Weigh in day 6/25/09 - Small gain :(

I guess I should have expected a gain - this past weekend I went home for father's day. For starters, I didn't exercise at all. Then my whole extended family came together to throw a surprise birthday party for my grandmother's 80th birthday. It was catered, complete with 7 layer chocolate cake for dessert. Then on father's day we had lunch with our extended family. It was a cookout with leftover cake for dessert. And then on father's day night my immediate family had dinner together - another cookout with leftover cake! Not to mention all the s'mores I made this weekend, using the many grills at all the cookouts. But I was feeling optimistic... why is it that whenever I'm certain I'll gain I always lose, and when I'm feeling optimistic I gain or have a small loss? Strange. Anyway, I'm still in the 180's - barely. To make matters worse, this week I'm going on a cruise from Monday - Friday. To make matters even worse, I'm going with my friend who has been my "pig-out" friend in the past... you know, the one friend that you can hang out with and eat as much as you want without being judged. The friend with whom you can go to a restaurant and pig out, then out for a large ice cream, then out to a movie where you pig out on popcorn. Sometimes she is dieting too, but right now she's kind of in an eating free-for-all and has already expressed her intentions to eat whatever she wants while on the cruise. I'm worried there will be peer pressure to eat and to avoid working out. On the phone the other day I talked to her about how I didn't want to gain weight on the cruise and how I wanted to work out, and she was like "Um, you only go on a cruise once in your life," suggesting I should really just forget the diet and pig out. I'm already fighting my own inner demons that tell me to eat eat eat, so if she adds her voice to theirs I'm afraid I won't be able to resist! And if I go back into the 190's I'll be upset :( It takes me a month to lose 5 pounds, and I could easily gain 5 pounds in a week of eating cruise food. I don't want to undo a month or more of hard work!

Weigh in day 6/18/09 - I broke into the 180's!!!

Wow! 2.6 lbs lost this past week! Remember, I was convinced that I would have either a very small weight loss or a gain. I guess bike riding every day has really made a difference! I have gone riding every day but 1 out of the last 12 days! I didn't go last Saturday because I had to be my cousin's wedding buddy in an out of town wedding she got invited to. Every ride is at least 45 minutes, and on the trail I ride there plenty of hills - long, slight hills and steep, challenging hills. I think it's really paying off! I'm so happy to be in the 180's - I thought I'd never get here! To be honest, I'm proud of myself for once :)

Off track already?

So on Friday, my bf and I went to a Mexican restaurant. I started the day off determined to do well: I used only 8 of my 26 points the whole day leading up to the restaurant, and I hadn't used any of my weekly points left. I also made sure to get in a bike ride, despite the 93 degree heat of that day. I thought that with 18 daily points and 35 weekly points, I had 53 free points and that that was a nicely sized buffer so I didn't have to worry about what I ate at the restaurant. Well, I was wrong... perhaps ordering their legendary nachos as an appetizer was a mistake. Perhaps ordering a chicken dish with a creamy sauce was also a mistake. Or perhaps ordering fried ice cream for dessert was a mistake. Really, the mistake was doing all three together. any 1 or even 2 of those things by itself would have been fine. But when I got home I tallied up the points as best I could without nutritional information from that specific restaurant, and I had gone slightly over 53 points - I think it was 56. Yikes! That wouldn't have been so bad, but the next day I had to go to a wedding with my cousin. At the reception there were hors devours (sp?) and cake. I had a reasonable plate of hor devours and a small piece of cake, for an estimated total (as I calculated later) of about 18 points! Ahhh! So I ended up going over my points that day too. So Friday and Saturday were just BAD. I failed at my goal of staying within my weeklies, only a day after making it! I am hoping that I can cycle 45 - 60 mins every day and somehow make up for this. It'll probably be either another week of slow weight loss or a gain, but I hope not! Please please please be kind to me, O weight loss gods, for I am but a lowly mortal!

As a side note, I decided to change my goal weight from 150 to 145. 150 is just still too close to overweight for my height. I feel like 145 puts me in a safer area.

