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.