Another Monday

Here we are at another Monday and another baby step closer to getting myself back on track.

You know what? Scratch that. I need to stop saying I'm off track or on track. Perhaps this is just what my track looks like. Let's face it; this is the way I lose weight. I have a few months where I am very actively losing weight and then a few months where I am mostly maintaining (sometimes gaining). This cycle has been repeating since I really got re-focused on losing weight in April 2014.

Rather than thinking of it as my normal weight loss cycle, I tend to put a negative spin on it and think that I always "fall off the wagon" for several months out of the year. Why do we have to be so negative? The reality is that I have been consistently losing weight since April 2014. It hasn't been fast. It certainly hasn't be linear; but my weight has gone down every year.

Here's the kicker; I have made some  huge strides this year to improve this journey. I am figuring out how to stay more consistent so that the weight comes off a little faster. In 2016 I was so off and on that in the end I was only 2.4 pounds lighter on January 1, 2017 than I was on 1/1/16. Throughout 2016 I had lost 29 pounds, but ultimately ended up gaining back 26.6 of those 29 pounds. But, the important thing to note here is that I did not gain all the weight back.

I may have gained back most of what I lost in 2016, but I didn't quit. 2017 came and I tried to get back down to business. I had a rough start and gained another 1.6 pounds from Jan-Feb 2017. But I kept going. In 2017 I lost 28.2 pounds. I gained back 21.3 of those 28.2 pounds and on January 1, 2018 I weighed "only" 6.9 pounds less than I did on Jan 2017. I could look at these stats and be discouraged; but I'm not. What I see is that between 2016 and 2017 I decreased the amount of weight I gained back throughout the year and lost more as a result.

And again, I did not quit. As of today I have lost 30.5 pounds in 2018 and have only gained back 5.6 pounds. That means that as of the beginning of this month (October 8th technically because that was the first day I weighed myself in October); I have lost 24.9 pounds this year. That is quite a jump from 2.4 or 6.9! Now, in 2016 I gained 2 pounds between October and Jan 1st; and in 2017 I gained 9.6 pounds between October and Jan 1st; so I still have work to do to keep on this path of improvement.

I will continue to fight at least enough of the fight to not gain any more weight back. I am doing just barely enough to make that happen; but I'm making a step every week towards doing more to ensure that gaining back more weight doesn't happen. This week I did not meet my goal of tracking every day and staying within my points. But, I made it farther than the week before. I tracked and stayed within my points until Sunday this week! I was so proud of myself on Friday. I woke up wanting to eat everything in site for no reason. I did eat a lot that day but I tracked everything and by the time I ate dinner (before the football game), I decided that my goal was to get through the rest of the night with no more food. I really didn't think I'd meet that goal but I did!

Saturday was great and I ate less throughout the day because I knew I was going to eat more at dinner with friends. I ate way too much Saturday night and was feeling it; but I still estimated my points for everything. By the end of Saturday I had burned through most of my points. I had about 20 of my FitPoints left so really plenty for Sunday to be an easy day. I have no excuses, I just wasn't feeling it on Sunday so I ate a bunch and didn't track it.

Am I mad today? Nope. Sure, I could have seen a lower number on the scale if I would have stayed more on track this week, but I'm choosing to look at the positive. I stayed on track for more days last week than I have in a long time. In case you're wondering I also had a slight loss on the scale today.

Thinking through this blog post today I realized that part of my cycle includes getting to a point where I want the weight loss to happen faster. I think this coincides with the weight loss/gain/maintain cycle because when I'm feeling like I want the weight gone yesterday I inevitably gain or maintain. When I start to take the pressure off of myself and realize that it really doesn't matter how slowly I lose weight as long as I lose it, I resume losing weight.

I have been trying since at least September to "really get back on track" and I've been thinking/feeling really negatively. I look at pictures and see not good enough again. I beat myself up because I should be losing more weight, etc. Well, it's time to get my brain back to realizing that I am doing OK. I am doing even better than I was last year and I will continue to work at this weight loss regardless of how long it takes.

Part of what happened this week is that I dipped into a lot of my weeklies on Wednesday. I used more of them on Thursday and Friday so by Saturday I was already using my FitPoints, which just means that I was already eating at the high end last week so that didn't give much room for a slip up. My goal this week is to try to stay away from my weeklies Mon-Thurs so that basically I'm eating lighter during the week so that I can eat a little more on the weekends. It is always my goal to track, but I'm also not going to beat myself up for not tracking on the weekends. The thing is, if I save basically all my weeklies and FitPoints until the weekend I can pretty easily eat without tracking and still see a loss on the scale on Monday. This method has worked for me in the past and I am sure it can again. It doesn't result in the fastest of weight loss, but if I can lose another 8-12 pounds between now and January 1, 2019 I will be beyond happy. And honestly, if I don't lose another pound but don't gain any more either, I'll be pretty content with that as well.

