Scale Issues

I had a craptastic WW week (which, as usual, meant a fantastic real-life week) and now I’ve having scale drama.  My week consisted of all you can eat sushi (which I definitely took as far as I could handle), too much wine and cheesecake on Thursday, a weekend in NYC in which I ate and drank more than I have in months, and then a Monday night during which my dinner was 3 shots of vodka, four beers, and wine chugged straight from the bottle.  Oh, and did I mention that I only went to the gym once?  My health and lifestyle over the past week have been questionable at best, though “disgraceful” would be a more appropriate adjective.

I woke up hungover on 4ish hours of sleep yesterday morning, normal WI day.  Just for the record, I do not drink to excess during the week pretty much ever.  I don’t go to work with hangovers.  I don’t make a habit of getting less than 7-8 hours of sleep.  As I read over this post and realize how trashtacular I sound, I want it to be known that Monday night was a disaster, but not a typical one.  Anyway, totally forgot to WI on Tuesday, nor would I have cared to anyway, and figured I might get an artificially low number due to my severe dehydration.  I also question whether I could have stood upright long enough to get a reading on the scale, but that’s a whole other ballgame.  So I weighed this morning to get it out of the way, record that shit, and move on.  And naturally, the scale is totally trying to mindfuck me by showing a 3.6 pound loss.

I loved the number I saw this morning, but it is completely impossible to be happy with it knowing it is artificial in one way or another.  I don’t know if the scale is messed up, if I’m still dehydrated from the massive alcohol consumption, if I have some life-threatening disease which will emaciate me over time, or what else.  I like the fact that my scale is usually pretty reliable and indicative of my progress on a week to week basis, so I’m naturally irritated with this confusion.  Out of curiosity, I went back and attempted a half-ass tracking of what I ate from Thursday through Monday since it was mostly untracked.  I’m looking at roughly 90 in the red, just from what I could remember consuming.  So it’s not like one of those dainty little weeks where I didn’t do as badly as I thought.  Shit was bad.  I tend to see false gains more than false losses, so it’s harder to conceive the reasons for it.

Anyway.  I’m not tracking that weight.  I will probably break my 7 month streak of no mid-week scale peeking and check tomorrow to see what’s going on, but I feel like it’s kind of justified here since the scale is either broken or fucking with me.  It’s less than a year old so I wasn’t expecting this kind of shenanigans from it so soon.  I might track tomorrow’s weight; I might just wait until next Tuesday.

Enough whining.  Regardless of whether I lost 3 pounds or gained 12, I am getting my shit in gear today.  Yesterday was mostly in gear but a little overly processed and I bailed on the gym again.  Today has been on the ball so far, and I’m going to the gym after work and making Emily Bites lasagna rolls for dinner.  I’ve been trying to rock the Lasagna Cupcakes but Wegman’s is being a dick with their wonton wrapper supply.  I’ve got a plan, I’ll stick with it, and I’ll update on what the scale spits out the next time around.

WW would be easier if I didn't eat peanut butter straight from the jar

I never got back to the blog with my lemon chicken pics, but you can just take my word that it was pretty and picturesque and, most importantly, delicious.  I also made the Soy Ginger Fried Couscous recipe last week (from emilybites.com and canyoustayfordinner.com) and added steak and crabmeat to it and that shit was orgasmic.  And no, that’s not TMI, just the truth!

I lost 1.4 at WI yesterday, which is a net loss of 0.6 from before my previous week’s gain.  I hate constantly talking in terms of “net loss” but when you yo-yo back and forth for weeks and weeks at a time, it’s the best way to express where I’m actually at.  That results in a net loss of 1 pound over the past 4 weeks which is frustratingly slow, but at the same time there’s another part of me that is happy that I can still continue to lose even when I’m not as on the ball as I should be.  I had set out to leave a few (5-10ish) weekly points on the table this past week, but Saturday night my dinner consisted of chicken wings, cheese fries and cheesesteak nachos, so I had no business having any points left or seeing a bigger gain than I did.  I think my frustration is more with my inability to be a tad more disciplined than I’ve been in recent weeks.  I think I’d feel better about things if I could just string together two solid weeks where I eat well and use plenty of WPs but don’t go overboard.  But, maybe that’s just not in the cards for the summer.  Which brings me back to the thinking that I’m letting myself indulge in all kinds of tasty shit and I’m still lighter today than I was four weeks ago, so I should shut the fuck up with the whining, right?!

