December Shenanigans

I meticulously avoided posting after my post-Thanksgiving WI for a few days, but now that it’s been a few days and I’ve gotten my shit mostly back together I figured I’d update.  I gained 4.8 last WI which I *think* has been my highest gain this time around on WW, which is no easy feat as I’m coming up on 3 years on this go-round AND I think I bested my previous highest by a good pound or so.  I didn’t track and enjoyed every morsel of food I could get my paws on so a gain of some magnitude was expected and all I can do is move on to the next week.

So far this week I’ve been good, and I have about 4 WPs left with my next WI tomorrow.  After tonight I’ll have gotten to the gym 4 times and so I think it’s been a good bounce-back week.  I’m not asking to get rid of the whole 4.8 this week but I’m hoping to make a nice dent in it, at least.  This time of year is awesome but a bitch on the diet front, and so I’m cool with seeing minimal results for the next few weeks.

On a more positive note, I did have some good (albeit expensive) non-scale victories over the weekend.  On Saturday I went shoe-shopping with my roommates and I was mainly looking for boots.  I’ve always believed myself to be in possession of big old man calves that do not and will not fit into normal-person boots.  I haven’t boot-shopped in awhile, but I can remember in college when I was at least in the general vicinity of my current weight, knee-high boots would not make their way up my calves.  I don’t have enormous calf muscles but they’re big enough and I’m sure a lot of that has to do with gaining weight over the years and my legs having to work extra hard to carry the added weight.  Anyway, in case it’s not already totally obvious where this going… every pair of regular-sized boots I tried on fit spectacularly, the wide-calf ones I tried on were too big, and so I think my legs might finally have joined the normal-sized population after all.  I ended up buying 2 new pairs including some fabulous knee-high suede boots that I want to sleep with they’re so lovely, and my mood was jovial.

Second expensive NSV:  I went dress-shopping yesterday to find a new dress for our holiday party this weekend.  I wasn’t intending to spend a lot, but it’s funny what your wallet is suddenly inclined to do when you try on a wonderful dress in a size you haven’t seen since you were a freshman in college.  It fit and zipped without a problem, though it hugs the shit out of every inch of my torso and ass so you better believe I’ll be taking it easy on the mint M&Ms this week.  Or, I’ll say I’m going to do that and end up stuffing my face and wearing a tight-ass mothereffing dress on Saturday.  Either way, I was ecstatic, I love the dress, and I feel really good about things in the weight department, even if I did gain the equivalent of a small child last week.

Hopefully I will have some good news at WI tomorrow, though this coming week will be a tougher one so that will

One last pre-Thanksgiving update

Quick stop-in before the Thanksgiving food-massacre begins.  I lost 0.4 at WI yesterday which I was very happy with.  Admittedly I’m not always ecstatic over smaller losses, but I was really just hoping to see any loss after the big one the week before, which didn’t feel entirely deserved.  I also ate, literally, a bowl of cookie dough on Monday night which felt like a rock in my stomach, so seeing the scale down to some new territory (-100.4, but still something) was nice.  I’m now 13.6 pounds away from my lowest adult weight and that is definitely a milestone I’m insanely fixated on.  Unfortunately with the holidays coming up it might be a ways off, but it’s still nice to dream about!

My level of excitement for Thanksgiving weekend and, in particular, the food and drink, is really somewhat sickening, but it is what it is.  Some people get excited for Harry Potter movies; I get revved up to binge on carbs with a side of turkey.  And the food is just too good to limit to one day, so I’m sure Friday will involve some continued gluttony.  Saturday is a reminder that I’m old as fuck as it’s my 10-year high school reunion, about which my emotions are rotating between excitement and boredom.  It’s somewhat cliché, but I really do keep in touch with the friends I wanted to keep in touch with, and two of my best friends from high school aren’t going, but I think it will be nice to catch up with some people I haven’t seen in awhile.  From a purely shallow-bitch perspective, I’m 7 pounds lighter than I was senior year of high school and very happy with where I’m at in my life and career, so I feel good about that.

Anyway, I’ll try to post after the long weekend but I may or may not feel like doing so after what which probably be a 32 pound gain on the scale.  Hope everyone has a great holiday!

It's almost time to binge on turkey!

