Secretly Shrinking

Forward Ho

2010-09-15T09:24:00.000-04:00

Down 1.2 this week to 158.4, so I'm pretty much back to where I was before I had that one weird huge drop a few weeks back and then screwed it up by gaining a lot for two weeks in a row. Heh.

I'm thinking about dropping my Weight Watchers subscription. I can count on one hand the number of times I've logged in over the last three weeks, and at least half of those have been simply to log my weight.

I don't go to meetings and my support group is my friends and family, so there's nothing to lose there. And the website simply isn't giving me much that I can use. I've been double-tracking my weekly weigh-ins on a spreadsheet anyway, and a spreadsheet I own myself can give me much more customized (and therefore useful) graphs and calculations. I occasionally hit the website for recipes -- but since I almost always rebuild the recipes a bit (to replace items we don't eat, or adjust serving sizes, or reduce carbs for Penny's sake) I usually have to recalculate the points anyway, so I can just switch to using the other gajillion-and-one diet recipe sites out there. I've hit all the big milestones I'm going to hit, so I'm not looking forward to the validation of little star icons. I'm not a forums person, I don't use their coupons to buy their food, and it's been ages since I've seen anything new or helpful in the advice columns.

I've been more or less maintaining my weight for the last three months. (Actually, over the last twelve weeks, I've been losing at an average rate of 0.2 pounds a week. I go down, I go up, I go down, I go up. Close enough.) I've been managing my food without tracking it for the last six weeks or so, and honestly, I think I've mostly got it. When I've gained weight, it hasn't been a mystery: I know exactly what I've done wrong and what I have to do to fix it.

The challenge for me now is to keep watching it and not let it slide. To keep stepping on the scale every morning and tracking it every week and screwing down my discipline when I've let things slide too much. But I don't really see the website helping with that.

I'm paid up for this month, but unless something happens to change my mind, I'll cancel before next month's payment is due.

Which, coincidentally, will be just in time to coincide with my 2-year diet anniversary.

Cringe

2010-09-01T08:58:00.000-04:00

Apparently, I had too much fun at my cousin's wedding festivities. I'm up another 1.4 pounds, which tips me back over my red-light siren weight of 160, to 160.2. So starting today, I'm back to tracking every little thing I eat, and weighing and measuring everything, and trying to get back to the gym (though with the daycare closed both Friday and Monday, I'm probably not getting in my 3/week until the following week).

It's all very well to relax and overeat on special occasions, but I've been letting that relaxation slide into everyday life. Time to nip that in the bud.

(I'm hungry already.)

WINCE

2010-08-25T09:14:00.000-04:00

I gained three pounds this week. Three.

And I don't even have a good excuse. I know exactly what went wrong.

The CSA brought us a big handful of tomatillas, two weeks ago. Now, I like Mexican food, but a little tomatilla goes a long way, and I didn't really want to be eating Mexican every night. So last weekend, I made a huge batch of guacamole. Six avocados' worth.

I had a plan, to keep myself from eating all that guacamole. Half of it, I sent with my husband to his monthly D&D game. The guys devoured it more or less instantly, and were, by all reports, most grateful.

Now, while he was at his game, I'd intended to meet up with some friends and their kids for dinner. I figured that would give my kids something to do to keep them occupied, and I could take along the rest of the guacamole and some chips, and sure I'd eat some, but so would my friends (and maybe even the kids). It was a plan!

Alas, the friends had to reschedule, and I found myself sitting at home, with the kids in bed and the husband still out... And the guac and chips were just sitting there. Begging to be eaten. I didn't eat all of it, but I probably ate more than I would've if I'd shared it.

And then I had some more the next day. And later that night, for a snack. And then the day after that, I was home alone, waiting on the A/C repair crew, and there was really only a little bit left...

It's not even the guacamole that killed me, though the gods know it's full of fat. But avocado oil is one of the healthy ones, and overindulging on avocado doesn't pack on three pounds in a week. Nope. That was the chips. It's the fried starches and the salt. Not only are they fattening, not only do they make me retain water for days afterward, but I can't stop. If there is an open bag of chips in the house, I will eat some. And then I will eat some more. And then I will lick my fingers and pry the crumbs out of the corners of the bag.

This is why I should not allow chips into my house. Three. Frikkin. Pounds. Ouch.

(But it was amazing guacamole.)

Surprise!

2010-08-18T14:26:00.000-04:00

I'm... down to 155.8 -- a loss of 3 pounds over the week. Which is quite the surprise, as yesterday morning I was still clocking in at 158, and I spent three days eating pizza and birthday cake in not-insignificant quantities. Though as I've noted before, my scale is not in its right mind. The Wii had noticed some downward trending, too, though, so I guess it's genuine. That knocks me firmly past a grand total loss of 115 (to 117.2, precisely).

I have trouble celebrating it, though, because I'm not entirely sure what I did to deserve it.

One item I'm proud of, though: Sunday, I was at a mall with a friend, and we stopped at the food court for lunch. I'd figured on going to Chick-fil-A, because they have some reasonable options, but had forgotten that Chick-fil-A doesn't operate on Sundays. So we wandered around to try to figure out what else to get, and I eventually found myself drawn to the Japanese food place.

I was pondering the chicken teriyaki and wondering if they would let me substitute miso soup for the fried rice (because I love fried rice, and if I got it, I would certainly have eaten entirely too much of it) when my eye was caught by some fresh fruit in the display case. And my body said Oh, hell yes.

I ended up with a bowl of miso soup and a big container of fruit for lunch. Not because I was trying to be on-plan, particularly, but because it looked so damn good. And it was good. It was amazing, actually. I even ate the cantaloupe, and I don't even usually like cantaloupe.

Apparently, my body was telling me I needed fruit. Apparently, I was able to hear it, and apparently, I listened.

This is a big deal, for me. I'm really bad at hearing what my body wants to tell me. But somehow, I did it this time.

Now that... That, I'm proud of.