Anyway, any particularly diligent eating I’d like to implement will have to hold off for at least one more week because I’m going to NYC this weekend and have no plans of staying within my points.  It’s kind of sad that I go in planning that in advance, but I think the drinks will do me in more than anything and I’m not looking to have a healthy, moderate weekend.  With days/weekends like this, I figure I will just try to make small improvements where I can (don’t go too overboard with my meals, maybe drink some light beer instead of all regular, etc.) but I’m going to be realistic and know that I’ll probably hammer through my points and then some and a gain is a high probability.  I also have my birthday coming up in a few weeks and that’s another week I stubbornly refuse to make wise decisions.  So it’s going to be difficult to gain any traction with healthy eating right now, but I will try to do some damage control and hopefully not go too insanely overboard.

Semi-annual Blog Check-In

I am the shittiest blogger ever, for real.  I actually go to my blog page occasionally and think about how I should write something, and then forget or get lazy or accidentally x out of the page.  Being the crazy narcissist that I am, you’d think I would be able to overcome my laziness/inability to work a mouse for 5 minute increments to throw out some kind of updates about myself.  You'd be wrong.

I have definitely been moving slowly on the scale, back to the gain, lose, gain, lose pattern.  Over the course of a few weeks I end up being down a tad more than a few weeks prior, but the back and forth of it gets to me sometimes.  If I could break past 93 pounds and hit -95 (and on to 100!) that might get me a little momentum, but the summer just seems difficult with more plans and crap going on.  I don’t do difficult very well, obviously.

My weekdays are mostly pretty good and I’ve been continuing to cook regularly which has been very helpful in keeping me marginally on track.  I keep meaning to post recipes or pictures of dinners I make, but like every other aspect of this blog, that thought typically goes by the wayside.  Tonight I’m making lemon chicken with cous cous for dinner.  The chicken recipe is adapted slightly from a Rachael Ray recipe, and it’s really good and flavorful for not too many points.  In theory, I will take a shitty picture of it later (you’ve seen my photog skillz) and post it with the recipe.  In actuality, I will not post again for 6-7 weeks and then toss out another lackluster, half-assed blog entry in which I commit to do something and then completely fall through on it.  That’s just how I roll.

In the meantime, I’ll leave you with something super happy and visual, which is the fabled Denny’s mozzarella stick grilled cheese sandwich that I’ve been lusting after for months now.  I don’t even know where a Denny’s is, but I assume it’s one of those places that I pass all the time and totally fail to acknowledge somehow.  I also imagine that it’s one of those places where you may or may not leave with some kind of venereal disease, but such is life.

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.

Before/During (-90)

2 posts in one day, when the crap does that happen?!  This is a total attention whore post (OK I guess a blog entirely about myself and my weight loss in which I talk entirely about ME is attentionwhoretastic in general, but alas).  Earlier I was thinking about how I own numerous clothing items that I wore at or around my starting weight and can still wear now, which is absurd.  I think I've lost at least 10 inches on my bust and I'm STILL wearing the same strapless bras.  How in god's name did those badboys even close before?  I also wore a dress in Boston last weekend that I bought around my starting weight.  It's stretchy cotton so it's not that this is physically impossible, but still kind of ridonk, no?  So anyway, I used my work time efficiently to create this before/after of me right around my starting weight, and 90 pounds lighter (both in the same dress):

The angle isn't great in the before pic since I wisely decided to lodge myself behind someone else so that my entire heftiness wasn't photographed, but I can still see a big difference.  I'm also wearing a cardi in the 2nd pic so you can't entirely see the dress, but you get the point.  I think my photoshopping skillz have improved a touch since the last before/during I fuzzily posted.

WI Tuesday

Still rolling along- another week, another WI, and a bit closer to goal.  It is sometimes hard to believe that I've been doing this, weighing in every single Tuesday (minus two missed weeks on cruises), for over 28 months now.  I'm not complaining about the amount of time, it's just weird to think about doing anything for that long.  I like to think that the longer I do it, the more it becomes habit and routine and less likely to crumble to pieces on a whim.  I guess only time will tell, but I am definitely very happy to have stuck with it this long.