Even though WI isn’t until tomorrow and I have nothing spectacular to discuss today, I’m feeling randomly inspired to post today.  Actually that feeling probably has more to do with my lack of inspiration to do work and my desire to find anything possible to waste time rather than being productive at work, but it all leads to me posting in the end, right?

I’ve been trying to have a decent week in the WW department to counteract this coming week which will be a giant abomination of any attempts at healthy living.  Thanksgiving outranks my birthday and Christmas in terms of my lack of interest in eating even minimally healthy and the entire day generally consists of eating as much as I can physically handle, waiting for my body to digest the bare minimum necessary to give me room to start eating again, and then repeating the cycle.  It would be horrifying if it wasn’t so blissfully awesome.  I would like to try to be decent up until Thanksgiving, but we’ve got a potluck at work on Wednesday and I’m going out for my roommate’s birthday that night, so Wednesday will probably start things moving in a downward spiral that will continue through the weekend.  Nevertheless, I’ll plan some trips to the gym and move on from there.  If there’s one thing I’ve learned during my 8 trillion years on WW, it’s that a few days can only do so much damage and I can always get back on track.  It’s not the planned failures that derail me- it’s the ones I don’t see coming.

Anyway, now that I’ve written in excruciating detail about how to be the worst Weight Watcher ever this Thanksgiving, I am hopeful for a tiny loss at WI tomorrow.  I had an alright weekend and have a few weeklies left over, but I just have that feeling that I won’t be losing this week, probably since the scale was a little too kind last week.  Either way, I am 36 pounds lighter than I was last Thanksgiving, so that is certainly something to be thankful for!

Hot Mess

Sorry for my continuing laziness with updating, although it’s surely to be expected at this point.  This month, and past few weeks really, have been flying, and since fall and pre-Thanksgiving/Christmas is my favorite time of year, I’ve been trying to enjoy the hell out of it while it’s here.

I’ve had some pretty inconsistent and, at times ,horribly unspectacular WW moments of late, but I’m trying to get things going mostly in the right direction.  I will fully admit right now that I’m going to eat the shit out of some Thanksgiving awesomeness next week and I probably will not track it or really say no to anything, but I figure I can at least try to be kind of a WW non-failure for the next 9 days. 

After maintaining my -100 loss for one week, I had a less than stellar following week involving too much Halloween everything.  For a couple weeks I think I just ate candy at will and pretended it didn’t have points, which is odd since I’m not even much of a sweets person.  I gained 3.6 and then only lost 0.4 last week after having a pretty decent week.  The nice part about that is that it sets you up for a loss even after a shitty following week because the scale sort of owes you, if that makes sense.  This is one of the good and bad things about only weighing once a week.  Anyway… after my meager 0.4 loss, I decided to take control by having absolutely awful-eating days Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday where I blew through all of my WPs and APs on nothing good in particular.  Friday I finally sat myself down and gave myself a good bitchslap and decided that at least for one day, I would not eat a single piece of Halloween candy, soft pretzel, or donut that was brought into the office (and all of that was on Friday.. evil bastards).  And so I didn’t.  But that night was my sister’s birthday so in lieu of dinner I had about 7 gallons of vodka which, for better or worse, all got puked into my bedside trashcan the following morning.  This is the part where I maintain once again that I’m not a raging alco. 

Despite the vodka-infused slip-up (which wasn’t so much a slip-up as a planned hotmess-capade), I did right the ship again on Saturday and have been eating pretty positively since then.  I made a much-needed trip to the grocery store and planned out healthy meals for the week and cooked some healthy crap Sunday and last night, with a turkey burger with avocado slices and a sweet potato on tap for tonight.  Oh, and despite being 30ish points in the red last week I lost 3.2 this past week to put me back at -100 on the dot and feeling much better in general now that I don’t have Snickers and Reese’s pulsing through my veins.  I have big plans to rock this week before eating myself into a mild coma on Thanksgiving.  Whatever, it’s once a year!

Well, I briefly tried to do a cool looking side-by-side picture thing, but my cropping and editing skillz (or lack thereof) on Paint eventually got the best of me and I gave up. The pics I have also didn't really seem to lend themselves to cropping and side-by-side analysis, so I figured I'd just post them in order and you can scroll through them instead.

