That’s all I have to say about that! I am 38 pounds down from when I started again in November. It’s been tough over the past couple of weeks as people at work have been getting fired and my incredible manager quit. So I have been a bit stressed and weight loss has been slow. But I am losing! I feel so much better about myself already.

I’m getting involved in lots of new things, and doing activities that I love. Like skiing! I’m going again on Saturday. On the 12th I am going to Ottawa to visit the fam for a week, and the following weekend I’ll hit Edmonton to meet some WW people. Fun times ahead!

I also joined meetings! I am so glad I did. It feels good to be so much busier these days. I am trying to get my old self back – I miss doing things and having friends.

Time for bed – was writing this as I monitored a work issue, but we’re back up and running now. I will try to write more often and check in with other blogs. I hate that word, but it’s not gonna change, so I may as well use it

How fabulous is that? I feel really good about myself at the moment. I did well last month. I wasn’t perfect, but that’s fine – I know where I can make improvements, and I also know that I’ll never be perfect. And that’s just a-ok with me

I made an effort to plan quite a bit. I knew in the mornings what I would be having for supper, and I usually packed my lunch. I tried to ensure that I was never out of lunch items or veggies for supper. Most week days I did 45 minutes of biking in the morning, and 60 minutes of something else (usually Wii) in the evenings. On weekends, I slacked a lot. What’s up with that? I get up early on weekdays, but I can’t be bothered to exercise on the days when I have nothing else to do. I’m weird.

Anyway, I clocked in 1915 minutes of exercise last month, and it would have been more had I not been sick last weekend. I’m trying to mix things up a little. The biking isn’t a big deal really – I usually just watch tv while I do that, so I don’t really get too sick of it. In the evenings I sometimes do Wii Fit Plus stuff(I like to do the expert bike course which usually takes up a good chunk of time), or Wii Fit Yoga, or Wii Active. Last week I did the four mile WATP dvd. I hadn’t done one of those in months, and I figured that it couldn’t be as dull as I remembered. I was wrong, of course. Five minutes into it, and I was dying of boredom. Still, I finished it, and probably won’t do it again for another six months or so!

I did eat out quite a lot, but I made good choices. Salads. Lighter sandwiches.

I did not journal my points, but that’s something I will work on this month. I did it on Monday, but not yesterday. Perhaps I will go and do that shortly…

Oh man – last week, I was attacked by a Lean Cuisine lasagne! Seriously! I’d just heated the damn thing up for lunch, and I was holding it in front of me while trying to cut into it with a plastic fork. Which snapped. So the lasagne flew towards me, and my fork hand ploughed into the piping hot pasta. I ran to the bathroom to wash it off, but it had already burned me bad enough to blister a little. My poor hand has since recovered, but my white shirt hasn’t

Beware the Lean Cuisine lasagne! It is the devil.

So…how much weight can I lose in December? It’s gonna be a tough one, but stay tuned…

This morning I weighed in at 307.6 pounds. I’m down just over 10 pounds so far this month, and I’ve actually been having fun with it. Go figure! I’m loosely planning meals – making sure that I have fruit and vegetables for both lunches and suppers, and I’m trying some different recipes. I’ve done over 18 hours of exercise. And I haven’t had take-out at all!! So this is also wonderful for my financial situation.

This is the longest I’ve been on track in well over a year, and I’m still excited about it. I’m eating well, yet I’m losing. Crazy!

It’s been really tough being back over 300. When I go to restaurants, I have to worry about fitting into the booths. Getting into friends’ cars is worrisome. Going to the movies sucks because I feel like I am crowding the people next to me. My body is cumbersome. If I sit down for a long time, I can barely go down the stairs without holding the rail. I’m back up to the top sizes at the plus sized clothing stores.

I remember how just over 18 months ago I didn’t have to worry about any of those things, and I was actually able to purchase the occasional item at a “regular” store.

Well, I’m on my way back down again. Soon enough I will be under 300 again. I have things to look forward to. I have reasons to work hard. In a few months, my mum and her friend will probably come visit – they want to try downhill skiing for the first time and I will take them up to Sunshine. I’d like to be in decent shape for that. In May my boyfriend will complete his second year of medical school, which is the end of the classroom/test part of it all, and he wants me there to celebrate. I’d like to be thinner and healthier when I meet his school friends!

I’d like to be able to start running again in the spring without worrying about my knees.

It’s been a tough couple of years, but for the first time in many, many months I really feel as though I’m back in a good place and ready to lose all this weight that I’ve put back on.

Let’s see how much more weight I can lose this month!