This was a long one today. If you're still reading thanks for listening to my ramblings. Here's to a great week ahead!

Day 4

For some reason day 4 has always been the most difficult day for me. Since most of the time I will be "starting" on a Monday, day 4 falls on a Thursday and perhaps I tend to fall off because I'm anticipating it being too hard on the weekend or something.

Day 1 (2, 3 and 4) breakfast

So here we are at another day 4. The good news is I've made it to day 4! If you've been reading my boring posts lately, you know that day 4 hasn't been a given these last few months. Last week I got through day 4, but fell apart for days 5-7. I am trying a lot of self-talk today to prevent that from happening again this week.

Day 1 (2 and 3 - haven't decided on day 4 yet) lunch

A couple of weeks ago I only lasted through day 2. On day 3 I overate and then just couldn't get myself back on track for days 4-7. I do think re-joining WW will be what helps me finally jump back on that wagon for more than just a handful of days in a row. Reason being is WW gives me the freedom to have a day (or even 2) where I overeat, but if I track what I'm eating I can see that I'm not actually "off program". There are plenty of times when I'm following WW and I have a day where I end up not tracking because I don't want to see the "damage" I'm doing. When the next day comes and I have a clear head I almost always go back and track everything I ate the day before. The majority of the time when I do that I see that I haven't actually used all my points so really I'm still fine as long as I get right back on track. It helps me to see what "getting back on track" has to mean.

So last night when I indulged while watching my baby girl perform during pre-game at the Cavs game; I didn't even think about it because I still have 26 of my weekly points as well as all the FitPoints that I'm earning this week. My only goal this week is to track and stay within my points - even if I use every last one of those weeklies and FitPoints.

Mary is 4th from the left

But then we're on to today. Day 4 and a day after using 40 points yesterday. The self-talk comes in to play because I start to second guess if I will have enough extra points to get through the weekend staying on plan. Basically do I have enough points to indulge as much as I want on the weekend?? The answer is NO and I never will. Even if I had all 42 weekly points and all my FitPoints coming into Friday, they still wouldn't cover the amount that I've been eating on the weekends. That's why I'm not actively losing.....DUH! 

On the JumboTron

It's getting back into the right mindset. It's not trying to figure out how I can play the system to eat everything I want, but getting back to thinking about what is really worth the indulgence and what I can wait to have until a little later when I've made a little more progress. I will never give up eating certain things, but I need to remember that I am perfectly able to avoid things for a finite period of time while I work on my goals. I can also remind myself that I can make room for those things here and there even when working on my goals - I just can't have it all. 

I chose to eat chicken fingers and fries at the game last night. That will more than likely mean that I will have to choose to skip something over the weekend (wine, an extra snack at the football game Friday night, another heavily fried meal, etc). Does it mean that I won't be able to indulge at all this weekend? No. I need to constantly remind myself that when I get into the groove, it is not that hard! It's not. But, man, why is it so hard so often then??? Because our minds lead us to believe that it is hard. It would be hard to say I am never going to have chicken fingers and fries ever again for as long as I live. But that's not what I'm saying and that's not what I have to do. I simply need to make the choice, count it, shift the rest of my week, and move on. And that is not that hard. So I will prove to myself once again that it's not that hard and that I can and will do it! 

What an awesome experience for these high school kids!

Back to Basics

I've noticed a theme over my last several blog posts. They usually happen at the beginning of the week and they talk about what my plan is to get myself back on track that week.

I could be embarrassed by the fact that I keep having to talk about how I really haven't gotten back on track yet. But, rather than be embarrassed I am choosing to look at it from a different angle. What I see is that even after 5 months of not getting myself back on track I continue to try each and every week. Some weeks I may last 1 day, some weeks (like last week) I last 4 days; but I always try to get myself back on track each and every Monday.

This weekend I realized that counting calories right now isn't giving me enough structure to kick my butt back in gear. I once again went back and read through some blog posts to give me some much needed motivation. I read through all of April since that was such a great month for me. In reading my posts I was reminded about when I was doing WW and tracked a "bad day" to find that I had still actually only eaten about 1800 calories. In the past few weeks when trying to get back on track counting calories I would say 1800 calories was a pretty good day.

What it comes down to is that WW seems to help me focus on better quality food. The point system helps me to determine if a food is "worth it" or not for me in that moment. When counting calories it might be easy to say that something that's 100 calories is just as "worth it" as something else that is 100 calories because the calories are the same. With WW those 100 calories may be 0 points (if it's a banana or hard boiled egg) or 3 points (if it's a 100 calorie bag of pretzels). The hard boiled egg will likely hold me over better than a small bag of pretzels. My body will also process that egg differently than the pretzels. And as much as I logically know this, I seem to make the "better" choices when I'm following the WW program and not just counting calories.

