Happy 4th of July!!

Hope everyone is having a wonderful 4th of July and summer.

I have spent some time recently going through old blog posts and it has been quite interesting. I honestly LOVE having this blog for that reason. When I am struggling like I have been it is so helpful to re-read through all my positive and negative posts. These struggles are nothing new and at some point it might just get through my head that it's easier to stay on program than it is to keep falling off and getting back on.

I find it interesting that back in April I was talking about how counting calories was getting annoying and I was thinking of joining WW again since fruits and veggies are "free". I thought perhaps this would motivate me to make healthier choices. I never did join WW because, like I said in that post, I don't really understand why I can't just make better choices without having to pay for a different way to track my food.

One thing I was reminded of was that in April when I tracked my food every day I lost 6lbs even though my calories average over 2100/day. Even with that happening I continued to get hung up on how many calories I was eating in May. I continue to be so hard on myself and when I struggle to eat less calories (like try to average 1500 or 1800), I feel like a failure and then EAT. None of this makes sense.

This post from May 1st talked all about how I should start getting better at trusting the process because of the outcome of my efforts between April and May. I don't necessarily think it's about trusting the process right now though. It's just about continuing to do it when I don't want to. It is truly not that hard; yet if it were that easy everyone would be at a healthy weight, right??

I weighed myself Monday and the total damage has been 5.2 pounds gained back. It was June 15th when I posted about having gained back 2 pounds and how that could easily turn into 5, 10, etc. Well, there you go. It turned into 5+ pounds and it's time to stop the scale from going any more in that direction. I was trying, once again, to decide what "program" to follow in order to get me back on track. I realized, with the help of my own blog, that I KNOW what is healthy and what is not. I also know what it takes to lose weight and know why I stop losing. I don't need any special "program", I just need to eat less than I burn and in order to know if I'm doing that I need to track my food and exercise. I tracked all my food yesterday and kept my calories in the green. One day/one step back in the right direction. I have tracked all my food so far today and even tracked what I'm planning to eat for dinner. I have plenty of calories left to eat something after dinner if I want since I ran 5 miles today and burned lots of calories.

That's it. I need to KEEP IT SIMPLE. Track my food. Exercise. Try my best to stay in the green on MyFitnessPal, but don't beat myself up when I slip into the red. Make the next day a fresh day and try again. My next infusion is July 14th and we'll see what that scale says in comparison to my last infusion 8 weeks ago. Every time I have stepped on a doctor's scale since January I have lost weight. If I can keep this trend going (even by 1lb) I will consider that a huge success! If I'm up from my last appointment that will stink, but it'll be what it is and I'll make sure it's down the next time (which will be in August for my annual physical).

Until next time.....