A little progress

I took some Benadryl last night and it made me so groggy I forgot to set my alarm for my Weight Watchers meeting this morning. Oops. So I weighed in on my home scale for this week.

SW: 185

CW: 178

GW: 135

I am so jazzed that I made it to 178! I wanted to lose 2 lbs. a week to be at 165 for our anniversary. I actually lost 3 lbs. this week, so that gives me a good head start. I needed a short motivational mantra to tell myself when I didn't feel like following the program, or when I felt like vegging out on the couch with a bag of chips (or chocolate chips). I asked Yahoo Answers for motivational phrases, but didn't really get what I was looking for. Then I came up with one all by myself. "Today is the last day I will be this fat." Some might see it as a bit harsh, but to me, it encourages me to take it a day at a time and not to let one slip-up ruin the whole day or week. Even though I need to lose an average of 2 lbs. a week, I am not setting goal weights for every week, because that can backfire with me. I end up having some kind of slip-up, and then I tell myself that I'll never reach the week's goal weight so I might as well just stuff my face. Then the next day or week, I am tempted to starve to get back on track. That kind of yo-yoing is not healthy, but it is what I have done in the past. I am pleased to say that this time I have consumed a fairly consistent amount of calories from day to day. Yay me!

Once I lose 10 more, I will have so much more to wear. It seems to be coming off mainly my hips right now, so my pants will be the first to come back to me! Hooray!

Thought about it…

I took a bath and thought about how I'm feeling and what I wrote, so time for a quick update.

My fifth wedding anniversary is in about 8 weeks. If I adopt the tough but realistic goal of losing 2 pounds a week, I can lose about 15 pounds by then. That would put me at only 10-ish pounds above my pre-unemployment weight (since I gained 30 but have already lost 4), which I can hide by dressing smart and using the right undergarments. I would be at 165 at that point. Until this year, that was my all-time high, so it's an important number for me. It's like coming back from the stratosphere and down to something that I've known and dealt with before. My anniversary doesn't seem so far away, and I was thrilled! to discover that I could get back to a manageable number by then. 185 felt unmanageable, and 181 still feels a little hopeless. But if I can get back to 165, I at least know I've gotten thin from there before.

Here's how I'm going to do it (pretty simply): I am going to stick with my Weight Watchers plan and track every bite, sip, and nibble. I am going to aim for the recommended amount of liquids, fruits, vegetables, and oils. No food is off limits, as long as I stay within my allotted number of points for the day. I am, however, going to try to avoid beer, as it makes me bloated and leads me to want to overeat. However, if I really crave one, it's after 6, and I have enough points to "afford" it, then I can still have one. Also, no more random swigs of wine or other drinks before 6. The reason for that is that a couple of times, I thought I'd just have a glass of wine with my late lunch, and then it relaxed me too much, and then I just kind of ate and drank and chilled the rest of the day. It's embarrassing for me to admit, but I have to cut out the denial if I really want to change, so there you have it.

Today, I'm having a sick day, but there are a few things I can still do. I can look up a Weight Watchers meeting for tomorrow to get me back on track. I can dig out my tracker and write what I ate for the past two days plus today. (I usually do my meetings and start my tracking on Saturdays, but I missed this week because of a graduation I attended, and then used that as an excuse to not track my points Saturday or yesterday.) I will immediately resume measuring what I eat and drink so that my tracking will be accurate. I will cut out the picture of the flat-bellied model that led me to all this reflection, and put it somewhere it can inspire me daily. I will walk slowly on the elliptical for as long as reasonably possible. And perhaps most importantly, I will keep knitting and cross-stitch projects by the TV so I have something to do with my hands besides mindless snacking.

I'm gonna do this!!!

Pissed off!

I am really pissed right now. I was going through my Victoria's Secret catalog, and there was one skirt that showed off the model's flat belly. I am sitting at home, sick, unemployed, bloated, and fat. I am a little teary right now because I was stupid. I had a good figure. I had it twice, and I lost it because I was stupid. Once I worked so hard to get there, I started stuffing my face again because I was deluded. I thought that once I got skinny, I would be one of those girls that could eat whatever they wanted and not get fat. If that was true, how did I think I got fat in the first place? I know I have to work to maintain my figure, but I had it and I gave it up. Now it takes so much more work, all the time, probably for a year (and that's if I stick with it) just to get what I had before. I am so mad at myself. I went from 130 to 150-160 and maintained there for a while. That wasn't ideal, but would have been good enough. Now I'm 180. No part of me looks good. Even my once-reliable waist is now thick. My chin is fat. My fingers are fat. I can't hide from it. I am so sick of it. But then I get depressed and demotivated. It all seems like too much, and the comfort of eating is so much more immediate. I struggle every day between wanting to change the body that I hate so much and wanting to numb my body image depression with food.

I can't last this way for long. Once I get a job, I will have to fit into my work wardrobe. I used to go out all the time, but now I'm afraid to go out because I might see someone I know. Being unemployed for a year means I sit at home. I don't walk around campus like I used to. Even with exercise equipment here, I won't get to the level of exercise I got before. I probably spent an hour each day just walking to and from the parking lot and from class to class, and then I did cardio on top of that. Being unemployed also means I have access to my kitchen whenever the hell I want. If I get a whim, I don't have the rest of the class period for the craving to pass—I just waddle to the kitchen and satisfy the urge. I have effing red stretch marks on a part of my body that I used to consider my belly area, meaning suitable to show off in a swimsuit, but now is part of a hip, needing to be covered. Those will never go away, no matter what the lasers and creams promise. I used to feel sexy and even thought of sex as a good replacement for a workout sometimes. Now, even when I'm horny, I don't want to have actual sex because it's not sexy, it's gross, I'm gross. A blob of dimples and stretch marks flopping around—that's all I am in bed. Disgusting.

How could I let this happen? Whenever I saw fat people as a kid, I would wonder why they didn't start turning things around once they reached chubby. Now I know it's a stupid complicated delusion called denial. I can't blame it on my hard time anymore. Yeah, I've been unemployed for a year and gained 30 pounds in that year. But I also had all the time in the world to stop it from happening. I don't want to be this anymore. I don't want pictures of happy moments to be overshadowed by how fat I look. I don't need to have another issue in my brain. I need to harness this feeling, put it in a box, and crack it open whenever I feel like giving up. If I hadn't given up so many times in the past 2 months, I would have lost more than 4 pounds at Weight Watchers by now. I would have been below the 180 mark, which is no longer obese. I am teetering on the edge of obesity right now and I hate it and I want it to stop TODAY. I am hungrier for feeling good about myself than I will ever be for food. I have never wanted any food enough to come close to crying over it. But writing about my self-hatred is making me teary. I remember a couple of years ago, I went ice skating with my husband. I was wearing low rise jeans, and I fell face first onto the ice. I ended up scraping my hip and bruising my hip bone. That's how thin I was. I couldn't even get low rise jeans over my butt now. I need to remember this feeling of wanting to go back, and use it to motivate me when the challenge seems insurmountable.

SW: 185

CW: 181

GW: 135

Four pounds down, forty-six to go.