Weigh-In: 8/26

 

Today was weigh-in day, and I am down 0.6.

Not as good as I would have liked (because let’s face it, I wanted a 10 pounds drop this week) 😉 but I am now starting to look at the bigger picture. All of these tiny losses add up and as long as they aren’t a gain, I’m happy.

This week I tracked and stayed on top of my water. Toward the weekend, I started to unravel a bit. I grazed, didn’t plan out my meals very well and in the end ate nothing but processed carbs. I tracked though, so even though my weeklies were in the negative, I have moved on. It’s a new week! I also changed by goal weight to 200 — want to start focusing on the smaller goals so they don’t seem so hard to obtain. I will set my goal weight at 10 pounds increments from now on.

This week, I am going to focus on continuing to track. Lots of fun things planned these next few days, so it will be a challenge to stay on top of my points.

Looking Back

I suffer from a self-diagnosed condition: weight loss delusion.

Do you know what that is? It’s when I think that what I am doing now is no worse that what I did before, but still lost weight. Why was I able to eat out at Wendy’s all the time and lose weight? How did I make non-Weight Watchers,Skinnytaste, etc… foods and still lose weight? Why am I gaining weight now if I am doing everything I was doing during my 30 pounds weight loss?

The truth is, I’m not doing it — even though I think I am. I suppose when you want to make excuses for yourself, you rationalize everything. When I was living in Colorado and going to Wendy’s, I had a garden salad with FF salad dressing and a small cup of chili. Now, it’s a spicy chicken sandwich and a medium order of fries (granted, it’s been a few weeks since I’ve had Wendy’s, but it’s a perfect example). So my previous meal was approximately 6PP+ values, in comparison with my 25 PP+ meal I’ve eaten more recently. Well, duh. No wonder why the scale has crept up and up these last few months. In my mind, I’ve been doing everything the same simply because I’ve eaten at the same stupid restaurant. Never mind that my choices are terrible!

Why do I think like this? I have no idea. Maybe it’s my way of making excuses for myself. I have to ask hubby sometimes if I am being delusional or if in fact I am doing something different. Usually he tells me how it is from his viewpoint (in a nice way!) and I’ll snap out of rationalizing of my actions pretty quickly.

There are two things detrimental to weight loss: rationalization and complacency. These two words are the reason I’ve gained back my 15 pounds since October and I know a lot of people deal with the same emotions of being bored with following any type of plan. The way I see it, a goal weight is nothing more than a number on a scale. It does not mean that all of the sudden we won’t have the temptations we had before, it does not mean that we don’t have to track just because we know what calories or point values are, it does not mean that we are all of the sudden an expert at weight loss. Sure, along the way we become educated, but I feel like I will always be learning to keep my weight down and not getting back to the habits that caused me to gain 90 pounds in the first place. When I got below 200 pounds for the first time in years, I acted like I knew exactly what I was doing and that tracking was not that important because I already knew what fit within my daily points allowance. Never mind that my habits were changing and I was not implementing my tools as they did so.

Reading my old posts — the ones where I was constantly losing weight — struck a cord with me. It was like reading someone else’s journey! I was diligent about tracking, drinking my water and exercising. I never really thought about how those factors placed a role in my recent loss, I just focused where I was going to eat. If you are a blogger, read some of your old posts — it was really eye-opening for me.

Monday Weigh-In

I weighed in at the meeting today since I still have a couple more weeks until the billing switches over to online — last week I did not go to the meeting , but input what I weighed so at least I had a record.

From last week, I am down 4.6 — though most of that gain was because I had salty food the day before and little water. It doesn’t matter what I gained or lost, I need to drop 14 pounds to get back out the 200’s.

As you can see, I’ve skipped going to meetings more in the last few months than I have on this 2+ year journey. It was a real turning point to deciding to go online. A few months ago, I asked the receptionist to start me in a new weight loss tracker, but she understood that as starting my numbers over completely — which is why my ‘starting’ weight is 205.4. I guess in a way it’s a good thing that happened, because now I feel like I am starting over in my journey.

Since Monday is a new weigh in day for me at the meetings these next couple of weeks, I met a new receptionist weighing me in today — have you ever wished some of these women would lead the meeting? There have been a couple times now where I connect with these ladies in the 5 minutes I am at the scale more than going to meetings with certain leaders for weeks.

The woman today was so refreshing. I was telling her how I lost 30 pounds last spring and then I got complacent. I acted like I became an expert at Weight Watchers and started to do things little by little that I knew I shouldn’t have — she said she knew exactly how that was and that she needed to always switch it up because we tend to get bored and then we start to slip. I guess that’s what happened to me. I got bored. One day of not tracking turned into two, then two turned into five and then I wasn’t tracking all week.

This week I have just started back on tracking daily. It’s amazing how simple it could be to “start tracking” but be so hard to actually follow through. I remind myself when I am finished eating to track it — if I get up and put my dishes away and get on with the day, I forget. I used up my weeklies on stuff that probably wasn’t the best, but oh well. I just wanted to get back into the routine of tracking.

I made an effort to start drinking water again. I started super slow — told myself I needed to get in at least 8 ounces of water each day. Since that’s only a cup of water, I felt good about meeting my goal. Then the next day I bumped it up and drank a liter of water. The next day I drank two liters. I will just focus on getting in two liters of water for now — then slowly incorporate more as I go.

I am tired of going 0 to 60 and then failing! Slow and steady is my motto from now on. I have a couple blog posts already in mind for this week, so keep an eye out for them!

