Finding what works for me

I had my official weigh-in last night at my weight watchers meeting, where I found out I had gotten rid of another 1.8 pounds! I am below my lowest weight finally, that I reached before I went on vacation at the end of the month. Damage repaired! In another 5 pounds, I will have lost 10% of my original starting weight which is fantastic! I will have reached my 5% weight watchers goal (I'll get something cool!). And I am a total of 26 pounds down now. I really love reaching these numbers. There are so many things to celebrate reaching!

I had kind of felt myself fall off the wagon for awhile there, and discovered one thing that motivates me, even if I don’t bring it home and stick it on the fridge; looking at people’s success stories. Getting more interactive on other people's weight loss blogs and SparkPeople really helps me. I gave myself a jump start by looking at all my friends’ pages, and commenting (where I hadn’t been because I was slipping) on their blogs and achievements, and reading the blogs. The effect was instantly uplifting! It reminded me of my own goals and dreams to be healthy and thin. It gave me a much needed kick in the pants, which got me moving again.

I had been doing pretty well; making my lunches every day, exercising a couple times a week, but it wasn’t quite enough. After my hypothetical kick in the butt, I reset my goals. I didn’t eat any foods off plan (by off plan, I mean foods I had not planned to eat), I wrote my foods down in my tracking book the night before when I made my lunch, so that I have my day until dinner planned out. Let me just say, avoiding the tamale on the table yesterday was only possible because I reminded myself that it was not on my plan, and would completely mess up my points for the day.

And because of all this, last week was the first week in my entire journey where I tracked EVERY SINGLE THING I PUT INTO MY MOUTH for an entire week. Including the weekend! This for me is a huge deal! Weekends have been something of a problem and being successful through them has been on my short-term goal list for ages, and no matter what I did, I hadn’t quite been able to reach it. Until yesterday. This gives me an amazing feeling of empowerment. That no matter how hard something is, if I keep trying to reach it, and keep pushing on towards it, I’ll get there. It will just take time and action.

When I started weight watchers, I had to adjust my points so that I didn’t go over, and since my dinner was my largest meal of the day, I would use only 5 points on breakfast, 5 points on lunch and leave myself 26-ish points for dinner, just so that I would reach my points target without going over, since we ate a way bigger meal at dinner. It did work ok, but over the last couple of months, I’ve been working on evening out my points used during the day, so that now, my breakfast is about 8-10, lunch is 9-12 and dinner is approximately 16 points. Lately, I have been doing really well with this. I’ve been getting several of the food groups that I need during each meal and find that it keeps me fuller longer, which is what I want. I also eat more normally, instead of banking my points for dinner and being so hungry, I go over anyways, or Jeff and I go out to eat and I get too much, even though it fits into my points.

It’s really working for me! I need to remember that when I feel my motivation flagging, I am slacking on keeping in touch with my friends blogs and need to become more interactive again. It’s the success that others are celebrating and the support I give and receive that makes it work!