Little Off The Top

2010-08-11T09:10:00.000-04:00

I lost 0.6 this week, which nudges me just past where I was before I went on vacation, to 158.2. If that .2 had fallen off, I could officially say that I've lost a total of 115 pounds, but oh well. I'm actually surprised that I lost at all, because I wound up eating out quite a lot last week, and did not meet any of my exercise goals.

I'm trying to be good this week so I can indulge this weekend. It's my daughter's birthday tomorrow, and the party is Saturday, plus a book I wrote is being released, so I've got a lot of fun stuff planned for this weekend, and a fair amount of it involves wonderful, delicious, really quite bad for me food.

But! But! But! I was in dire need of a t-back bra to wear with a dress, and I just happened to be passing by a Victoria's Secret, so I thought -- why not? I went in, and not only did they have exactly the bra I needed, in my size, and in the color I needed -- but it was incredibly comfortable. I mean, weirdly comfortable. Bras are not, in my experience (many years of it, because I was a C cup by the 7th grade), ever actually comfortable. I was insanely excited about that bra for days after I bought it. I haven't been able to shop at Victoria's Secret since early college -- and now I can't wait to go back, slightly expensive or not!

...Easy Go

2010-08-04T09:08:00.000-04:00

Weighed in at 158.8 this morning, which is not quite back to where I was, pre-vacation, but it gets me comfortably back out of the 160s and on my way back down.

Of course, I may well see a bump up tomorrow morning. We went out to eat last night and I had a whole mess of hush puppies. With butter. ("Mess o' puppies" is a technical culinary term. I promise. Would I lie to you?) But they were soooo tasty!

I really think I'm beginning to approach equilibrium, with my weight. I'm mostly comfortable with the amount of food I'm eating (usually), and even when I go off-plan and don't log for a couple of days, I'm doing okay at holding my own. When I look at my graphs, I've gone from a fairly steady and smooth downward curve to jaggedy bumps and lurches. The overall average trend is still downward, but it's definitely starting to level off, and it looks like I'll probably even out somewhere around 155.

I could live with that.

Normal

2010-07-28T10:29:00.000-04:00

I'm up 1.8 pounds over the last two weeks, back over the 160 mark to 160.2. (It was even higher than that, Monday, but that's not official.)

No stress. No regrets, either. I mostly tried to eat sensibly, but there was a fair amount of fattening food, and there was some stress-eating, and then there was a Garrett kiosk at the airport as I was leaving, and then I met up with a friend for fancy French food, and there was the Mike's Hard Lemonade that (once I thought to look it up) had about 50% more calories than I'd estimated (and alcohol makes me retain water for a day or so, anyway).

We did a bit of walking around, but not as much as I'd expected, and what with one thing and another, I only got to the gym once in the last two weeks. (When I went back on Monday, it kicked my ass, but it felt really good.)

So... Yeah. I splurged a bit, and I bloody well enjoyed it, and now I'm back on the wagon, and the weight is coming back off.

This is what normal people do, right? They go on vacation and splurge and gain a little, and then they buckle down to get it back under control before it can get out of hand.

Yeah. I can do that. I can do this.

Dink

2010-07-14T09:04:00.000-04:00

Despite the summer bash and skipping the gym for the entire week, I managed to drop another 0.8 pounds, to 158.4. (It was down to 158.0 before the bash. Ah, well. I regret nothing!)

I'm only getting to the gym twice this week, though I think lugging a 2-year-old through two airports (including O'Hare) by myself will mostly make up for the missed session. Then I've got a wedding to attend and a week of living with my mother-in-law, so I'm kind of bracing for some celebration and stress eating. Not to mention what will happen if we visit Matt's grandmother and she decides I need to be Fed.

At any rate, I'll be out of town next week, so I'm missing that weigh-in. (I may step on my MiL's scale a time or two, just for a reality check, but I'm not logging an official weigh-in from a scale that isn't mine.)

Wish me luck, and see you in two weeks!

Whut.

2010-07-07T08:46:00.000-04:00

So, I had a long weekend involving ice cream and Cool Whip and movie popcorn with "butter" and hot dogs and cheeseburgers and whipped cream and cake and potato salad and chips. I didn't so much as open my Weight Watchers log for three and a half days, and I skipped the gym on Monday. I was braced for a gain and praying I hadn't gone back over 163.

So I was kind of nonplussed, if pleased, to be down 2.2 pounds to 159.2 this morning. Which means that despite some backsliding, I've met (barely) the goal I set a while back, of being in the 150s in time for the big Summer Bash reunion thing, which is this weekend.

Yeah, I kind of expect to not be in the 150s again by next week, too.

Oh, and: crap. I'm going to two weddings this summer, and my smallest dress is an 18, and my only skirts that fit are inappropriately short and/or black. I should probably go shopping soon.

Up Again

2010-06-30T08:43:00.000-04:00

Up again this week about half a pound, so I'm up to 161.4.

I ought to feel disappointed or something, but I'm really not. Mostly, I think, because I'm not seeing a lot in the mirror that simply losing weight will fix, anymore. Which is not to say that I like everything I see, of course, but it's not as simple as, "Yuck, I'm fat!" any more.

Matt took this picture of me a few weeks ago, and my reaction was actually, "Oh, holy crap, I'm looking bony!" When I look in the mirror before I step into the shower, that reaction is basically confirmed -- my collarbones stand out, and I can see the bones on my chest shifting. Which I've always thought looked slightly gross. My cheeks and jowls are slightly fleshy, left over from being fat, but my neck and chest, which don't have a lot of excess skin, are verging on too thin for my tastes.

The excess skin on my arms and legs is definitely gross -- I've been doing a lot of selective cropping on my summer swim pictures, let me tell you -- but losing more weight will not make my skin tighter. It will, in fact, have the opposite effect. The only things that can make my skin tight again are a) time (lots of it), and b) surgery that I can't afford. I'm going to have to reconcile myself to that, I suspect.

My hips and abdomen are bigger than I'd like -- but that's more to do with my overall body shape than mere fat. I can remember hating that my hips were wider than my chest, and the way my abdomen pooched out, back in high school, when I weighed 135. (And let's be honest: I've carried two babies in that abdomen and delivered them with those hips. My baby-factory region is not going to ever look like it did in high school.)

