Darn You Freewebs!

Webs.com won't let me update anything on my website, including my weigh-ins and my pictures. I'm beginning to reeeeally hate that site! So, I decided to turn to good 'ol Blogger, which hosts my blog. I knew you wouldn't let me down, Blogger!

Here's the picture I've been trying to load to my site for the past few hours:

I got my braces off last Thursday and am super excited that that particular chapter in my life is finally over. I actually decided to get braces a few months after joining Weight Watchers, figuring that I could improve my smile as I work on my weight loss, and it truly was the second best decision I made in 2009. (The first being joining WW, of course.) Sure it was a bit embarrassing running around with braces in my mid-30s, but in the end the embarrassment, and not to mention the pain, was totally worth it. Especially considering I have a lot to smile about nowadays.

Now off to go find a better free website builder better than Webs.com. Wish me luck!

So True

From an article I just read: "When minor rationalizations become habits, they can sabotage your efforts." Exactly.

Gotta Love Those Non-Scale Victories!

My, oh my, how I feared armed chairs. No, not chairs with guns but rather chairs that have arms. As a morbidly obese woman who carried a great deal of weight in the hips, thighs and bum, every time I encountered a situation that involved sitting down, I immediately and with a great deal of trepidation checked out the actual seats. If they had arms, if they were situated close together, if they were plastic or if they were old, I panicked. At my absolute heaviest, booths become a problem as well.

In my larger days, I had a few embarrassing situations that involved seating. I once broke the leg of my parent's plastic lawn chair. Luckily no one was home and I slunk away with nary a word to them and I've often wonder if someone later tried sitting in it and found themselves rolling in the grass after the leg gave out, embarrassed with the belief they were the one who broke it. I've murdered two toilet seats, both in our brand new house. No one other than my husband knew about it, but just him knowing was bad enough. Both my brother and my in-laws have arms on their kitchen chairs and during family meals, I had to sit on the very edge of the chair because I was physically unable to squish my rump between the arms. At my former hair salon, the shampoo chairs had arms and while I was able to squeeze into them, I had to fight to stand back up. My hair dresser once laughed at my struggles, hence the "former" status. Plane trips were always "fun," but one was particularly horrendous. I spent the entire two hour fight in tears as the corner of the metal arm bit into my leg, leaving huge bruises that lasted for weeks. I was too embarrassed to ask the cute young man next to me if I could lift the armrest so that my fat thighs could expand into his space.

There are other examples, but those are the ones that really stick out in my mind. Every time I experienced an embarrassing situation, I vowed to change my ways, to lose weight so that I would never feel that way again. Of course, each time I failed to keep that promise and my fear of normally innocuous chairs continued to grow.

To this very day, I still get that fluttery panicked feeling when I walk into a room and see seating that wouldn't have accommodated my 320 pound body. It's so ingrained in me that I don't know if I'll ever have a normal reaction when presented with seating that belonged to my "to be avoided" category. However, there is hope. After the initial feeling passes, I now find myself plopping down in said chairs with nary a care in the world. While that flash of fear is still disturbing, the relief of realizing it's no longer a concern is...wonderful...and liberating. Quite honestly, it's one of my favorite non-scale victories to date.

I'm Tellin' Y'all It's Sabotage

Despite my grand declaration of "having a plan" in my April 5th blog, within less than 24 hours of posting that, the plan was but a mere memory as I let my frustrations completely overwhelm me and foolishly decided not to give a crap for the entire week. While merely out of habit I still hit the gym, I didn't track a single day's food and didn't deny myself anything I felt I deserved, including my old nemesis Hot & Spicy Cheez-Its. Honestly, it's the closest I've ever come to going off the deep end and there's no doubt about it, a shadow of my former self was present the entire week. Kind-of scary to think about how easily it can all be reversed despite almost two years of practice.


At yesterday's weigh-in, I decided since I was going to gain anyway, I might as well take the opportunity to switch to a new weigh-in outfit. Like most loyal Weight Watchers, I have an outfit (i.e. The lightest combination of clothes I could find in my closet) that I wear to my meeting each week. For me, that amounts to a t-shirt and pajama bottoms that hopefully passed for real pants, but in all likelihood didn't. Lots of members wear strange outfits to WW meetings so I never felt conspicuous there, but I usually go grocery shopping afterwards so I'd often bring a pair of jeans to change into. Lately, however, I've been forgoing the tedious task of schlepping extra clothes to my meeting and started shopping in my weigh-in outfit instead. I never saw any curious looks cast my way while cruising down the aisles, but I shop at Walmart, a place that has an entire website devoted to the oddball fashions of their patrons, so I guess my PJ bottoms were pretty tame in comparison. Despite this fact, I was never comfortable being out in public in this outfit and didn't want to return to bringing extra clothes to my meeting, so yesterday I ditched my super light pants and donned a pair of jeans instead. Of course like any good Weight Watcher, I weighed the two pants on the food scale to compare the difference in order to see what kind of damage the jeans would inflict on the real scale. I'm nothing if not neurotic. Anyway, I gained 2.4 pounds with about 1.2 pounds attributed to the extra weight of the jeans.

