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!