Summer

I always consider last summer to be the "weakest" time during my weight loss journey.  Although I don't think I have had anything I can fairly call a plateau because the scale has always moved generally in the downward direction, I've had large chunks of time made up of yoyo-ing that yieled tiny net losses over a few weeks or months span.  I looked over my weight loss chart and realized that last summer wasn't particularly unique in its slowness (I lost 5 pounds from Memorial Day to Labor Day, a little over 3 months time), as I also only netted a 4 pound loss from Christmas 09 to Memorial Day 2010.

I'm not stating these numbers to complain about weight loss.  I realized at the end of 2010 that I had "only" lost 20 pounds over the course of the year compared to the 50 in the 11 months I did WW in 2009, and was still thrilled to know that I was significantly lighter, average weekly weight loss be damned.  But I think I always viewed last summer as this major obstacle in my progress since things finally accelerated a bit in September.  As this summer approached, I wondered what kind of losses I could expect.  And now, a few weeks into June, I decided I need to stop overanalyzing every aspect of my weight loss.  How I do each week is up to me, not some hypothetical pattern from past years.  And if I do lose slowly, what's the BFD?  I am happy to learn from my progress but not obsess over it either. 

When I first started WW I made an Excel spreadsheet where I would track my WPs and APs used, which GHGs I satisfied and how many days, and then chart my loss for that week.  I'd try to use it to figure out what patterns seemed to help and hurt me and what combination of APs earned and WPs consumed was ideal.  Honestly, looking back, that's way too much energy to spend obsessing over WW and I know how to be successful without nitpicking every minutiae of the plan and what I put in my mouth.  I also realized over the past two weeks, when I was admittedly a tracking slacker, that I have gotten to a point where I more often than not make good decisions with what I eat without keeping a running points tally at the front of my brain.  I'm not going to stop tracking, but I am going to allow myself to acknowledge that I have instilled some good habits into my life and I don't need to constantly check and triple check everything I do.  And I'm not going to analyze the crap out of my weight tracker looking for hidden patterns and secrets to future success.  After all, I'm too lazy to manually change the channel on my TV let alone expend that kind of time and energy on an Excel spreadsheet.

I lost 0.8 this past week after being about 8 points in the red and tracking the weekend a couple days after the fact.  I'm going to try and improve on that this week, but I take some comfort in knowing that even when I'm not perfect, I'm better than I think.