Twenty Twelve

It’s January 10 and I’m finally getting used to the fact that the holidays are over, for better or worse.  It has been nice to actually have free time for a change and to get back into a stable routine, both in terms of exercise, eating, and life in general.  I’m going to Indianapolis for Super Bowl week (not going to the game itself) at the end of the month so it’s nice to have something fun to look forward to after a few boring weeks of stability.
 
In looking at my weight tracker, I was up a total of 5.8 pounds on the WI following Christmas from my pre-Thanksgiving WI.  It was over the course of several weeks in which I went up and down, with more up than down, and that’s the most I’ve been over my “low” weight this time around on WW.  That said, I was still somewhat happy that it wasn’t worse after several weeks of shabby-ass tracking and overindulgence.  I’ve lost back 2.6 of that over the past 2 weeks and can hopefully dispose of the rest of it over the course of January.  I remember saying before Thanksgiving that I’d be happy to finish the year out at the same weight or a hair lighter than I was then, and feeling like that goal was rather unambitious.  In reality, that goal in itself was a lot to handle!

Anyway, despite my crankiness leading in to January, things have been good so far.   There is something enjoyable about going grocery shopping, cooking regularly, and having a routine again that doesn’t involve candy and vodka for dinner.  I don’t know when I’ll resume steady weight loss again, but if I can just get back to pre-Thanksgiving weight and lose a few more pounds here and there after that, I would certainly not complain.  January is when things got moving on the scale last year so hopefully that can hold true, even to a lesser extent, in 2012!

Requisite Emo New Year's Resolution Post

As I continue to hover within a couple pounds of the same weight I’ve been at for roughly five months now, I wonder if I’ve become too content with my current weight.  And more importantly, I can’t help but wonder if that’s such a bad thing.

I’m still anywhere between 25-40 pounds from my goal weight and I’m not set on any particular number- anywhere in that range would tuck me into the healthy weight bracket.  Although I feel like I’m pretty healthy at my current weight and I’m in as good of shape as I’ve been in since early college, I know I could be a bit healthier at goal, and I know I’d be happier with the way I look at goal.  I’m a vain bitch by nature.  But at the same time, I don’t have a lot of serious complaints where I’m at now.  Maybe that provides me with a bit less motivation to keep plugging away at WW, but maybe that’s not the worst thing in the world either.

In fairness, I should mention that I am very fortunate to never have been truly miserable with respect to my weight, even at my heaviest.  I was definitely less pleased with that aspect of my life 100 pounds ago, I didn’t like the way I looked or felt, and pictures became an increasing disaster.  But I still enjoyed my life and my weight didn’t severely take away from that.  However, looking back to my starting weight this time around, I also realized that my reasons for wanting and needing to lose weight were less superficial than they normally have been in the past, and definitely less superficial than they are now. 

Although I wasn’t experiencing any major health problems or at imminent risk of anything awful, I have to call a spade a spade and acknowledge the fact that I gained 114 pounds in 6 years and that is not healthy any way you slice it.  I was wearing sizes I had never seen before and my shopping options were becoming limited.  I remember sitting on a plane and realizing that there was not much seatbelt left and that if I gained more weight I’d need an extender.  I rarely worked out and walking multiple flights of stairs at a time was a chore.  I was increasingly experiencing acid reflux and indigestion symptoms and I had a solid year or so where I had this nagging cough and chest congestion with no particular cause that I imagine was at least somewhat weight/fitness-related.  That’s not to say that vanity wasn’t still a huge factor in wanting to lose weight.  There was no “lightbulb moment”, so to speak, but some unflattering pictures of me were at the forefront of my mind when I re-joined/re-committed to WW in February 2009. 

My point is that, silly as it sounds, I feel extremely lucky to be back to a point where my weight is mostly just a vanity issue once again.  My weight has always been up and down but up until 2005 or so it had never really been a major problem so much as a vanity-based annoyance.  Yet back in high school and early college I sometimes let my dissatisfaction with my appearance snowball my weight into more drama and irritation than it probably required.  It’s unfortunate that it took SO much weight gain to put things into perspective for me as far as what is truly important, but from here on out I will try not to take things for granted with my weight.  In other words, embracing the fact that vanity and wanting to look hotter in a bathing suit are pretty good fuckin problems to have in the scheme of things!

Anyway, I don’t know why I’ve been feeling so introspective about things lately- maybe it’s somewhat New Years resolution-related.  I hate resolutions and I sure-as-shit am not going to plan my year around losing x number of pounds, because that’s just inane.  But I’d like to continue losing weight while also continuing to develop a healthy outlook towards weight and life.  Last year I stopped weighing myself mid-week and have pretty much stuck to that faithfully for a year now.  I would like to take more steps in the direction of making my weight and health a priority while also NOT making it a major focus in my life.  I don’t want to know what I weigh on a daily basis just like I don’t want to spend a great deal of emotional energy based on where I’m at in my weight loss.  I like writing this blog and I want to continue living a (usually) healthy lifestyle, but I also don’t want WW and weight loss to be such a huge part of my life- surely my life is more interesting than that!

I hope to re-read this post periodically throughout the year to see how I’m doing.  I want to keep following WW but I hope to reach a point where I spend fewer hours a day thinking about it, and I will try to update about my mindset from here on out as much as I do about my weight and other shenanigans.  Reaching my goal weight without being where I want to be about it mentally first is just going to spiral me through ongoing dissatisfaction that won’t change no matter how low the scale gets.  So with that said, hope everyone has a wonderful New Year in which we can all achieve the resolutions we set out to accomplish.

Quick Pre-Holiday Check-In

Here I go again being the shittiest blogger ever!  I'm also still not doing much on the WW front, and my last 800 WIs have basically been: up, down, up, down, up, down. And so on.  All things considered I'm not terribly unhappy to only be a shade over my lowest weight as I haven't exactly been knocking shit out of the park this month, but hopefully in January we'll have some more downwardly progress.  My sister and I are going to Indianapolis for Super Bowl week so I need to be a flyass bitch for those parties!

I don't have much to report otherwise, but I am enjoying the crap out of the holiday season thus far and I hope everyone else is as well!  My roommates and I threw what I can only describe as a fabulously bangin holiday party a couple weeks ago, and since I'm really lazy about posting pictures I'm including a pic of me in my party dress here.  Yes, I exist in black and white.

my sister and I and some really freaky lighting

Anyway, I'll try to update a little more regularly but hopefully there will be some more regular weight loss to report as well.  Hope everyone has a wonderful holiday!

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!