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!