A Good Day

The sun is shining and I feel good! 

I wrote this blog post last week but never shared it on Facebook so you all didn't see it. You can read it now to catch up, but it basically just talked about how I decided to re-join Weight Watchers YET AGAIN! 

Last week was week 1 of Weight Watchers and I also happened to start the week not feeling well. Sunday night I started to feel a little blah and had a horrible headache. By Monday I was achy and a little feverish. I had my infusion scheduled for Friday so I wanted to be sure to get rid of that sickness as quickly as possible. I spent the next few days in bed resting so that I could get healthy by Friday. It worked and by Thursday I was feeling significantly better. I did not workout at all last week though because I didn't want to push my body and find myself still sick and having to cancel my appointment on Friday. 

So every day I counted my points and even though I didn't earn any fitpoints until Saturday, I stayed within my points for the entire week. Actually, I even ended the week with some fitpoints remaining. The result was that I lost 2.6 pounds this week and saw the LOWEST number on the scale since 2012! YES! In the blog post last week I ended it saying that I was so close to getting below the lowest that I had hit in 2017. Well, I did that by more than a pound! 

The other thing I spent some time doing last week was really giving myself a heart to heart about how I approach this weight loss. I actually went back and was reading through this whole blog. I can't get over how funny it is to read my blog posts one right after the other. When I write them there is obviously time between each of them; but when reading them it goes from one thought to the opposite thought from one page to the next. What I already know and need to remember is that when I start to get crazy about how quickly I'm losing weight I inevitably fail. I get so neurotic that nothing is good enough or fast enough. I feel the need to be absolutely perfect and if I'm not I feel guilty and like I'm a failure. 

The outcome of this crazy cycle is that I lose weight, gain some (or all) back, lose it again, etc. This has been my cycle since I started this blog in 2012 and that is why I haven't been able to not only get to my goal weight, but even get back down to where I was at the start of 2012. I have spent so much time and energy losing the SAME 30-40 pounds over the last 6 years, it's amazing really. 2017 was a better year for this, but still not wonderful. From January to May I lost 20.2 pounds. I've talked about it before, but I then lost and gained the same 5-6 pounds from May until December. By January 1, 2018 I had gained back about 12 of the 20.2 I had lost. The best news ever is that it is 2/26/18 and I have officially lost those 12 pounds that I had gained back PLUS another 1.6! 

The real challenge now is to just keep this going in the right direction. I'm not saying that the goal is to never see the scale go up a couple pounds again. It will. The goal is for the overall trend to be down without gaining back a significant amount of weight at any point in the year. In order to do that I need to stop putting so much pressure on myself to reach a certain number by a certain date. I keep making that mistake. I get away from it for a while, but then for some reason I tend to go back to trying to reach some number by some date. This time around it was that I wanted to reach a certain number by the end of this contest. I let that consume me. I was so focused on that (and it really wasn't realistic, by the way), that I didn't even see the accomplishments I was (am) making. And this 8 week contest is just that - 8 weeks. There may be people participating in this challenge who could get to their "goal" by the end of 8 weeks, but I'm not one of them. This 8 weeks is just part of my journey. 

So that's it. My focus right now is to stay on track as much as I can. Track my points. Exercise. And stop beating myself up for not being perfect.