Progress

I feel like I’ve made some progress in this little journey of mine. Last week, as I ranted incessantly, was so not a good week in terms of living a healthy lifestyle. Between eating too much at a holiday bar-b-que, not being able to exercise because of 12 hour long work days and stress binge eating, I started to slip into bad habit and it showed on the scale. In reality, I wasn’t as bad as I could have been, and probably ate much worse on a “normal” day pre Weight Watchers, but I still did a really good job of beating the hell out of myself over it.

I made a key decision, I still went to my weekly weigh in, even though knew it would be bad. I couldn’t go to my normal Friday meeting, so I made a point of getting up early on Saturday and getting over to another meeting. As expected, it was bad. Like 3.4 pound gain bad. I know it wasn’t all fat, but still, pretty bad on my 5’3” frame. Five years ago, something like that would have had me running for the nearest McDonalds (conveniently located across the parking lot from WW. Seriously, whoever planned these locations is either an evil genius or a complete idiot. My guess is evil genius.) That is, if I even got on the scale at all. Like a lot of people, I hate seeing the cold reality of the scale, even more so when the prior trend was downward.

I’d be lying if I didn’t have the urge to let myself “go” another week, but I tried to remember what got me started. I tried to remember how I felt with 90 pounds of extra weight, wearing clothes I didn’t like, not being able to wear rings I loved because they were too tight on my bloated fingers, being sweaty all the time. I tried to remember how difficult it was to walk at a quick pace, forget running, the embarrassment of barfing after pushing myself too hard on a cardio machine (even if I did retell it for laughs later on) . I kept telling myself I wasn’t going to be going back that place, to being that person.

So I spent Saturday trying to get back on plan with mixed results. I went for a 7.5 mile run, I ate healthy and on track until the evening came and the carb monster decided to come out to play. I kept trying, with success for the rest of the week. I went to my weigh in today hoping to at least not have gained, hopefully to have lost. My hard work paid off and I not only lost the weight I gained last week, but also another quarter pound.

The focus now, as it has been, is maintenance, but also to be more realistic. I had the worst case scenario – a horrid week, not eating right, missing some exercise, and a rather large gain, and guess what? I survived. I not only survived, but I managed to get back on track and reverse it.

Makes me think I just may be able to do this maintenance thing!