32 Days

Day 1

I've been just a little busy.

We decided that this is going to be our summer to get lots of projects done around the house. Project #1 was actually our front steps. We did that back in May when the top step completely crumbled under my feet. We hadn't quite decided what order things would go in after those steps, but when we got on the pool deck for the first time this season we realized that had to take top priority. The old deck was just incredibly unsafe and we didn't want to have anybody over to swim with the deck in its current state.

The deck was quite the under taking, but it is now done and absolutely beautiful and incredibly safe! The deck was finished on July 4th and by July 8th we were working on doing the demo of our dining room! This dining room project is going to be even more daunting than we had anticipated (and we anticipated it to be a huge project).

The good news is doing all this demo and construction is great for working out. There were plenty of days when I skipped my run because I figured I'd burn enough calories doing the work I had to do on the house (and I did).

The not so good news is that my eating has been horrible lately. I've eaten significantly worse since being home from vacation than I did on vacation. I do this EVERY time I go on vacation. I don't know if it has to do with being on vacation or just getting out of the habits I was in. I obviously didn't track for 2 weeks on vacation. I came home and tried to immediately start tracking again and I think I only lasted 4 days. In those 4 days I was able to get back down to where I was before vacation, so that was good. I haven't tracked anything since then. And not only that, I got back into the habit of eating things "just because" or eating things because I know I'm going to restrict myself from those things later so I mind as well get my fill of them now. It's so stupid! It's back to the mindset of the food not always being there. I worked so hard to change my mind earlier this year and realize the food will always be there and I can make the choice to have it if I REALLY want it, and I can make the choice to skip it if my goals are more important than having that food.

All clean and ready to be torn apart!

I still have been getting on the scale though and I was surprised to see the scale not going up as drastically as I thought it might (or should). The bad thing about that is I also wasn't feeling any push to get myself back on track because I wasn't gaining weight rapidly. There isn't really anything wrong with that mentality. I mean, if I can take a little break and basically maintain my weight within 5 pounds of my lowest that's not such a bad thing. But, there's no reason to eat as poorly as I've been eating for as long as I've been doing it.

I kept pushing the envelope and kept eating horribly knowing that at some point the scale would reflect the damage I had to be doing. 199.9 is the number that drove me in April and continues to be the number that drives my motivation currently. Back in April it was about getting to that number for the first time; now it's about not going past that number. I do NOT want to see 200 on that scale EVER AGAIN! I am so proud of the fact that I hit 199.8 on April 18th and I have NOT seen 200 again since the day before. Even with weighing myself daily and seeing the normal fluctuations, 200 has never been a number that appeared on that scale since April 17th.

So, I need to find a new number to help drive me to get back on track. I had already decided that today was going to be my day to re-focus. The scale this morning was closer to 200 than I want to be so it definitely helped push that motivation to actually re-focus today and get back to losing weight. I have 32 days until my parent's 50th wedding anniversary party and my goal is to be as close to 185 as possible. I honestly can't remember the last time I weighed 185 pounds. I know after I got married and before I got pregnant with Mary I was hovering somewhere around 160. By the time I gave birth to her I was over 200. I was 189 when I got pregnant with Robbie; so it's probably been about 15 years since I was consistently 185 (or less).

32 days is plenty of time for me to reach that goal but I have to focus and work at it. I will have to track my food every single day for those 32 days. I will need to keep my calories/points in my allowed range every day for the 32 days. I've done it before and I can (and will) do it again. Today is day 1. I have had 2 meals so far today and have already planned and tracked my dinner. I will be tracking using WW and will try to have 5/7 blue dot days each week. My goal/plan is to only use my dailies and weeklies each week and not dip into my FitPoints. These are all the things I did back in April when I lost 14.6 pounds. During April I still had days where I ate popcorn at the movies, I had ice cream on basically a nightly basis, I had a couple days where I just lost my focus and binged (but estimated it as best as I could after the fact). I'm saying all this to remind myself that it's not that hard! It doesn't have to be as hard as I make it out to be. Track my food and move on!

So there you have it. I'm back and re-focused on continuing this weight loss journey. I've given myself a long enough break. It's time to get the scale moving back in the right direction!