Weigh in day 6/11/09

Another kinda slow week, weight loss wise - I lost 0.8 lbs. My mom said she thinks there are certain weights that your body gets stuck at, whether you're going up or going down. If that's true, I think my body likes to get stuck in the neighborhood of 192 - I remember being at that weight for a long time, and being stuck there when I tried to lose weight a couple of years ago. But, at least I'm going down. Also, I recently started working out every day. I told myself that since I'm unemployed and sitting around the house I have no excuse not to get a workout in every day. I have exercised for the last 5 days in a row. I set an initial goal of exercising every day for a week, and so far it's going pretty well. Mainly I have been cycling. There's a cycling/walking trail just outside my neighborhood. If I ride the whole thing and do this one part of it twice, I get a 50 minute ride by the time I get back home. And the trail has many challenging parts - lots of hills to struggle up, where I can feel my heart pounding. Since weight loss always seems to be delayed I hope that at next week's weigh in I'll see some results from all this working out. As for staying on points, on Friday I pigged out and ate slightly over my weekly points, but I stayed within my points all the rest of the days and by the end of the week I had extra activity points. But it would probably help not to go over my weeklies. Also, I've begun incorporating more veggies into my diet, and drinking more water. So this week I'm going to try not to go over my weeklies, to exercise every day, and to continue eating more veggies and drinking more water. Hopefully I'll get into the 180's sometime soon!

Weigh in day 6/4/09, plus some notes on my low self esteem

I lost 0.6 lbs this week, despite being on steroids for my sinus infection and not exercising much. When I first weighed in I was upset. "Only .6 lbs?!" I thought, "That's nothing!" For a little while it felt like a personal failure. I felt like I might as well have gained. But eventually I realized that progress is progress, no matter how small. Losing .6 lbs is better than losing nothing, and much better than gaining! Now I've lost 24.6 lbs, which I feel I can round up and call 25 when I tell people how much I've lost so far. And you know what I'm going to tell myself starting now? 25 lbs is a lot of weight!

I have low self esteem, so I tend to minimize my accomplishments. When I lost 10 lbs I thought "That's nothing, it won't really count for much until I've lost 20," and when I hit 20 lbs I still felt like I hadn't really lost that much, and that it hasn't made that much of a difference. I've been feeling like I haven't lost enough and I must not be trying hard enough. I tell myself that I must be barely scraping by, and that all the weight I've lost so far has been due to luck. This is what I do when I accomplish something: I explain it away by saying I got lucky or I didn't really try that hard so it doesn't really count for much. I have been telling myself that I'm still quite fat and I can't consider myself on the road to success until I've lost 30 lbs, but I know when I hit that I'll tell myself that I need to be at 185 to have accomplished anything (that's when I'll no longer be obese.) When I hit 185 I'll tell myself "Well, it took you long enough! If you hadn't screwed up so much you could have gotten here faster. Anyway you still look terrible, so don't pat yourself on the back just yet."

But today I checked out "Start Living, Start Losing" from the library. It's a Weight Watchers book of success stories. In each 2-3 page story, someone tells the history of their battle with weight, the turning point, their time in weight watchers, and what their life is like now. At the end of their story they give a little piece of advice. A lot of people used that section to talk about the importance of positive self talk. I recognized myself in their stories - they talked about their inner naysayer and their lack of confidence in their ability to lose the weight. I've been realizing lately how much I trash talk myself in my head. It's even there at the subconscious level - I assume, without even thinking about it, that people that I meet automatically don't like me or automatically think very low of me and that I have to prove that I'm likable to them. If they compliment me or say they want to hang out with me I just assume that they're just being nice and they really don't mean it. It's really a very big problem!

I've decided I'm going to work on it. I'm going to tell myself how well I'm doing, and that 25 lbs is a huge and impressive amount of weight to have lost in 5 months. Because it is. AND I'm going to try to tell myself that I'm beautiful, just the way I am, until I believe it. Somehow I've gotten it in my head that it is physically impossible for me to be pretty until I hit a certain weight. I actually have certain weights in my head at which it will magically be ok for me to wear sleeveless shirts, wear little dresses, go running in shorts, etc. So I feel like I'm working towards beauty, and when I get there I'll like myself and other people will like me too. But I need to like myself right now, no matter what I look like, because as far as human beings go, I'm pretty great, damn it!

Here goes everything...