dianaschnuth

I started writing the outline of a blog entry this morning at work, while I was waiting for my computer to process some reports I was working on. My Piccadilly notebook now contains a page of notes that say I should start this year off with a graph of my weekly weights, a report on miles walked this week, and some other stuff. It also says I need to take time out to pamper myself, including getting exercise and plenty of sleep.

That was this morning. My weigh-in was at noon.

I weighed in at my heaviest in a year and a half: 200 pounds.

That set off the weirdest emotional rollercoaster I’ve experienced in quite some time. Shock, disappointment, depression, anger, motivation, and did I mention anger? Finally, I got an infusion of Get Over It from various sources, both intentionally and indirectly, and I started to feel less pissed in general and more focused.

The last time I weighed in at or over 200 was on July 29, 2008. At that point, I’d already lost close to ten pounds in the three months I’d been on Weight Watchers, and I would continue on a steep decline for another two months before hitting The Plateau.

First thing this morning, long before The Dreaded Weigh-In, I got an e-mail from Weight Watchers. Seems that my eTools (which I get for free with the At Work program) have expired. I’d already known about this; we’d had to have a special extension of our session to get us past the holiday season, and our eTools didn’t extend with us. What I hadn’t known was that, back in April 2008, I gave WW a credit card number that apparently expired in the interim, so they couldn’t automatically charge me the minimal charge for eTools.

When I went to the WW website, I saw that I actually have six months to reactivate my account. Since I’ve been saving my daily food tracking logs to my home computer, and I’m completely and thoroughly anal-retentive about tracking my weight locally (see graph, above), I wasn’t concerned about losing my historical data, so I decided to switch things up for a week and track on SparkPeople instead.

I think this is going to be a helpful switch-up for me, even if only for a week or two. I’m being especially mindful of what and how much I eat, since SparkPeople tracks actual nutrients, not Points. Today, I ate what I knew were normal meals, then calculated the Points values at the end of the day. I did pretty well, eating only two of my 35 Weekly Allowance Points (which I know won’t mean much to anyone outside of Weight Watchers).

I’ve also been doing the cardio I’ve always known I need to do. On Sunday evening, and again this evening, I did a 30-minute kickboxing workout on DVD. It kicked my ass in a Very Good Way, and I’m glad I didn’t skip it this evening, like I was tempted to.

Honestly, I think that this 200-pound weigh-in might be the best thing for my weight-loss regime right now. What got me off the couch and into my kickboxing DVD tonight was that number, rotating in my head, taunting me. I don’t want to be this weight. I don’t want to feel like this — physically, I mean. Frumpy, doughy.

I mean, sure, I used to be over 250 pounds, and this is definitely an improvement over that… but I can do so much better.

I deserve better.