to rally a bit. Oh, well, I guess they can't all be two pounds or more. And hey, I'm down to less than 10 pounds until my second 10% goal has been hit.

The frustrating bit is that I don't really know why I didn't lose more.

I slacked off for half the week on the exercise, but that was because I was sick -- you'd think that eating only half (or less) of my points allotment would make up for the fact that I wasn't going to the gym.

Hell, maybe I'm not eating enough and it's sending my body into metabolic hibernation.

Or maybe I'm just leveling out a bit as I approach one of my body's "natural weight" points (somewhere between 220 and 225, from previous experience) and once I manage to bull through that, I'll go back to losing quickly again.

Shrinkage

I managed to buy myself a new pair of pants this weekend, which is good because my brown work pants were getting laughably oversized. The new pants are size 16/18, which is just thrilling. I held them up in the fitting room and said, "No way is my butt fitting into that!" but, shockingly enough, it did.

(They're stretchy knit pants, so I suspect I'm closer to the 18 side of that scale, but after looking at the way they fit in the mirror, I didn't even consider trying on the 20/22s.)

I also got some new bras in this week -- 42Ds. The 42 part fits pretty well, but apparently my boobs are still wavering on the dividing line between D and DD. One of the new bras was wearable, but uncomfortable by the end of the day; the other bra immediately gave me the boob equivalent of the muffin-top, which just isn't pretty no matter how you slice it.

Still, shrinkage = good.

Tick.

Weigh-in time! This morning, I stepped on the scale and it said 225.0.

Uh... What? I stepped off, and it said, "ERR 0". Ah, that makes more sense -- the kids had probably been playing on it and gotten it un-zeroed. I re-zeroed the scale and stepped on again. 230.4. Much more likely.

That's a 1.2 pound drop -- not as much as I was hoping for, but more than I was expecting, to be honest. The baby was sick last week, so I spent most of it working half-days and spending the other half of the day at home, and then Monday was a snow day, so I spent that whole day at home, and... home just isn't a very good place for me to be on a diet.

At work, I can steel myself to some level of discipline. I eat breakfast, I eat lunch, I eat my afternoon snack. If I'm hungry before lunch or before my usual snacktime, I have a few cans of low-point soup stashed in the cabinet, and some pickled beets (don't judge me) in the fridge. I go through at least 36 ounces of liquid while I'm sitting at my desk (in some combination of coffee, tea, and diet soda).

But at home... If the baby doesn't eat all of his handful of mini nilla wafers or slices of banana, I might as well pop one or two in my mouth rather than throw them out and let them go to waste. There's that tub of cool whip in the fridge every time I open it, and one fingerful isn't going to cost me that much, right? And hey, there's that Valentine candy that I got on sale that's only 1 point a bag; what's one point between friends? I don't have a drink ready at hand all the time (it's easier not to have one nearby when the kids are romping on me) so I tend to get hungry faster and snack more -- and even the healthy snacks add up. An average 8oz apple or pear is 2 points. All things that, individually, wouldn't make a difference, but if you add them up over a whole week's worth of snitching and cheating... do.

And I didn't make it to the gym even once in the last week. I was doing workouts on the Wii Fit (wiirkouts, I dubbed them) so I wasn't being a complete slug, but the Wii Fit does not get my heart rate up to 120 and hold it there for thirty or forty minutes solid. (I was hoping I'd get to the gym today, but my car is in the shop. BAH. Maybe I'll make it tonight.)

So, all that taken together, I'm not too displeased with this past week's weigh-in. But here's hoping I'm back on the speed train this coming week.