And balancing all that... Turning sideways in the mirror is a pleasant surprise -- my behind is smaller than it's ever been, I think. I can actually make out muscles in my arms, when the loose skin isn't in the way. Even if it's wider on the bottom than the top, I've got hourglass curves again. (My secret guilty pleasure: when I leave the daycare in the morning, the sun casts my shadow on the sidewalk in front of me, and I love to watch my hips sway when I walk back to the car.) I'm in pretty good shape for a woman who's closing in on 40 (especially considering that when I was 35, I was closing in on 300 pounds).

So a half-pound gain this week doesn't really bother me that much. I need to exercise some discipline again to keep it from going up three weeks in a row, but I'm beginning to wonder if "around 160" is where I need to stay, at least for a while.

And Up Again

2010-06-23T11:59:00.000-04:00

That pound I lost last week? It came back. No question as to why, either: grilled fajitas with friends on Saturday, followed by Father's Day ice cream and BLTs, corn on the cob, watermelon, and more ice cream on Sunday. And then Rock Band Night Monday.

I don't think any one of them would have hurt me too bad, but put all together... yeah, I'm back up a bit.

And you know what? It was totally worth it. Summer is the best time for good food. Grilled chicken and peppers and onions, farmer's market tomatoes and corn and watermelon... You damn well better believe I went back for seconds!

So I'm back up over 160, a bit, but I'm not sweating it. I didn't gain it by slipping back into old bad habits, covertly snarfing doughnuts and candy bars in the office kitchen. I gained it eating good food with good friends and having a good time, and I'm confident I'll lose it again. No regrets.

(Is this how normal people feel about food? I could get used to it.)

B'dmp!

2010-06-16T10:45:00.000-04:00

A one-pound loss this week nudges me, by the narrowest of narrow margins, out of the 160's and into the 150's -- 159.8, pretty much the lowest it can be (since my scale does its partials in 0.2 increments) and still be less than 160. So while I'm holding my breath against a gain next week bringing me back up (Father's Day this weekend, including a meal with my family, which is not often diet-friendly), I guess I can say I've technically met my goal of being below 160 before the Summer Bash. And if I'm careful, I'll still (again?) be in the 150s when it rolls around.(Though given the amount of food likely to be there, it's entirely possible that I might pop up afterwards, hehe. Maybe I should focus on building a buffer, there.)

My daughter begged me -- begged me -- for cauliflower soup last night. How do you turn down someone begging you for something that tasty and healthy, even knowing that the other two members of the household don't like it? You don't. So I made two kinds of soup for dinner last night. My fridge is stuffed with leftovers, now. Tasty, tasty soup leftovers.

...Or It Didn't Happen!

2010-06-10T10:49:00.002-04:00

Poor Matt; I made him go through something like three separate rounds of taking photos of me this morning. The first round, the camera was set up for full sunlight, so the pics turned out too dark; the second set, he only took pics from my waist up (and while I think those look better -- damn my child-birthin' hips! -- they're not so good for comparisons); and finally, the third set, I got some usable shots. Whew, and thanks, hon!

Here's my starting picture, almost exactly two years ago (I'm the one holding the baby):

And here I am now:

And just for fun, here's the whole spread of baby-holding pictures, each taken almost exactly a year apart:

The kid keeps getting bigger, and I keep getting smaller! (Though I have to say, the 40-pound difference between '09 and '10 is significantly less noticeable than the 70-pound difference between '08 and '09 -- more than the extra 30 pounds should make, really. Maybe it's an illusion caused by the angles of the shots and positioning of the kid's leg.)

She Scores!

2010-06-09T09:22:00.000-04:00

Whahoo! I'm down 2.2 pounds this week, which is just enough to bump me over the 5th 10% goal that I've been staring at since (dear gods) November. 160.8 puts me only barely past the goal weight of 161, with no guarantee that I won't bounce right back up over it next week, but there we have it!

I'll have to get Matt to take a comparison photo in the next day or so so I can post that. (He took a picture of me just this weekend, actually, but I was in a swimsuit, and when I saw it, well... I was braced for the fact that my boobs were hanging down to my waist -- seriously, I need a bathing suit with an underwire or something -- but I hadn't realized how horrible my legs look; there's so much loose skin there that they look saggy and wrinkly all down my thighs. Ug. Maybe I should start saving up for cosmetic surgery to get some of this excess skin removed, as I suspect I'm too old to expect much elasticity from my skin.

Anyway, I'll get Matt to take a picture of me wearing pants in the next day or so and post it.

In theory, another 10% of my weight lost would take me down to 145, slipping me just under the BMI "normal" gate. But given how much my weight loss has slowed in the last few months, I'm wondering if 145 might be a little too ambitious (cosmetic surgery notwithstanding -- I bet I've got at least 10-15 pounds of excess skin hanging on me, here). And quite honestly, if I do have 15 pounds of excess skin hanging on me, then the amount of fat in my body is already pretty close to "normal". So I've set my next goal to 150. We'll see how long it takes me to get there, and how much effort it is to stay in that range before I decide whether to go further.

Oops.

2010-06-02T09:06:00.000-04:00

I didn't do too badly on the writing retreat, but then I came home and promptly went out to dinner two nights in a row. Once at La Tolteca, where I overindulged in chips, and once to the County Grill, where I ate half a barbecued chicken (well, most of it) and cornbread muffins and warm potato salad...

So, er, yeah, I kind of undid last week's loss. I was at 163 this morning, up 1.4 pounds. I'm hoping some of that is water weight, from all the extra salt. But still, bad bad bad! Back on the wagon for me!

(But man, oh, man, the barbecue and the cornbread and the potato salad were worth it.)

Huhn?

2010-05-26T09:28:00.000-04:00

What? I lost 1.8 pounds again this week! Two good weeks in a row! Am I allowed to do that? Shh, don't tell the Diet Police!

