Fat

I feel fat.

And to compound that, I feel like a whiny complainer for focusing on the one thing in my life that isn't going as well as I would like it to.

The thing is that it isn't NOT going well, per se. I plateaued all summer, pretty much, with a few small breaks downward. My surgery plus working late plus wedding planning plus being sick of Weight Watchers combined to keep me at about the same weight. And honestly, I wasn't trying that hard. I had so much success with Weight Watchers at the beginning, and while that wasn't easy, per se, it felt rewarding, or simple, or something. All I had to do was stick to my points and the weight felt like it just melted off.

And then that changed, and I was frustrated, and demoralized, and that was very demotivating. It felt like it wouldn't really matter if I ate just a few extra points, or didn't track my food intake quite as carefully, because nothing was really changing anyway. So I relaxed, and I think that was OK for awhile. What I have to keep reminding myself is that there is no rush. I need to lose the weight, and it's happening, but it's an ongoing process. There isn't an easy way out. There are quicker ways, like surgery, which was always my backup plan before I started Weight Watchers, but they aren't easy, as Erica's experience has clearly shown me.

So, I gave myself a break. And I plateaued. And honestly, I'm lucky that I didn't gain the weight back. That was my fear. Although maybe if I had started to gain the weight back it would have kickstarted me into really focusing on Weight Watchers again.

I sound like I'm talking about a stale romantic relationship here, but I want Weight Watchers to be like it was in the beginning. I want counting points to feel like a fun puzzle instead of a dull trap. I want to not know the points of what I'm eating by heart so that I am forced to enter them into the tracker instead of assuming that I more or less know what I'm consuming. I DO more or less know, and that's probably why I haven't gained the weight back, but the flip side of having learned so much about calories and nutrition is that it's really easy to get lackadaisical about tracking, and blur the lines of your recommended point intake.

But most of all what I want back about the beginning of Weight Watchers is the way I lost 50 pounds in 6 months. I want that to happen again. And I want it to be as straightforward as it was the first time.

I want to lose another 50 pounds. And I want it to be easy. My problem is that I struggle not to associate my weight loss goals with time goals. I find it difficult to say that I want to lose 50 pounds, full stop. Instead, I say I want to lose 50 pounds in 6 months. Then I start thinking about where I will be 6 months from now. OK, if I lose 50 pounds in 6 months then I will be done by next summer. And so on.

But I won't lose 50 pounds in 6 months. That only happens when you start the new eating habits. So I'm a little bit lost. I want to lose 50 pounds, period, whenever. But I don't want to tie that to a weight loss rate that will make me feel like a failure if I don't achieve it. I don't want to say that I need to lose 1-2 pounds every week, because I'm just setting myself up for frustration and self-blame.

Back when I was losing weight easily, every week, my biggest fear was that it would suddenly stop and I would get stuck at my current weight. And then that's exactly what happened. But I can see the differences. Before, if I ate one M&M, it got recorded in the tracker. Now, not so much. Before, when Torsten and I went to Germany for a week and a half and I couldn't track my food or my weight, I literally had nightmares about getting home and discovering that I had gained 10 pounds (I didn't). Now, I go on vacation and barely think about it. I do think about it on a certain level--that's one thing WW has done for me, allowed me to have a basic understanding of the nutrional value and caloric content of most food, whether or not I'm writing it all down in point form. But I don't think about it enough, I don't monitor it enough, I don't track it enough. And I have learned about myself that if I am not incredibly disciplined about the tracking, I will be stuck in maintenance mode. And I don't want to be.

So, maybe now is the time? The wedding is over, the honeymoon is over, my hours at work are shorter. It shouldn't be difficult to cook healthy meals, bring leftovers in at work, get to the gym a few days a week. It shouldn't be difficult for me to record what I'm eating. But if only I could recapture that mindset, the part where this is all a fun little puzzle, a happy, healthy solution. And I don't know what to focus on to make that happen. So I need to just plow ahead, even if I don't have that same singular focus that I had in the beginning. I just need to power through.

I feel fat because I thought I would be thinner by now, and I'm not. And I wish I were, and I recognize that the only person who can make that wish come true is me.