I've had three gains in a row now, which in my almost 23 months on Weight Watchers has never happened, but here's the cool thing.... Despite knowing I was going to gain and regardless of my disappointment and shame, I still went to my meetings and faced the scale. Believe me, I didn't want too. In fact, the second week I had decided to skip but changed my mind at the last second, showing up to the meeting 15 minutes late and insanely proud of myself. What would be the point of skipping anyway? Because of my home scale, I already knew I had gained so the only purpose skipping my official weigh-in would serve is to make me feel absolutely rotten about breaking a promise to myself. I started this journey with the vow that I would never purposefully miss a weigh-in and to this very day, I have stayed true to that promise. I continue to be very proud of that fact.

So far today I'm doing well, staying on program and making healthy choices. At this very minute, I feel totally in control but I am well aware that this can change on a dime. I remind myself daily to be extraordinarily grateful for every single wise decision I make because I know that as long as my good choices outnumber my bad, I will continue to progress. I may stumble from time to time, but I will never, ever allow myself to fall. Yet another important promise to myself that I plan on never reneging.

Hippity, Hoppity Easter's on Its Way

If I make it to -150 pounds by the Tuesday after Easter, I've decided to reward myself with the cute little charm to the left. That gives me exactly three weigh-ins in order to lose 5.6 pounds. Back in the day, that would have been a snap but nowadays, it takes extreme dedication and very, very few slip-ups to achieve such a lofty goal. Can I do it? Yep. Will I do it? I'm not as confident as I once was, but I sure as heck will give it my all.

My other reward for reaching -150 pounds is that I get to take the next set of front/side/back pictures. I've been taking these pics every 25 pounds down since I lost my first 25 and let me tell you, it's great incentive! I often regret the fact that I didn't take a picture of myself at my heaviest, but to be perfectly honest, in the beginning I had zero hope that I'd stick with it long enough to warrant a before photo. I'm so glad I was wrong.

You Take the Good, You Take the Bad

In my past nine weigh-ins, I've had six gains. Luckily the gains were relatively small, so with my three losses the total loss for the nine weeks is still -3.8, but this in no way is cause for celebration because I know I could have done much, much better. Heck, that’s less than ½ a pound a week. Truly pathetic, but only because I know it's due to lack of commitment.

Even though I still maintain that the last two gains were undeserved, in my heart of hearts I know I'm no longer giving my weight loss journey the effort it requires. I'll have a good week and then relax my standards the following week and at this point in my journey, that's just not something I can afford to do. When I began this journey, one or two bad days didn't seem to adversely affect the scale, but nowadays just one off-program day can spell disaster come weigh-in. The sad thing is that I’m well aware of this fact and yet I still choose to make poor decisions.

“I don't feel like going to the gym and you can’t make me!”

“Eating half a pizza really won’t make a difference so dig in and enjoy life!”

“Forget having a nice balanced dinner, let's have ice cream instead!”

Of course, I don't do this all the time, but on the occasions when I do give into these urges I'm not only messing with my weigh-in results, I'm wreaking havoc on my confidence as well.

I'm still losing and am very happy about that and I do realize that this isn't a race, but I’m haunted by the fact that I’m dealing with one major time constraint, which is that I’m getting older by the day and my husband and I would like to start a family before my eggs shrivel up and die. I’ve always had it in my head that we’ll start trying to conceive once I achieve lifetime status with Weight Watchers, but at the rate I’m going right now I won’t reach my goal weight of 140 pounds for another 18 months. Eighteen months…whaaaaaaaaa!!! That means I won't be a mommy for another 2+ years, barring any complications of course. That quite simply is not an option.

At this point I realize it’s probably too late for me to reach goal by my 2^nd year Weight Watchers anniversary on June 1st, but another year and a half of struggling to get to goal? Forget it! It’s time for me to wake up and face the facts. I’ve been lax in my efforts for a while now and it’s showing. Losing weight and getting healthy is essentially my fulltime job, a job that my future family depends on, and it needs to be treated with utmost importance.

Right before I started writing this blog entry, I sat down and preplanned my day for tomorrow. Not only did I make sure I stayed within my allotted WW daily points, but I also ensured that my meal and snack choices were nutritionally sound. I plan on hitting the gym for my aerobic exercise right after breakfast and will focus on toning after dinner. A plan is in place and now I just have to execute it then lather, rinse and repeat all the way to goal...and motherhood.

Hitting the Wall

Last week I had a very unexpected gain of 1.4 pounds and this week the scale has not budged even a single ounce except for when it temporarily went up two pounds the day after weigh-in. Needless to say, I am getting very frustrated.

Normally something like this wouldn't bother me, but I had a horrific November and I really wanted to rock December, which technically I'm doing even though the scale isn't showing it. According to my GoWearFit, both last week and this week I have been burning 1000+ calories over what I consume more days than not. If it truly is calories in versus calories out, then I should be seeing good results, right?

I realize it's only been two weeks of not seeing the losses I deserve, but it feels so much longer than that because of the struggles I experienced in November, even though I earned the pitiful weigh-ins I received that particular month. Plus the next two weeks are going to be difficult for me what with celebrating Christmas with my family this coming week and then again with my in-laws the following one and I wanted to get some fantastic weigh-ins under my belt for December before heading into the lion's den of baked goods and well-meaning food pushers.

I eat very clean and exercise regularly, so I'm at a loss as to why the scale is being so fickle right now. Is my body taking a break after 1 1/2 years of steady weight loss? Maybe. And if that's the case then I'll just have to accept it. Other than tweaking my exercise routine and experimenting with new foods, I'll keep doing what I'm doing and just hope that I haven't hit some sort of wall that will take weeks or even months to break through.

But I have to tell you, stalling out when I'm so close to the finish line really (and I mean REALLY) sucks.