So I'm at 161.4 now, officially crossing the marker of having lost 110 pounds total. I'm only half a pound from meeting my fifth 10% goal (boy, this one is taking long enough -- I passed the fourth one in mid-November!) and I'm solidly on track for the goal I mentioned last week of being below the 160 mark in time for the summer bash in July.

Onward and downward!

Creep Creep Creep

2010-05-19T09:19:00.000-04:00

I forgot to post last week: I'd gained a pound. It wasn't unexpected, as I'd kind of splurged with eating out for several days in a row.

This week, I'm back down to 163.2, so my net loss over two weeks was 0.8 pounds. Guess I can't complain too much. And aside from a birthday party this weekend, I don't think I've got any other big splurge occasions for a while, so hopefully I'll be able to stay on track for a bit. I'd really like to be below 160 in time for the Summer Bash in July. (That's 3.5 pounds to lose in about 7 weeks. Given that my rate of loss lately is hovering around half a pound a week... it's possible. If I can manage to stay on plan.)

I'm kind of wondering if I should set my "final" goal at around 155. I have a whole lot of extra skin sitting around these days, left over from being enormously fat and then fat and pregnant. I have a horrible case of granny-arms, and when I stand up, the extra skin from my hips and thighs falls down and bunches up around my knees, which is making me almost more self-conscious about wearing shorts than I was when I was merely fat. If I could afford to have all that excess skin surgically removed, I'd be willing to bet it would drop me by a solid 10-15 pounds. At least. (Also, it might move my boobs back up to my chest from my waist.) Alas, it's not a health hazard and I'm not wealthy, so surgery isn't really an option. And I'm old enough that my skin isn't as elastic as it used to be, and I don't think I can expect it to tighten up very much on its own. So I need to take that 10-15 extra pounds into account when I decide on my final weight.

Counting in favor of that option, by the way, is another sign of progress: I can actually put my old high school class ring on again. (Yes, I still have it.) In fact, I can even put it on the finger it was originally measured for, though it's a snug fit and I wouldn't want to do any exercising or go out in hot weather with it. But I can get it on and off again. Which is pretty cool.

Anyway, we'll see. As slow as I'm losing these days, I've got plenty of time to decide.

Turnaround

2010-05-17T22:20:00.000-04:00

Two years ago, when I was doing the annual benefits re-up, I thought that since I had two kids now, maybe I should sign up for some extra life insurance. There's a base minimum -- no matter what, my family gets one year's salary if I die -- but I can opt in for more than that. I went with the lowest level, to make it a grand total of two years' worth.

Because this was opt-in rather than the required base minimum, I had to submit a medical form. I didn't think anything of it, really... until they turned me down and denied the life insurance extension.

They were explicit about the reason: morbid obesity. It was a sticking point, an eye-opener, and one of the many reasons I started getting serious about getting exercise and losing weight.

Today, I got another letter from the company's life insurance carrier. This time, it was to tell me that this year's request for additional life insurance has been approved.

Of all the triumphs I've had since this whole thing started, it seems odd that this one should feel so huge. But it does, and so here we are.

Superfast

2010-05-05T08:58:00.000-04:00

Because things are insane at work today, so I only have a minute to update: weighed in at 164 this morning, so I'm finally over the hump. Here's hoping, anyway.

Keeping my fingers crossed that it'll stay that way; I'm only 3 pounds from my next goalpost.

Coasting

2010-04-28T10:28:00.000-04:00

Up 0.2 pounds this week, to 166.2. Which is just annoying. Especially since it was down around 165 all weekend. Stupid last-minute gains.

I've been in this general range for more than a month, now. Is it a plateau, or is it simply laziness? I'd really like to drop another 15-20 pounds before I start thinking about maintenance.

Guess I'll just hold the course and see what happens. I've got my book club tonight (munchies!) and a luncheon at work tomorrow but am hoping otherwise to be able to stick to the plan.

Dabump

2010-04-21T09:22:00.000-04:00

Yesterday morning, I was 168.2 -- down half a pound, or thereabouts. This morning? 166.0. WTF, scale? WTF? But the Wii Fit confirmed it, so there we are: 166, down 2.6 pounds from last week, and nearly back to the 165 I was before I started letting things slip.

I think I need to cut out the evening snacking again, even when I've got the points for it. I don't know if it's that saving points for a snack makes me hungrier during the day and more inclined to cheat, or that evening food just metabolizes that much slower, or what, but I definitely lose weight faster when I cease all eating after 7pm.

I'm also, now that the weather is thinking about getting warmer and produce prices are starting to come down, thinking of trying to work salads into my lunches. It doesn't actually save me that many points -- my usual sandwich is only 4 points, and the cobb-ish salad I had yesterday was 5 (egg, avocado, meat, and cheese add up fast -- thank goodness for 0-calorie dressing!) but it does drastically increase my veggie intake and shake up my metabolism a little so it's not anticipating the same thing every day.

I've been getting some fantastic compliments from people lately -- kind of weird how that seems to come and go in waves, isn't it? But I'm not complaining! I don't see a lot of change in myself, day-to-day, so it's always good to be reminded that I am still changing, and for the better.

Aye-yup.

2010-04-14T09:08:00.000-04:00

As anticipated, I'm up 3.6 pounds this week, to 168.6. These things happen, especially when I go off the diet and then go on vacation. I'm trying to get my fanny back into the wagon now, and hopefully it'll go as easy as it came.

A Revelation

2010-04-13T14:30:00.000-04:00

Yeah, so, there was Easter and Easter candy, and then there was being on vacation and eating at tourist spots and being betrayed by my usually health-nut hostess who set out chips and salsa for us and made decadent desserts, and then there was an anniversary dinner with my husband which started with foie gras on hazelnut toast and did not get much healthier from there, so while official weigh-in isn't until tomorrow, I'm pretty sure I gained a solid 3 or 4 pounds over the last two weeks. I'm braced for it and trying to get back on the wagon.

It's a reminder that, however well I've done, the bad habits and attitudes that made me fat in the first place are still lurking just under the surface -- and that, like any proper monsters, feeding them makes them stronger. It's a lesson that I need to keep in mind

But that's not what this post is.

