Elephino

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

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?

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

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

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!

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

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.