 

I'm actually disappointed that I don't have any really good (aka bad) pics from Halloween 2008 when I was around my heaviest/starting weight. I would have saved those pictures on my old laptop which I don't want to dig up, so I was left with the pics I had posted to my old-school Webshots account. Naturally, I was pretty judicious with which pictures I posted since I was not particularly happy with my weight at the time and I was unflatteringly stuffed into my flapper costume. The pics I have are mostly group shots where I've carefully wedged myself between other people, hiding my full size. Nevertheless, here I am in all my costumed glory for Halloweens 2008 through 2011.

 

 

Halloween 2008: Flapper... a hair shy of 100 pounds heavier than my current weight (yes, I know I'm sketchy about sharing actual weights!)

 

 

Halloween 2009: Devil... down about 42 lbs from heaviest (+58 from current)

 

 

Halloween 2010: Pilot/"Mile High Captain"... down 65 lbs (+35 from current)

 

Halloween 2011: Bumble Bee... down 100 lbs (current)

 

 

So there you have it.  I wish I had better pics from '08 and '09 but I think the changes are fairly noticeable in my face even if you can't totally see the body.  I'd like to do another before/during pic in 10 more pounds, whenever I get there!

Quick Update

Just wanted to swing by and blow your minds by posting two days in a row, particularly shocking after I posted a pointless questionnaire yesterday to distract you from the fact that I semi-ignored WW for the weekend.

My scale says I maintained this week which was cause for a nice little morning celebration since I was a expecting a small gain.  Not peeking at the scale mid-week really makes WI morning a lot more fun (or sometimes a lot more horrifying.. but usually fun).  I should note that I started this paragraph with "my scale says" because sometimes I'm skeptical when I maintain.  What are the odds that I stayed the exact same weight, to the tenth of a pound, from one week to the next?  I mean I realize there are fluctuations in between, but it always seems unlikely.  Nevertheless, my scale is all I have to go on and I'm not try'na look a gift horse in the mouth.

I feel like a maintain (especially after an eh week) is a nice little opportunity for a "do-over" where I can have a good following week to make some new progress without having to waste a week getting the gain off.  That said, I have another Halloween party this Saturday and a small Halloween get-together on Friday which will still involve pumpkin beer and pizza and such.  Pumpkin beer and pizza is my weakness, people!  I'm also making matters worse for myself by making Halloween Funfetti cupcakes to take into work this week.  The good part is that I can only shovel so many cupcakes into my mouth before the rest of the office gets in on the action.  Still, long story shortish, it's unlikely I'll have a stellar week ahead of me.  But a girl can dream...

Total Non-WW Post

I saw another one of those survey/questionnaire post things on another blog and it made me want to post one.  They're cheesy and remind me of high school email chains, but still fun!  And more importantly, after a pretty unfabulous WW weekend (a rough estimate puts me in the red by about 20, but that might be on the low end), I figured a post to distract from what will probably be a blah WI tomorrow would be more fun.

(I will quickly add that Friday's Halloween party was a lot of fun and I'll post some pics soon).

Four Jobs that you have had:
Attorney
Wawa employee (every summer in college)
Bath & Body Works
Diane’s Water Ice, until they fired me

Four things you wanted to be when you grew up:

Attorney (since 7^th grade.. god I’m boring!)
Writer
Professional basketball player
Football blogger (OK that was like 3 years ago)

Four Movies you could watch over and over:
any of the Die Hards

The Hangover
Dirty Dancing
Old School

Four Cities you have lived in:

Philadelphia
Boston
London
State College, PA

Four TV shows you love to watch:
Mad Men
Dexter
The Good Wife
Modern Family

Four Places you've been on Vacay:
Maui
Paris
San Francisco
Caribbean

Four Websites you visit daily:
Weight Watchers (that shit’s addicting)
Facebook (not quite daily)
Weather.com
Pacer (legal professionals know this one)

Four of your favorite foods:
mac and cheese
pizza

fro yo

sushi

Four foods you can't stand:

99% of veggies
mayo
liver
tea – iced or hot (not a food but it came to mind)

Four Schools you've attended:
Boston University
Penn State
AES study abroad in London (is that a school?)
Cherokee High School

Four Places you'd rather be right now:
my bed
George Clooney’s bed
Fogo de Chao
Tokyo