This post is because I really, really, really missed being able to go to the gym while I was on vacation. I was looking forward to it yesterday when I remembered I had a doctor's appointment that was likely to eat up my usual hour-ish of break time that I use for going to the gym. It was just a checkup, though, so I thought maybe if the doctor only took half an hour, I could squeeze the gym in anyway.

Alas, the doctor took over two hours, exceeding my break time rather excessively, and I did not get to the gym and having to burn an hour or so of vacation time while I was at it. I was a bit surly about it.

So I went today. And I dove in with all the enthusiasm of a starving man at an all-you-can-eat buffet, to make a really inappropriate simile. Sometimes I glance over the edge of my book at the countdown clock and groan at how slow it seems to be going, but today seemed to fly by. I usually sustain a speed of about 3.6 on the elliptical; today I kept it up around 4.0, according to the end-of-workout summary, and I hadn't even felt like I was pushing that hard. When I moved around to the weightlifting side of the room, the weights felt lighter, and I even bumped up my settings on a couple of them, and did an extra round of sit-ups, just because the ache felt good.

...

Forget being able to see my cheekbones again. Forget a figure in the mirror that I haven't seen since college, and the matching number on the scale, likewise. Forget a whole wardrobe full of new clothes, and my doctors and family and friends raving about how great I look.

This. This is what balances the monsters lurking under my skin and waiting for me to make a mistake. This is what makes me know I've actually changed over the last eighteen months or so, because two years ago I would never have even thought about saying, "Oh, thank god I'll be able to get to the gym today," much less, "Wow, that burn feels great! I think I'll do some more sit-ups!" Even a year ago, I figured I'd always hate exercising, just like I always have, and that it was just something I would suck up and endure because it was better than the alternative.

Change happens, even when you don't see it coming.

Steady As She Goes

2010-03-31T09:00:00.000-04:00

My weigh-in this morning was the same as last week's weigh-in: 165. Given how horribly I ate this weekend and Monday night (Chik-fil-A and Mexican fajitas -- including half a basket of chips -- and like 4 "servings" of Whoppers candy), I'm actually sort of relieved that I didn't gain.

And in Signs of Progress, I bought some new pants this weekend - size S. Holy cow! To be fair, they're from Target, and I've found Target clothes to run a bit on the large side, and these may be a little loose even for Target, so I'm still in M pretty much everywhere else. Whatever the vicissitudes of my actual weight, I guess the targeted toning I've been doing at the gym is finally starting to pay off!

I won't have a weigh-in next week, because I'll be out of town. But we'll be staying with extremely health-conscious relatives and doing the tourist thing with the kids in tow, so I hope I won't be falling off the wagon too badly. Maybe if I'm lucky, it'll even burn off a little Easter candy!

Jump

2010-03-24T10:19:00.000-04:00

Weighed in this morning at 165, down 2.2 from last week, for a total of 108. After going to a fancy restaurant and eating way too much, and then going to the movies and having popcorn. With butter. I'm beginning to wonder if some of the trouble I'm having is because I need to eat more, occasionally, to keep myself from going into metabolic shutdown. I haven't been as constantly freezing cold this week, either (though that could as easily be due to the fact that it's finally starting to warm up outside).

So now I'm trying to decide if I really do need to eat a little more -- or if this is one of those statistical blips that, if I pay attention to it, will get me into trouble.

Well, if things go according to pattern, I'll be back up to 166 or so next week. I guess we'll just have to wait and see what happens. In the meantime, I'm only about 20 pounds (ish) from being done with this phase of things. And that feels pretty awesome.

Recipe For Success

2010-03-17T09:17:00.000-04:00

Back down to 167.2 this morning, which loses most of last week's gain. (It was 166 yesterday morning, and 165.6 the day before that. Stupid Wednesday gain.) I really don't have much to say about it, one way or the other.

But I'd been meaning to document a couple of recent recipe discoveries, so I might as well do that.

Cauliflower Soup
8 oz of chopped onion
1 tsp butter
1 head of cauliflower, cut into chunks
1 16-oz can of diced potatoes, drained (or 12 oz of diced fresh potato)
4 cups chicken or vegetable broth or stock2 cups of water (or more as needed)
1/2 tsp caraway seed
salt and pepper to taste

Coat the bottom of a large stock pot with cooking spray and place over medium-high heat. Add the butter and the onion, sprinkle with salt to help the onion sweat, and cook, stirring occasionally, until the onion begins to caramelize. Add the potatoes, cauliflower, spices, broth, and water, bring to a boil, and simmer until the vegetables are tender and soft, about 15 minutes. Use a stick blender to puree the vegetables to the desired consistency.

Weirdly, this tastes much more strongly of potato than it does of cauliflower. It's an extremely versatile soup, and just about any favorite spice combination would do nicely. My daughter and I both love this soup.

If you split it into 6 servings of about 2 cups each, it's about 1.5 points per serving.

Stuffed Zucchini
3 pounds fresh zucchini (6-8 small or 4 large)
8 oz lean ground beef (7% fat or less)
1/4 c. egg substitute
1/4 c. bread crumbs
1/4 c. grated parmesan cheese
1 Tbsp chopped parsley
salt and pepper to taste

Split the zucchini in half lengthwise. Trim the stem ends if necessary, leaving as much flesh as possible. Using a melon baller or grapefruit spoon, carefully scoop a trough out of the center of each half, saving the innards. Spray a baking sheet with cooking spray and arrange the hollowed zucchini halves on it. Chop the reserved zucchini innards finely and put in a mixing bowl along with the ground beef, egg substitute, 1 Tbsp. of the cheese, 1 Tbsp of the bread crumbs, and the spices. Stir until well-mixed, then divide the beef mixture into the zucchini halves. Sprinkle the remaining bread crumbs and cheese over the tops, and bake at 350 for about half an hour, until the zucchini is soft and the beef cooked through.

Divided into 4 servings, this is 3 points per serving. And they are BIG servings. If you're using smaller zucchini and a couple of filling side-dishes, this could easily split to 6-8 servings. Half a pound of hamburger doesn't seem like all that much, but once you've mixed it in with the zucchini innards, it stretches surprisingly well -- and my son, who hates zucchini, ate the filling without noticing a thing.