New Start (again)

Since I am switching my weigh-in day to Monday and going from meeting to the online membership, I wanted to have a starting point to look back on. Here was my last weigh-in, last Tuesday. A lot of that is bloat and water weight, since I ate a super salty meal the night before I stepped on the scale. Anywho.

Yuck. I know it won’t be like that for long. I’ve been tracking this week and getting in 1-2 liters of water each day — I am slowly trying to get back on the wagon!

Accountability

The last few months have been really rough for me emotionally. Nothing “bad” has happened, I just find myself in a funk for some reason. It’s a little bit missing Colorado during the summer (I adore thunderstorms!), hubby losing an awesome job and then being hired with his old company, which is a good option compared to many jobs (thank God!), and finally, losing control of my weight loss journey.

We decided in early August that the best thing for us was to switch to Weight Watchers online. It’s a scary move for me. I’ve always been a huge advocate for meetings — I loved the support, my leader, being proud of myself for the weekly losses I had, hearing about great ideas from other members. Then I moved. I wanted to love my new location as much as the one in Colorado. We tried meetings most days of the week at a few different times and we just could not click with a leader or group. As a 30 year old, going into a weekday meeting means one of two things — it’s probably pretty sparse with attendance or there are the 60+ crowd. The leaders did not have control over the meeting and as a result, I was bored. Then I would do things I never did back in Denver. I skipped two weeks at a time, went to weigh in and leave, then skip the next week’s meeting.

Since I no longer cared about stepping on the scale at the meeting, I stopped caring what I ate. I stopped tracking. Who would see the bad choices I made? No one would “see” the damage from the double-double I ate the night before weigh-in. Except someone did — me. I would step on the scale the next morning in my bathroom and be mad at myself for getting further and further away from 200 though I swore I would never be that way again.

So, moving to online is a scary step because I am accountable only to myself. Since I am a pay-monthly member, I need to wait until September 3rd to officially switch to online. I need to re-pay the registration fee (grr!) and start from scratch — but I think it will be a good thing. I know I have the support around me and in an effort to keep up with my progress I have decided to make my new weigh-in days on Monday morning at 9:30 here at home. I will weigh in, blog about my week and share a picture of my scale with all of you. I will read my online weekly and success stories from the Weight Watchers website and make my own “meeting”.  Also, reading my past blogs will give me a lot of insight to what I was doing and thinking when I had weekly losses. Yet again, I need to lose the same 15 pounds I’ve lost many times before — but it is what it is, time to do something about it.

Have any of you switched from meeting to online? How did it go? 

Perspective

I follow a lot of health-related people on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter so this topic is something that I have come into contact with a few times and it leaves me a little perplexed. It’s the topic of eating clean. Let me preface this by saying I know that there are a lot of foods out there we shouldn’t eat. In fact, there are numerous times I see new products and just shake my head — nothing but crap that is marketed to us and as a nation, we continue to get fatter and fatter.

Have you seen food commercials lately? It’s like there’s this race to see who could come up with the most fattening, artery clogging foods. Two that come to mind are straight from Jack in the Box — the Big Waffle Stack and the Really Big Chicken Combos. When did a simple breakfast sandwich not become enough, where we then need to two eggs, sausage, bacon, ham and cheese stacked between two waffles? Seriously. Or how about the chicken sandwich that now comes with two patties? It’s like the more information that comes out about the obesity epidemic in America, the more ridiculous food is getting.

So I really get the idea of ‘eating clean,’ but more and more I am seeing it consume people to the point where they feel like failures the minute they eat a piece of cheese. One lovely person I have found along the way in my Weight Watchers journey is Brianna from Shine or Set. Just recently, she wrote a very powerful post called Free to Eat — and while I don’t struggle with food to this extent, I think anyone on a weight loss journey understands where she is coming from, whether it’s to that extreme or not. Reading comments left behind on the post further illustrate this issue — that in order to get healthy, one must cut out every.single. thing. in their diet. I’ve seen it by reading numerous weight loss blogs — people cutting out every last thing in their diet just to reach a number on a scale.

People, that number on a scale means NOTHING to your overall health or well-being. Yes, it’s something I struggle with frequently and it’s very confusing to rely on a number to illustrate how you should feel with yourself. Just recently, I had someone tell me I look much thinner than I did a few months ago. It’s hilarious actually, because I am almost 15 pounds heavier now then the last time they saw me. Each time I step on the scale, I go through a range of emotions. If it’s higher than the last time I stepped on it, I get pissed off. If it’s lower than the last time, I’m happy, only to be disappointed the next time I step on the scale to see it’s budged .01 of a pound in the wrong direction.

While Weight Watchers isn’t perfect when it comes to tabulating points for wholesome foods, I love that I don’t need to cut out every food group aside from vegetables and meat in order to lose weight. I’ve lost 30 pounds by eating the foods I like, modifying how much of it I eat. I don’t want to become obsessed with whether or not I can eat a Dodger Dog next time I go to a ballgame. I want to clean up my diet because I want to get more wholesome foods for nutrients and cost savings, not because the eating clean craze tells me I should.

In her post, Brianna talks about stopping her rigorous guidelines to follow IIFYM, which is short for If It Fits Your Macros. This way of eating tracks your protein, carbohydrates, fat, fiber and alcohol intake. Think you’ve heard that before? Yes, it’s a similar method of tracking your food with a little program I love, Weight Watchers.

I am all for the occasional clean up — a weekend juice fast, Whole30 (find out great information from Reduced Fat Girl on this), but I’m looking to lose weight and get healthy because I watch my portions and spend time at the gym — two things that are manageable for me in the long term.