Whee!

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

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

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

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

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

Appreciative

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

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

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

Blah.

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

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

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

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

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

Shrinkage

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

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

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

Still, shrinkage = good.

Tick.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Halfway House

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

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.