But I found a little insight this last couple of weeks. I realized that I had to find the fun in weight loss again. When I lost 100 pounds, it wasn’t easy at all – but there were parts that I really enjoyed. All those little milestones. The stars on my WW graph. The feeling of being lighter than I’d been in many, many years.

Now I feel weighed down not only by the physical weight, but by the mental garbage. I won’t get another star on the WW graph until I lose 100 pounds (again). I imagine the feeling of fitting into jeans I wore only last year to be, “These should be too BIG for me now”. I’ve been depressed, disappointed in myself, and most of all, I’ve been uninspired.

I posted something like this on the WW message boards, and got some great feedback and ideas. One of the ideas that I tossed around in my head was to make a fresh start – use my current weight as my starting weight and go from there. It’s a good idea. I’d be getting my stars again But ultimately, I decided against this plan. I need to do this again, yes, but I need to take with me everything I learned the first time. I can’t just sweep my past under a rug and move on as if it didn’t happen. I did lose 100 pounds. I did put it back on. I need to deal with that and learn from it.

I understand how to lose weight, and I know what habits I maintain that prevent me from doing so. Why I have these habits? I dunno. The term ‘emotional eating’ is tossed around so much these days that many people are using it without thinking about what it actually is. I’m not an emotional eater. Sure, I eat when I’m depressed. I eat when I’m angry. I eat when I’m feeling alone or neglected. But I also eat when I’m happy! I eat when I’m having a great day.

I just really love to eat.

How do you battle this kind of problem? Sheer brute force? Can I actually learn not to love eating? Is it a matter of going through the Beck book over and over again and putting those techniques into practice until I actually do change? Is it really possible?

I don’t know. I really don’t. But the truth is that I have to keep trying to find my way.

So I came up with a little game that I’m going to play with myself. It’s called: How Much Weight Can I Lose in One Month?

This is not an extreme game. I’m not planning on drinking water and eating only grapefruit. I am eating healthily – 3 balanced meals a day! – and exercising 90-105 minutes a day. I ride my exercise bike for 45 minutes every morning (while watching an episode of Dexter – god, I love that show!) and then I do some Wii Fit or Wii Active for an hour in the evening.

On the morning of November 1st, I weighed myself officially. 318 pounds on the nose. That’s 7 pounds fewer than my original starting weight. Cringe! This morning, November 5th, I was 311.2 pounds. Hooray!

It’s kind of funny how this actually might work for me. I don’t have a specific goal. It’s open ended. But I am determined to do my best. If confronted with a treat, I immediately think about how it will affect my monthly loss. If I consider stopping for fast food on the way home, I quickly choose not to do so as it may mean a smaller loss on that scale.

I guess we’ll see Off to eat my healthy lunch!

Then I got home and pigged out every day for about five weeks, bringing us to last Monday. Last Monday I was back up to 311 pounds, which is less than fifteen pounds lighter than when I started in 2005.

What the hell has happened to me?

It’s back to JFDI, really. Last week went well. I journalled the first half of the week, but after our company BBQ on Thursday, I stopped. That happens to me all the time! I have to either stop eating out where I don’t know accurate point values, or just estimate and journal the estimation. The latter should work just fine, but for some reason, I just don’t do it.

But I continued to eat well for the rest of the week, and I’m down six. I’m aiming for another four pounds this week, and then 1-1.5 going forward. I can do it. I have done it before. I need to stick with it.

The funny thing is that I get so sick of take-out. When I’m off plan and driving home, and I’m trying to think of where to stop for supper, nothing appeals to me. But even though I would love to have something home made, I still stop somewhere. I don’t know why I do that. It’s ridiculous!

My inability to stick with this has been documented right here. How often do I go missing for months, and then show up with a post about how I’ve gone off the rails and gained, how I’m ready to get back into it, blah blah blah. And I post regularly for a week or two. Then I’m gone again, shoving pizza and cheeseburgers down my throat.

All I can do is keep coming back and keep trying. Maybe this one will stick.

On the positive side, I’m still OP. I’ve gone over my daily points the past two days, but I’ve journalled everything and made sure that I have flex to cover, so all is bliss.

I finally saw the Harry Potter movie last night. It was ok. I was entertained, but I think they really missed the point of the entire book. It’s the book where we learn more about the villain – how his life was when he was a child, and how he grew into the monster he became. The movie left all of that out. And Snape was barely in it – he’s the title character, ffs! I am slightly biased as Snape was my favourite character in the books – but still!

How quickly Friday has rolled around again! I’m looking forward to the weekend, although there’s a possibility I may have to work. I am going to stay OP. I am going to catch up on exercise. I am not going to sit on my (fat) ass and watch tv all weekend!!