I lost 1.6 this week so that nets another 1.2 pounds closer to goal.  I'm glad to see that the mini-gain last week was actually mini and not a fluke, which I tend to wonder about when I presumably go over my points by a bajillion and don't track.  I was a little lackluster with tracking this past weekend as well, but I did go back and track anything I missed yesterday.  It looks like I ended up with about 15 WPs left plus 20 APs earned, so I'm pretty happy to know that even when I'm not tracking diligently right away, I'm still generally making good choices and mostly aware of what goes in my mouth.

I'm slowly creeping towards the -100 mark and still haven't really planned anything for it.  I know it's a big milestone, but I also want to keep going and get into my healthy weight range and closer to what I deem a good stopping point/goal weight for me, whatever number that ends up being.  I also realized that as I get into higher and higher "loss" numbers, I am more hesitant to share that info with other people.  It's not like they didn't know me when I was bigger and know that I had gained a lot of weight, but I'm still not crazy about discussing the fact that I was 90 pounds heavier in the first place.  When I was in Boston, I mentioned to someone that I had about 25 pounds to go to be at my weight from the end of freshmen year of college.  Taken in conjunction with having mentioned that I lost 90, the math becomes pretty obvious for how much I gained from 2002 to 2009.  I almost feel silly celebrating the loss of weight I should never have gained in the first place, but I guess that is the nature of all weight loss.  And regardless, since I went and gained the weight I might as well lose it and be proud of that.  No matter how high my starting weight, it could always have been worse, right?!

Anyway, I am definitely very happy with my progress regardless of how petulant I sounded in the rest of this post.  My grandmother is coming in from Oklahoma on Thursday so there will be a lot of dining out over this weekend, so I need to buckle down and make (mostly) wise choices.  It's like all interest in portion control goes out the window once I step inside a restaurant.  Why does restaurant food have to be so friggen delicious? 

Junealicious

Ugh once again I suck at blogging.  I'm really too lazy to commit to anything, even to rambling regularly about myself, which happens to be my favorite topic of discussion.  So once again I'll vaguely promise myself that I'll blog more often, etc. etc.  I really do think it helps keep me in line and accountable so I'll try to suck less at this.

I forget where I left off WI-wise (god forbid I hit the "back" button and check) but I hit the -90 mark last week.  This past week I gained 0.4 which I was gleeful about since I was in Boston Friday to Tuesday and ate and drank a lot of junk.  I did walk a ton though which helped and I can honestly say that I was pretty good with keeping my portions in check and not eating in between meals.  I also think I made pretty good choices with what food I ordered.  Even so I was expecting a gain of some magnitude, so having a tiny gain after a more-indulgent-than-usual weekend was very exciting and made me feel like I'm actually capable of not losing all semblance of control and discipline every time there's a bank holiday.

I noticed awhile back that for the first time on any previous WLJ or stint on WW, I have not had a single crazy-big gain.  Like, at all, in nearly 2.5 years.  I think some of that is just that my body is not as awful about retaining water and I WI further from the weekend, but still.  I used to always have the occasional 4-5-6+ pound gain after a bad week (or usually, weeks, since I'd skip WI and then dick around for another week) and feel like I'd spend weeks afterward trying to get it off.  I'm pretty sure this time around I haven't gained more than 3.2 in a single week and it's rarely over 2.4 or so- usually lower.  I have no idea why this is because I still have my shitastic weeks, but it's kind of nice to be less of a yoyo-er than in years past.  I think it also helps that I've finally gotten over my previous tendency to undereat my points following a bad week/weekend which would usually just send my metabolism diving off a cliff and the scale in 15 different directions.  Anyway, just a random observation that I wanted to brag briefly about.

So, Memorial Day weekend was extremely enjoyable and it was great to see my law school pals.  It's become our annual thing to meet up in Boston and we even visited the law school which felt kind of eery but also made me miss those days.  On the other hand, I used to subsist on Thai take-out and assloads of pizza and beer, so being a normal working individual is a lot easier on my weight loss.  It has also been more than 2 months since I moved to Philly and although my weight loss isn't always consistent, the scale is still moving steadily downward.  Maybe I can keep plugging away at this after all!