I seem to be doing the weight-loss cha-cha this week: for every step forward, there seems to be two steps back. It’s a dance that really isn’t any fun, and totally screws with your mind.
I think this is the dreaded stall I keep hearing about, but have yet to experience. Until now.
My hormones are running over me rough-shod right now. This is the worst menstrual cycle I’ve had in my adulthood that I can recall: bloating and puffiness like you wouldn’t believe, breakouts every single day on my back, chest, and face…I didn’t even have acne this bad when I was a kid!
My ovaries are pumping out estrogen and progesterone like crazy, and this is ensuring that my fat cells are plumped up full of water, which is what I think caused this week’s gain. My eating was pretty much the same as last week, I actually increased my activity, and my water intake was 112 ounces or more each day.
I’m not feeling too good about myself today–I feel like a failure, and that my body is failing me right now. It feels almost like the 6-month weight loss “honeymoon period” came to an abrupt end the minute January 9 turned up on the calendar (my 6-month surgery anniversary was on the 8th). I feel like these last 90 pounds are going to be the hardest ones to lose. The first 135 were easy peasy.
I know this isn’t a race. I know this isn’t going to happen overnight. I know that I have accomplished a lot of things toward improving my health in a very short time. But none of those things makes me feel better right now about this week’s lack of progress on the scale.
I spent a better part of the day trying to think of everything I could have done differently. Could I have eaten fewer calories? More calories? Fewer carbs? More protein? Less fat? Could I have drunk more water? I exercised as much as my schedule would allow me to, and moved around as much as I could each day. I could sit and think all day long about what I could do differently, but what good does it do me? Ultimately I feel like a friggin’ science experiment, and even though I am a scientist, I don’t like being the lab rat. But I am. Every. Single. Week.
*sigh*
And notice I said COULD and not SHOULD. There is a big difference.
I won’t wallow in this funk for long. I’ve already won a hard battle this morning by not eating my feelings, so that’s something. I’m a stress eater by nature, so back in the day, when I had a whole stomach, I would have dived into a bag of chips face first and not come up for air until I’d devoured the entire bag. Then I would have eaten a full meal afterward, plus a drink, most likely a Coke Zero.
Now, with a banana sized tummy, I can’t eat my feelings. I’ve learned to tell myself that eating them won’t solve anything, and that I’ll just feel worse than I did before. Because both of those things are true–if I even attempted to eat my feelings, I’d feel like crap because I’d choose something that wasn’t good for me to eat right now, and I’d eat too much of it and make myself sick. I need to find some other ways to dissipate the stress I feel when I run into frustrating situations like this, though. Telling myself that eating my feelings is a bad idea will only work for me for so long before Fat Girl shoves Thinner Girl aside and tells her to fuck off, those chips/pretzels/rolls/donuts are going to be mine! As I drove by the boxing gym today, I thought perhaps boxing might be a good way to get that frustration out. I may need to look into taking lessons…the gym is just down the street from school. Hmmm….
Anyway…
This evening when I was cooking meals for me and the hubby for the week, I noticed that when I put on my apron, I could tie the apron strings around my waist, and then around my front:
It’s the little things, y’all.
I couldn’t do this before. I was doing good to tie the strings around my back and get them tied in a bow at all.
It’s things like this that reminded me that this 1.4 pound gain really and truly is small potatoes in the grand scheme of things.
Today’s eating was pretty okay. I got in 90 grams of protein, 30 grams of carbs and 46 grams of fat. Calorie count was 916, including vitamin supplements. I really need to look at the diaries of the days where I have lower fat and see how I can model those days more often. I think that’s going to be important as I push toward losing these last 90 pounds.
Today’s food choices, from upper right: Rudy’s smoked beef tenderloin; Rudy’s smoked ham with broccoli bacon almond salad; sample of Trader Joe’s baked beans and pulled pork; multivitamin and calcium supplements x2, iron supplement; honey garlic marinated flank steak and leftover rice. Not shown: 100-calorie package of cinnamon roasted almonds.
La Guerra de La Gorda 