Elephino

2010-03-10T09:57:00.000-05:00

What do you call a cross between an elephant and a rhinoceros? Elephino!

Hell if I know. Yeah. One of those weeks. I gained back what I lost last week -- 1.6 up, back to 168.6.

I have no idea. I spent all week bouncing up and down, weight-wise. Every day, practically, I stepped on the scale to a new result.

I'd blame it on the pizza and cake Saturday, except that just yesterday I was at 167.2, and while bad eating sometimes takes a day or so to show up on the scale, I'm pretty sure it does not wait for four days.

I went a little over my minimum on Monday, but only by two points, so that shouldn't have hit me this hard. And I was a point under minimum yesterday, so you'd think they'd have averaged out.

It's been three weeks since my last gain, which means this probably isn't monthly water weight (though my cycle's so screwy, it's always an option, I suppose).

Apparently, the whole two-steps-forward-one-step-back thing is just how it's going to be for me, for now. Does that mean I'm closing in on my body's preferred "final" weight? I'd hoped to get down to about 145, but at my current rate, that'll take another whole year. But I certainly feel like I'm closing in on a point where I don't know if I'll be able to trim too many more calories, certainly not on a long-term basis.

I'm definitely noticing some results from the strength training I've been doing for the last couple of months. Even with the slowed weight loss, my clothes are getting looser. (My size M knits are actually loose enough that I'm tempted to try on a pair of Smalls, next time I'm in Target. Just for kicks.) So maybe it's partly a gaining-muscle/losing-fat thing?

On the plus side, I feel a little disappointed, but not particularly discouraged by the gain. I seem to have finally internalized the whole "but the overall trend is still in the right direction" thing. So maybe I do this down-down-up dance for a while longer, and just focus on making my body stronger. Maybe once I've built up my muscles a little more, I'll start burning calories again. Or maybe I just settle out at around 160? It could be worse. I think I look pretty good where I am now -- and the stuff I don't like is mostly saggy skin, which losing weight won't fix, anyway.

It's a weird place to be, on this journey, but I'm weirdly at peace with it.

Elephino.

I'll Take It

2010-03-03T08:43:00.000-05:00

Pretty much immediately after last week's weigh-in, my weight popped up to 170.4, and it sat there all week. It was 170.4 yesterday morning when I checked, and I sighed and tried to reconcile myself to a nearly 2-pound gain with no real reason attached.

So this morning, I stepped on the scale and saw... 167.

Which is a 1.6 pound loss (106 pounds grand total, 6 pounds away from my next -- and possibly final -- 10% goal.)

I don't understand it, but I'll take it.

Who Knows?

2010-02-24T09:26:00.000-05:00

This morning's weigh-in was 168.6. So, er, 4.2 pounds lost this week, which is last week's 3 gone plus another 1.2, so my average over the last 2 weeks is 0.6 lost per week. Which is just about normal for me lately. So maybe last week's weird gain was mostly water weight?

Biology is not chemistry. And it's definitely not math.

But I should probably stick with the whole "not eating after 7" thing for a while, just to be sure.

(Not that I entirely stuck with it this week -- I got invited to an Event on Saturday, at which I ate a ridiculous amount of gourmet chocolate. But other than that, I did pretty well.)

ACK

2010-02-17T09:14:00.000-05:00

I'm up three pounds this week. That puts me at 172.8, which is perilously close to making me lose my 100-pounds-lost cred.

It's Karen's fault. She lost like six pounds this week, so she must have greebled my loss.

I'm sure it has nothing to do with the fact that I ate like a quarter of a king cake all by myself, and had cupcakes and chocolate cookies and triscuits for Valentine's Day and went out to eat and had mashed potatoes instead of broccoli and went to Rock Band and ate more cupcakes and chips and was generally and in all other ways and complete pig all week. Nope, not at all the problem.

So it's back in the saddle and strict logging and actually measuring portions instead of eyeballing them. And just to be sure, until I've lost those three pounds, plus one more for good measure, I'm cutting out any and all food after 7pm. Doesn't matter if I have points left. Doesn't matter how hungry I am. Doesn't matter where I am or what I'm doing or who I'm with. No. Food. After. 7. Until I have an official weigh-in that's below (not at) 169.

I've come too far to let laziness and gluttony triumph over me now.

WTH

2010-02-12T09:02:00.000-05:00

The Wii Fit tells me that I've gained three pounds in the last four days, undoing two or three weeks' worth of progress.

But I bought some jeans a couple of weeks ago that I could zip up but not sit down in, and as of this morning, I can, in fact, both zip them up and sit down. They're not the comfiest pair of pants I own, but I'm wearing them and expect to make it through the day just fine.

What. The. Hell.

(Oh yeah, and this weekend? Valentine's party. For which I've already made cupcakes. I don't expect next week's weigh-in to be anything like happy.)

Ha!

2010-02-10T09:10:00.000-05:00

Well, the Wii Fit, as usual, says I gained a pound and a half between Monday and today, but the bathroom scale failed to get the memo, so I'm down 1.4 pounds this week, to 169.8. Whether my weird little down-up pattern will be back on track next week and pop me back up into the 170s, I don't know.

Everything is moving so slowly these days, I've caught myself wondering if I would be content to call it done sooner than I'd originally thought, maybe somewhere in the 160s. It's tempting. I made the really big goals -- the 100 pounds lost, the dip out of the "obese" category. Goals forward from here all seem sort of... lackluster. And I think I look pretty good, actually. I'm in Mediums and Larges, so I can shop pretty much wherever I want. I wouldn't mind a little less loose skin around my arms and legs, and a little less muffin peeking over my tighter pants, but I expect I'm stuck with the granny arms and thighs -- at my age, the skin isn't as elastic as it once was -- and what of it can be fixed is going to be the result of patience and targeted muscle building, not mere loss. Or, possibly, surgery (yes, I've seriously given consideration to surgery to fix the granny arms, but I don't think I can afford it).

