breakin it down

REMINDER: I’m blogging about things not related to weight loss here: www.jenc.tumblr.com. Go there instead of here for normalcy.

Things are moving along quite nicely with my new approach to losing 27 pounds. Being back in the WW system, by joining the program online, was a good move for me at this particular point.

Hang with me while I break it down and perhaps risk repeating myself:

After losing almost all the weight I needed to lose by attending meetings pretty religiously for the first 3 or 4 years I was involved in WW, I haven’t attended meetings regularly in probably over two years. I have, for the last two years or so, been weighing myself pretty regularly, writing down what I eat every day, exercising as often as I am psychologically able without making myself hate exercise and resent my whole life, and doing my best to stay on track and eat within my points each week. It hasn’t been simple. And I’ve definitely eaten more than my allotted points each week. To my credit, I wasn’t terribly focused on losing more weight. And I also wasn’t doing a ton to combat weight gain if and when it would occasionally knock on my door. I got fired from my job and then I feel in love, both of which impacted my eating habits, I would venture to guess.

So despite my “best” (I put that in quotes because they haven’t been the best) efforts to the contrary, I’ve definitely gained some weight in the last two years as I’ve focused less on the number on the scale and practiced living my life as a thinner person who doesn’t attend a weekly meeting because she used to be fat. I needed to go there with it. To return to the land of those people who don’t go to weight loss meetings. And I’m glad I did it. It has given me invaluable perspective to learn to be a healthy eater without the scale as my compass. It has certainly been a balancing act. And frankly I’m sort of happy to have put back on a little bit of the weight over two years because it means a.) I didn’t put a lot of it back on, only a little tiny bit! Which is great! Because that means I wasn’t perfect in my habits, I experienced failure, but I’m still a normal weight. That’s a wonderful thing. I wasn’t normal for a long time. So to want to lose 20 pounds feels like nothing. And b.) I have been forced to become comfortable with this body, with being imperfect, which was a lesson I needed to learn the entire time I was fat and the entire time I was losing weight. I needed to learn that it’s okay to feel good about oneself if one’s body isn’t up to Hollywood standards. And I’ve learned that. Being imperfect has helped me to accept being imperfect.

Plus my boyfriend likes my big booty.

And now I’d like to swing the balance back in the other direction for a little while. I’m confident and content being me and now I’d love to exercise and healthy-eat my way back to a slightly more toned me that can fit into a lot of cute stuff! So that means giving those habits a bit more focus than I’ve been giving them in the last couple years.

Joining WW online and buying a new scale (I threw the old one out a long time ago) is the most formal effort I’ve made in recent memory to committing myself to getting back to my fighting weight, besides starting to blog again about the effort.

I’ve already seen nice results on the scale this week alone. (Granted, I documented my new “starting weight” when I was rocking some serious after-several-bad-eating-days bloat that was bound to disappear quickly, but hey, why not pad my success a little bit.) And it’s lovely to be accountable to the online system, which seems so much more “real” than just jotting stuff down in my own personal food journal. ADDITIONALLY, having all my tracking done online as opposed to on paper in my purse has been an unexpected stress reducer. I don’t need more charts and graphs and papers and numbers and lists and notations and slips of paper to worry about. I will make myself crazy with that shit. It’s nice that it’s all in one place now. I sound like an ad for WW. I’m not. I’m just rejoicing in my honeymoon period. We’ve all been there before upon a rejoining experience. I’m in the phase where I can do no wrong.

However, I haven’t been perfect this week. All my flex are gone. And I have through Monday to eat 23 points a day. It’s gonna be tough. I worked my ass a week or two ago and was only able to reign in the flex points per week to 55 (down from a habitual 75 that I’d gotten up to) so I anticipate some hunger in my future. Granted it’s been a tough few weeks of holiday and wedding eating (little cousin got married at Christmastime) so perhaps without all the temptation I’ll be able to come out on top. (I should add that losing the 27 pounds I want to lose will actually put me below my lowest ever recorded weight when I was losing the first time. I had about 7 pounds left to go when I quit losing, so my current goal includes losing those too.)

I also didn’t exercise until today. But I was very good while I was away in the midwest for a week. In the interest of counterbalancing the food intake, I worked out several times during the week. So my body hasn’t seemed to mind that I’ve taken it easy since I returned to New York. It was essential, mentally, that I not push things. I made my triumphant return to the gym today and got in some treadmill time. I’ll make a quick stop tomorrow for some light lifting. We’ll do this in small doses. There’s no reason to work my ass off like I used to when I was 15 pounds lighter. I’ll reserve that for the next time I’m 15 pounds lighter. In the meantime, I’m just going to do what it takes to have this week look good on the books. I think slow and steady might win this race. Excuse me, this journey. It’s not a race. ;)