Anyway, I'm saying all this to say that I decided to renew my WW membership again. I signed up for the 3 month contract so I will be doing it for at least the next 3 months. Between February and May when I was following WW I lost about 19 pounds. Let's see what I can accomplish over these next 3 months. I don't expect it to be quite that much for several reasons, but I will be happy with the scale moving back in the right direction again. I need to lose 6.6 pounds to get back to where I was on June 15th when I hit my lowest weight this year. I have 31 days between today and Thanksgiving and my goal is to be back down to my lowest by then.

So let's get back to basics and do what worked for me back in April and see if it will work for me again. My goals this week are:

TRACK! Yea, that's pretty much it this week. The goal for this week is to track everything and stay within my points. I get 23 points per day; 42 weeklies to use and then can earn FitPoints for exercising. For this week I am not worried about how many of those points I use, as long as I end the week at 0 (or with points remaining obviously).

Right now I am focusing on 31 days. I do feel like focusing on short term goals like this have also helped in the past. So today was 1/31 and was a good day. I ended my day at 24 points. On to day 2!

Have You Seen My MOJO??

Needless to say I have not yet found my mojo.

This might help. This was my view this morning for my run

In my last post I said I was going to force the issue and try to lose 5 pounds in the month of September. In that post I said my weigh in for September 1st was 196.2. My goal for Sept 29th was 191.2. By Sept 15th (week 2 weigh in) I was down to 193.8 so basically right on track to lose 4.8-5 lbs in the month. And that is where anything positive from September ends.

I can't tell you what happened. I don't know why I can't seem to get my butt back in gear. And frankly seeing that I really was on track for the first two weeks of the month annoys the crap out of me. The problem is, I didn't feel like I was on track at all. It was a constant mental struggle and I just ended up giving in.

And after taking the other pic I turn to see these guys.

Yesterday I decided to look back through my blog (this is why I love this blog) and re-read all my posts from April. I realized what I have been trying to do is be perfect. I've been wanting to get myself back on track so badly that I've been trying to have a perfect week. A week where at the end of the week I'm down 5+ pounds. I've done it before so I feel like I could easily do it again. The problem with this way of thinking is that when I'm not perfect I go to the other extreme. What I think I wasn't realizing is that a lot of those "successful weeks",  I rarely go into them thinking I have to be perfect. My mindset is what makes the difference in this journey. So yesterday I decided to switch up my mindset. I am going into this week with a goal of not being perfect, but getting back to being consistent. My goal is to track what I eat and move on. Eat what I want and attempt to make it fit into my calorie goal.

I didn't start April with the goal of losing 15 pounds that month. I started April hoping that by the time we left for our trip on May 26th I would have lost 12 pounds total. My goals for that first week in April were to track my food and stay within my allotted points - even if that meant using ALL my "extra" points. In the end, I didn't need that much freedom, but because I allowed myself to have that "freedom", I was successful.

I had been completely fine with maintaining my weight this summer. All of my clothes still fit and the scale wasn't drastically going up so I didn't stress about it. However, I eventually got to a point where even though my scale is showing that I'm still under 200 pounds, I don't feel as fit and lean as I did back in May. I'm only 6lbs heavier than I was in May, but it feels like more to me.

My beautiful daughter had her very first homecoming a few weeks ago and for the first time in a while I did not like the pictures of me. It's totally crazy because the jeans I'm wearing in that picture were hand me downs from my sister after she lost her weight and they are a size 12!!! That sweater (also from my sister) is a large. But I look at that picture and rather than seeing how far I've come, I see how far I still have to go.

2015-->2018

I even ended up doing a comparison pic to my heaviest because I was thinking I looked just as big. And what's even worse?? When I did the comparison pic I didn't see as many differences as I usually do. I don't see a 50lb difference between those photos. I quickly got back in my not good enough mindset. It's amazing how quickly that mindset comes back and inhibits my efforts. I think when I get into this mindset I become all or nothing because I'm trying so hard to be "good enough". So here's my reminder: I am good enough. I may not have lost any weight between May and now, but I have managed to maintain my weight within 6 pounds - and that's good enough. 

I continue to make baby steps in this weight loss journey and that is good enough. Baby steps. Every year since 2014 I have lost weight, gained a bunch (but not all) back and started the cycle over again. But I have never given up and if that isn't good enough I don't know what is! Every January since 2014 I have weighed less on Jan 1st than I did on the previous Jan. 1st. The change has not been drastic because at some point within the  year I gain back some of what I had lost throughout the year. The difference between 1/15 and 1/16 was 11.8 pounds. The difference between 1/16 and 1/17 was 2.4 pounds. The difference between 1/17 and 1/18 was 6.9 pounds. The difference between 1/18 and today is 25 pounds. I am bound and determined to make it even more of a difference come Jan 1st. All I can do is keep trying....and that's exactly what I intend to do!