On the other hand, I'm still firmly in the "overweight" category, and while I have a lot of issues with the BMI categories, I expect the 160s are still much heavier than optimal for someone my height. I certainly don't expect to get back to my high school/early college weight -- if nothing else, I've had two babies since then, and the change to my boobs is probably worth a solid 5 pounds all by itself. But it might be nice to get within 10-15 pounds of that weight.

So I'm trying to fight that temptation -- once I got back on plan after the holidays, I did start losing again. And it's not like I get to relax all that much once I graduate to maintenance. Not if I want to avoid backsliding and regaining a lot of weight. And honestly, maintenance is even harder than losing, because there isn't that sense of change to keep you motivated.

So for now, I'll keep plugging away at it.

Patterns

2010-02-03T10:39:00.000-05:00

Since I do 15 minutes of yoga with my Wii Fit every weekday morning, it tracks my weight almost every day. For the last five or six weeks, there's this interesting pattern: Monday is always the lowest weight of the week. And then I pop back up before my weigh-in on Wednesday, and sometimes Thursday and Friday go back down, and sometimes they stay where they are. But Monday always shows a significant drop, and it always goes back up before my weigh-in.

My daily weigh-in in the bathroom more or less matches this. Sometimes the bathroom scale lags behind the Wii Fit by a day or so -- but again, it always pops me up for weigh-in day.

And this seems to be entirely irrelevant to whether I eat out over the weekend, or go out and do stuff on Monday evening. Whether I'm below minimum points or have dipped into my weekly points. Always a dip over the weekend that's gone by Tuesday or Wednesday.

The good news is that since it's an obvious pattern and I haven't found anything that will affect it... I guess I can just ignore it.

So though I was significantly lower yesterday, this morning I am 171.2. Which is a drop of 0.6 from last week that puts my overall loss at 101.8.

On the plus side, I'm experimenting with some recipes from the Hungry Girl cookbook I got for Christmas. Some of them are more gimmicky than useful, but some of them have been really awesome. I'm particularly fond of the apple-pie-in-a-cup recipe that uses cinnamon imperials for flavoring (though I had to recalculate the points based on a full-sized apple, because I don't know any stores that sell what qualifies as "medium" apples). I've also made some 2-point key lime pie tartlets that are really quite tasty.

This week I'll be testing out a recipe for apple and broccoli slaw that sounded tasty. Next week's experiment is baked "fried" zucchini.

Creeping

2010-01-27T16:02:00.000-05:00

Okay, a 1-pound loss this week takes me to 171.8 (total lost of 101.2). Over the weekend, I was down to 170.4 and then popped back up, but I think that had to do with some (ahem) feminine matters. We Shall See, I suppose.

At any rate, I'm pleased not to have completely stalled out.

Brief post today, as I forgot to post this morning when I usually do my writing, and now that I've remembered, I'm in kind of a Mood. It's been one of those days. Anyway, yay progress, right?

Treading Water

2010-01-20T08:46:00.000-05:00

Today's weigh-in is... 172.8. Exactly the same as it was last week. I'm trying not to be discouraged -- there are, after all, a bunch of potential factors at work.

For starters, in the "I'm not as healthy as I think I am" category, we went out to eat Sunday at a hibachi restaurant to celebrate a family birthday. I love hibachi, and I'm sure I over-ate. Since my 2-year-old wasn't interested in his soup or salad, I ate his in addition to mine, as an aid to filling up. And I ate a big bunch of his vegetables, too. I indulged in the steak and chicken combo, and ate every last bit of my steak -- but I left about half the chicken and probably more than half my rice on my plate. I thought I'd done pretty well, all told, but of course even the vegetables had been cooked with oil and butter, so maybe it was more than I thought.

And then in the realm of "willpower? what willpower?", I played Rock Band with some friends Monday night, and even though I'd brought some low-point snacks for myself, I caved and ate some chips, too. I don't think I went too overboard, but... overboard is overboard, I guess.

In the land of "not actually my fault", I've got a mild-but-persistent cold, which is probably dragging my metabolism down.

And in the world of "short-term loss for long-term gain" (or the reverse, as it may be) my change-up at the gym means that I've replaced about 15 minutes of cardio with 15 minutes or so of weight lifting, so I'm both losing 15 minutes' worth of steady calorie-burn and gaining muscle-weight. Which makes me wish I had a more recent set of measurements, so I can do those comparisons. I should try to remember to do those monthly, or thereabouts, I guess.

On the plus side, I've been getting a lot of compliments, lately, which is nice for my ego.

Signposts and Markers

2010-01-13T08:43:00.099-05:00

Back in November, before the holidays closed in, I crossed the threshold on my fourth 10% goal, and at the time, I noted that I was awfully close to a few other major milestones, so I was going to hold off on celebrating that signpost until I'd lost another five pounds.

Then the holidays hit, and I more or less went into a holding pattern for the next six weeks. Which is okay. I'd given myself permission to do that. I'm pretty proud, in fact, that I managed to restrain myself as much as I did. But now I'm back on track and trying to get back on the wagon, and it hasn't been remotely like easy, but I'm (mostly) doing it.

And I've been rewarded for it. This morning's weigh-in put me at 172.8. That's 1.6 for the week, and more importantly, a grand total loss of 100.2 pounds. And the Wii Fit has been reporting for several weeks now that I've dropped below the line that separates "obese" from merely "overweight".

So I passed my fourth 10% goal.

And I'm not obese any more.

And I've lost. One. Hundred. Pounds.

Do you know what difference one hundred pounds makes?

Here I am, a year and a half ago (I'm the one with the baby, though it's worth mentioning that everyone else in that picture has been on Weight Watchers since then, too, and has made similarly impressive progress):

...and here I am now:

I'm not even sure someone who hadn't known me for the last two years would be able to recognize me. I still own that t-shirt I'm wearing in the top picture, because it was one of my favorites and I can't bring myself to throw it away -- but it hangs down nearly to my knees like some kind of bizarre minidress. I'm wearing about half size M clothes, and the Ls I'm wearing are almost exclusively because my boobs are DD cups and just don't squeeze into some M cuts. (Which is absurd. I've lost 100 pounds, and my boobs have only gone down one cup size? The husband isn't complaining, natch, but y'know, I'd be okay with a regular D cup, I really would.) I own a pair of size 12 jeans, and they don't even give me a muffin-top (well, not much, anyway).

