dianaschnuth

This month marks seven years that I’ve been on Weight Watchers. I’m down about 40 pounds from where I started, and that includes a pregnancy in the middle of my weight loss journey thus far. (That 40 pounds isn’t including the weight I lost on Atkins and somehow managed to keep off — if we include that, I’m down 80 pounds from my max weight in August 2003.)

I’ve had a backslide of about nine months’ worth of weight loss — I weigh now what I weighed back in July 2014, in the middle of my most recent awesome stretch of weight loss. I’m about four pounds above my lowest weight, which I had reached back in October, and I still have another ten I wanted to lose beyond that.

It’s hard to make myself realize that it really is the small things that make a difference. For instance, I really, really have a hankering to go get some dessert from the cafe downstairs right now. I have 17 Points left for today, so I could totally do that. Except that one giant piece of cake would probably use up at least 11 of those Points, if not more, which would leave me with a mostly veggie dinner, which may or may not fly once I get home. (Update: succumbed to two-thirds of a piece of banana cheesecake, which I estimate at 9 PPVs. This after a successful WW weigh-in where I lost 1.2 pounds. After a dinner of Mac and Cheese with my son, I went over my daily target by 12 PointsPlus.)

I’m moving in the right direction, despite a few behavioral blips: losses two weeks in a row to combat the gains of the previous three weeks. I still really want to see what my New Goal Weight looks like on me, since I’ve seen what my Original Goal Weight looks like (back in October) and, while I liked it, and it felt good… it didn’t feel like I was where I wanted to be quite yet.

If I apply myself, I still think I can do this by Thanksgiving. If I apply myself.

NSVs:

• Took the stairs in the parking garage to my car with a co-worker to go to lunch. Didn’t think twice until she started falling behind. “Please tell me this is our floor!”
• Snacked on a fun-size bag of Skittles at my desk at work (left over in my candy jar from Halloween) instead of going to the restaurant downstairs and buying a muffin or a giant dessert at 2pm.
• Reclaimed 9 t-shirts, two skirts, and two aloha shirts from my bin of too-small clothes. Let another skirt and a pair of dress pants go to the thrift since they fit my waist but were too short. (In the case of the skirt — a 39-year-old has *no business* wearing a skirt that short.)

Non-Scale Failwhale:

• I ordered myself a new iPhone case as a reward for not snacking after dinner for an entire week. When I told my husband, he told me he had already bought planned to buy me an iPhone case for my birthday later in the month, and I realized I’d broken the No Shopping In Your Birthday Month rule. The guilt got to me after he went to work, and I ate an entire fourth meal after my son was in bed.

But once I reach that elusive number on the scale… what then?