dianaschnuth

My weight loss has been slow but steady of late: between ½ and one pound per week. Last week, though, my progress slowed; I only lost 0.4 pounds, and this week I gained that 0.4 pounds back.

Granted, since my weigh-in is at noon, right before lunch, that fraction of a pound could have been one well-timed bowel movement last week, or a mistimed glass of water this week. Even so, I agreed that I would put money into an account for every week I gain at Weight Watchers this year, so I did that this evening. I set up a new savings account at ING Direct, and called it “Goal 170” — when I hit my weight goal of 170 pounds, I’ll take that money and buy some new clothes for myself. (I wonder what size they’ll be?)

My Weight Watchers leader, Linda, took a good hard look at my numbers after she wrote down my weight this morning. She paused, squinted, and asked me, “Can you do 20 Points this week?”

For those of you not familiar with the Weight Watchers plan: I currently get 25 Points per day, plus 35 per week to use whenever I want. A Royal Red Robin Burger is something like 30 Points by itself, while I can have one of those Weight Watchers meals at Applebee’s for around 9 (for an entree plus soup).

I’ve been spreading my Weekly Allowance Points across the entire week, eating about 30 Points a day. Cutting down to 20 a day is going to be a challenge. But, like I assured Linda, I don’t have anything special going on this week that I need to save them for. So, here we go.

This, my friends, is a diet. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Turns out that Linda used this tactic on another member today, who just happened to sit next to me at the meeting. She’s been stuck within the same five-pound range since October. Even though my plateau has been considerably longer than that, it does make me feel validated (vindicated?) to know that I’m not the only one a.) having plateau issues and b.) having to cut way back this week.

The other two people who sat down by me today are Lifetime members (meaning they’ve hit their goal weight and stayed near it for a goodly amount of time). Between my fellow plateauer and the Lifetime folks, I really felt like I was experiencing a sea change in my diet attitude, just by association.

Dinner tonight was an iceberg and spinach salad with strawberries, onion, black beans, and fat-free poppyseed dressing (1.5 pts); a 4.3-ounce baked chicken breast with 1 tablespoon of nonfat vanilla yogurt, plus thyme and rosemary (4 pts); and carrots with ginger and garlic (2 pts). Those seven-and-a-half Points were about the most filling Points I’d eaten in some time. Plus, I actually sat at the dining room table to eat my meal, rather than watching the news or playing a game or even browsing on my iPhone. I focused on my food, enjoyed it, ate slowly, and was comfortably sated by the time I was done. Dessert, a couple hours later, was a small glass of fat-free milk with zero-calorie chocolate sauce (Walden Farms; surprisingly delicious).

If I continue to plan ahead, treat myself to food that’s tasty AND healthy, and not give in, I can turn this thing around. Tomorrow is our team lunch at work; I can easily be good enough for lunch that a large salad and a chicken breast will be sufficient for dinner.

No worries. I’m looking forward to this.

It’s been a full year since the last time I did a full weigh-and-measure, and the numbers… well, truth be told, they’re not as bad as they could be.

Weight: 195 lbs (on the home scale – up 4.4 lbs from last February)
Bust: 43″ (up 1″)
Chest: 36″ (up ½”)
Waist: 40″ (up 1″)
Hips: 46½” (up ½”)
Upper Arm: 13″ (same)
Lower Arm: 10″ (same)
Thigh: 25″ (up 1″)
Calf: 15½” (up 1/4″)
Neck: 14″ (same)

The good news is that my weight has been on a steady decline since the beginning of the year: I’m down four pounds (according to the Weight Watchers scale), which is an average of 0.7 pounds per week. It’s slow loss, yes, but at least it’s consistent.

I’m taking a kind of carrot-and-stick approach right now: when I reach a weight of 190 (on the home scale), I get to buy a new bathing suit for my Mexico vacation. The snag is, the vacation is at the end of April, so I need to get a move on if I’m going to order my suit online and get it in time. (If I don’t, though, at least I do own a swimsuit that fits.)

On the punishment side of things: if I gain weight one week to the next at Weight Watchers, I have to put money into a savings account. Since I calculated that each pound I gained last year cost me $64.75 in WW fees, that’s how much I’ll put in per pound. (Pro-rated for partial pounds gained, of course.) In the end, I’m going to use that money to buy myself clothes when I reach my ultimate goal of 170… so it’ll be untouchable for a while. Luckily, I haven’t had to pay into that account yet, and I hope to avoid it altogether.