Mind you, I'm not by any means done. I've got another 30 or 40 pounds to go. (If I lose another 36.4 pounds, I'll be able to say I'm less than half the woman I was -- but that would put me right at about the weight I was in high school, and after 2 babies and with these DD cups, I don't know how feasible that really is. On the other hand, my starting point for this diet is actually not the heaviest I've ever been, so I expect I'll eventually be able to say that anyway.)

But I've made it, over the last 15 months, to these three milestones, and I think it's time to celebrate, and celebrate BIG. I'm still pondering what my celebration/reward should be, but I've got a few notions. Anyone want to offer up any suggestions?

Recovery

2010-01-06T09:13:00.000-05:00

This morning's weigh-in was 174.2 -- 1.6 for the week, 98.8 total, and putting me this close to being back to my pre-Christmas low.

I decided Monday morning, when the various feasts and dinners and such were all done and it was definitely time to get seriously back on the wagon, that I needed to be especially strict for a week or two. Not just logging and meeting my points goal for each day, but also meeting all the nutrition checkoffs. No junk food at all, even counting points for it -- all snacks must be heavy in nutritional value: fruits, veggies, or yogurt. No evening snacking at all, even fruits or veggies, until I've broken the evening grazing habit. Must absolutely do my 15-minute Wii Fit routine every weekday morning, must absolutely make it to the gym at least three times a week.

So Monday and Tuesday were a bit rocky. I did a lot of pacing and I drank a shocking amount of tea. Today will be rough, too, I expect. And possibly tomorrow. But I've been sliding for the last six weeks or so -- I've been more or less maintaining my weight since Thanksgiving -- and while I'd given myself permission to do so, I need to get back into control if I want this last thirty or forty pounds gone by the end of the year.

Maybe if I'm vigilant and determined, next week's weigh-in will earn me that coveted and elusive 100-pounds-lost mark!

Take It

2009-12-30T09:35:00.000-05:00

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

2009-12-23T08:32:00.000-05:00

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

2009-12-16T09:20:00.000-05:00

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

2009-12-10T16:00:00.000-05:00

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

2009-12-09T08:53:00.000-05:00

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

2009-12-02T10:21:00.000-05:00

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

2009-11-25T10:59:00.000-05:00

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

2009-11-18T11:58:00.000-05:00

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

2009-11-11T08:16:00.000-05:00

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!

2009-11-04T09:24:00.000-05:00

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

2009-11-02T14:51:00.000-05:00

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

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.)
Combine flour, baking powder, salt , baking soda, and spices in a large bowl.
Combine applesauce, pumpkin, sugar, egg substitute and milk in a medium bowl; mix thoroughly with a wooden spoon.
Add applesauce mixture to flour mixture and mix until completely incorporated.
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)

Saute onion in butter (and some cooking spray, if needed) until it just begins to brown.
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.)
Put it back over heat, and add remaining broth, pumpkin, spices, and sugar. Bring to a boil and simmer 10 min.
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

2009-10-28T09:42:00.000-04:00

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

2009-10-22T11:41:00.000-04:00

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

2009-10-14T10:14:00.000-04:00

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

2009-10-07T09:04:00.003-04:00

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

2009-09-30T09:16:00.000-04:00

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

2009-09-23T09:21:00.000-04:00

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

2009-09-18T07:41:00.000-04:00

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

2009-09-17T08:57:00.000-04:00

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

2009-09-09T08:50:00.000-04:00

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.

2009-09-03T13:45:00.000-04:00

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

2009-08-26T08:08:00.001-04:00

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

2009-08-23T11:14:00.001-04:00

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

2009-08-20T08:17:00.000-04:00

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.

2009-08-19T08:30:00.000-04:00

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

2009-08-12T11:50:00.000-04:00

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

2009-08-05T07:54:00.000-04:00

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

2009-07-30T08:19:00.000-04:00

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

2009-07-22T08:37:00.000-04:00

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?

2009-07-15T08:23:00.000-04:00

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

2009-07-12T19:13:00.000-04:00

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...

2009-07-09T19:09:00.000-04:00

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

2009-07-08T08:16:00.000-04:00

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

2009-07-01T09:34:00.001-04:00

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

2009-06-24T08:50:00.000-04:00

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

2009-06-17T06:41:00.000-04:00

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.

2009-06-10T09:13:00.000-04:00

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.

2009-06-03T09:06:00.001-04:00

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

2009-06-02T16:13:00.000-04:00

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

2009-05-27T07:31:00.000-04:00

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

2009-05-26T11:14:00.000-04:00

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

2009-05-20T08:54:00.000-04:00

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

2009-05-13T09:00:00.000-04:00

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

2009-05-09T10:00:00.000-04:00

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

2009-05-06T08:51:00.000-04:00

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.

2009-04-29T09:23:00.001-04:00

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

2009-04-23T13:27:00.001-04:00

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?

2009-04-22T09:47:00.001-04:00

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

2009-04-15T09:07:00.000-04:00

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

2009-04-12T20:47:00.000-04:00

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!

2009-04-08T08:48:00.000-04:00

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

2009-04-06T15:46:00.000-04:00

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

2009-04-01T09:19:00.000-04:00

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

2009-03-31T17:03:00.000-04:00

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!

2009-03-27T09:28:00.000-04:00

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

2009-03-18T08:52:00.000-04:00

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.

2009-03-11T08:55:00.000-04:00

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

2009-03-09T10:52:00.000-04:00

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.

2009-03-04T08:56:00.000-05:00

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.

Halfway House

2009-02-25T08:53:00.000-05:00

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

2009-02-18T09:37:00.000-05:00

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

2009-02-11T09:21:00.000-05:00

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

2009-02-10T15:15:00.000-05:00

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.