I haven’t been as vigilant as I should be about diet and exercise for some time now. I hit my first plateau over a year ago; I tried pushing through it at the beginning, but the lack of results just drug me further down, until I started just coasting. (At least I didn’t give up entirely, though: things could be much worse right now!)

For now, I’m trying to mix up my food and my activity, fill up on fruits and veggies, appreciate that slightly hungry feeling, get muscle-sore on a regular basis, all those sorts of things that I haven’t been doing.

If you do what you’ve always done, you’ll get what you’ve always gotten.

How much can I push myself to lose in the next four weeks?

The Lane Bryant catalog arrived yesterday.

I pulled out the coupons and leafed through the pages, coming to a stop at the swimwear section. My first thought was, “Why would I buy a zebra-striped swimsuit? It just screams out, ‘Look at my rolls!'”

Then, of course, I felt guilty. Big women are beautiful, too, and I shouldn’t be projecting my feelings about my own body onto these plus-size models.

I realized at that point that the LB swimsuit models seemed to run the gamut of sizes. Without knowing how tall they are, they seemed to go from the low end of Lane Bryant sizes (12 or 14) to maybe a size 18 or 20 — again, depending on height. I’m relatively tall for a chick — 5’10” and a size 14/16 at 197 pounds — so I’m no judge on sizes. Some of the women didn’t look “plus-sized” at all, while others… well, I just wished I could stick a pin in them and let a little air out, and then they’d look just about right.

Which led me to realize: I don’t know which of these women I most resemble, shape-wise. Am I really that fat? I don’t know! I can’t tell. When I look at the thinner plus-size models, I think of them as “normal.” Not stupidly skinny. They have some meat on their bones, but no rolls. But I don’t think I look like them; I must be fatter than they are. Then I look at the larger models, and I hope I don’t look like them… except, well, they look good, too. Sure, they’ve got rolls, and thighs, and upper arms, but they’re pretty and confident and they fill out their clothes well. They don’t look sloppy, just big.

It wasn’t until I did my own private swimsuit photo shoot in the basement this evening that it occurred to me: plus-size models get airbrushed, too! It felt like the biggest “duh” moment ever. You can’t make me believe that none of those big and beautiful ladies has any cellulite on her thighs.

Still, though, I’m having trouble with the mixed signals I’m getting. The Health At Every Size/Fat Acceptance movement would have me be perfectly OK with being a size 14/16, as long as I’m healthy (which, as far as I know, I am) and not eating unreasonably. Weight Watchers says that my health will improve significantly if I lose just 10% of my body weight. The Wii Fit tells me I should be some skinny damn weight I haven’t seen since elementary school.

I just want to feel comfortable in my own skin. I want to stop feeling self-conscious and embarrassed around fit people. In addition to the social aspects, though, I’m curious what I’ll look like when I drop another 20 pounds (on top of the 50 I lost a few years ago).

I think I have some psychological fine-tuning to do, beyond the physical and behavioral that I already knew was ahead of me.

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.

Every year, in early January, I post an entry about what’s gone on in the past year. Major life events, vacations, tragedies, what have you. This year, I’m planning to do things a little differently, and present a Feltron-esque display of charts and graphs and visuals to sum up 2009. Seems only natural, being that I’ve been working in Business Intelligence and Data Warehousing for the past two years, and reporting is what I do.

Reporting on one’s own life can be a strange and tedious thing, depending on how OCD one is with oneself. Since I’ve been tracking my weight on either a daily or weekly basis for the past seven years or so, in the same Excel spreadsheet, I thought I’d go for the “low-hanging fruit,” as they say, and create a simple graph of my average weight by month:

Granted, December is far from over, but still. This graph isn’t pretty — or, rather, the data it’s showing isn’t pretty. (Whether it’s aesthetically pleasing enough is beside the point at the moment.)

This isn’t a plateau. It’s worse.

I have three weeks to get my average December weight down below where it’s currently hovering. We’ll see how that goes. I’m hoping to revise this graph for the better for inclusion in my official year-end retrospective.