Ok, so even I am rolling my eyes at that. It’s the honeymoon phase all over again, when planning is kind of fun, and seeing the number on the scale go down quickly is insanely motivating. I know better than anybody how difficult it is to keep it up, how fed up one can get with counting every little point, how easy it is to start nibbling here and there, to ignore a few extra grams on the food scale, to forget to count the samples ingested while wandering around Costco. And I know how all those little things eventually show on the scale, so the numbers stay the same or even go up. I know how discouraging it becomes, and how the binge mentality kicks in. And I know how that one good week can disappear in a haze of fast food value meals.

Yes, I am giving myself all kinds of credit for having such a great week, but I am not going to lose focus.

I’m looking forward to my vacation home to St. John’s. I always lose weight when I spend time with my parents – my mum is so active! She won’t be having surgery until early September, so there will be lots of hiking and badminton and best of all, tennis!

The downside, of course, is the depression that always kicks in when I come home, or when visitors leave me. I compensate for that by eating as much junk as I possibly can. For at least a week. So that when the loneliness finally wanes and I start living my regular life again, I’m depressed because I put on all the weight that I lost. I compensate for that by eating as much junk as I possibly can.

Vicious cycle! I am determined that it won’t happen this time.

I guess when you have a 36 point target, there’s a lot of room for the extras. I didn’t eat nearly as many weekly points this week as I did when I had a 27 point daily target, and I didn’t even earn any activity points (until today – an hour on the bike!). Next week I intend to do about 90 minutes a day, which means about 5-6 APs. Of course, I’ll probably be down to daily target of 35. So I’ll be able to eat 40 points a day.

I’m really pleased with my accomplishments this week. I had take-out just once, and chose a small grilled chicken sub on whole wheat bread with a veggie salad. I did spend too many points that day on the dressing – I knew Subway ranch was bad, but not that bad! Still, I counted it, and S suggested that next time I get a Subway sandwich I stop into Wendy’s afterwards and ask for a light ranch.

I ate dessert only once, and that was 3 squares of dark chocolate that I counted.

So all in all, this week has gone very well. If I can keep it up tomorrow, it’ll be the first complete week I’ve had OP in a very long time. I’ve forgotten how good it feels, and how much confidence I gain when things are going well.

Next week will have a couple of challenges. I have plans for lunch out one day, and supper out another. But if I just make sure that I choose well, there is no reason why I can’t continue to do well and lose more weight next week!

I hesitate to set fixed weight goals, but I’m considering it at this point. There are five months until 2009 is over. If I can lose an average of 1.5 pounds per week, that’s about 30 pounds. Assuming I weigh in around 295 on Monday (possibly a pound or so above, but no big deal), that will take me to 265.

That’s reasonable, and I can do it!

I’ve finally gotten back to watching TBL Australia, Season 4. I marathoned the first 2/3 of it a couple of months ago, but I got tired of it and took a break. Reason 1 – I know who wins. Thanks to TBL USA, who announced it on their finale. There’s practically no way to keep oneself unspoiled with regard to tv these days, even internationally. Most of the fun of watching it for me is the contest. Without that, I wouldn’t be interested. It’s why I don’t watch any of those other weight loss shows – without a competition, I really don’t care. I have plenty of places to find inspiration, primarily on the WW boards.

Anyhow, Reason 2 – it’s the first Australian season where I’m not entirely happy with the way it’s going. It seems even more producer-manipulated than ever. Some people seem to have nine freaking lives, and they keep being saved by random ‘twists’ in the game. Bleah. Anyhow, I don’t really have anybody to root for to join the winner in the top 3 or 4 – there is one person, but he’s already at his goal, so I don’t know how he’ll manage to stay. And I just loathe Michelle,. the female trainer.

I figure I may as well finish watching it, even if it’s just to root for the eviction of the one girl I really don’t like!

Tomorrow is August 1st, and that means I need to get back into exercise. In January, I started a contest with my family. It’s based off something from the WW 200+ boards, but a little more suited to me. On the boards, there is always a monthly thread where we keep a running tally of all the exercise minutes we’ve done. It’s fine – I participated for a couple of years – but there doesn’t seem to be a whole lot of purpose to it. I tried to get people interested in trying to beat previous month totals, but nobody really went for it.

So for this family challenge, we all set a goal each months for how many minutes of exercise we want to complete. Then we try to meet or beat it. It’s individual and collective – everybody’s goals are added together and, as a family, we try to beat that number. So if one person is slacking or sick or something like that, everybody else has to cover for them.

The cool thing is that everybody got so into it! Six of us participate – both my parents, my sister and her husband, my boyfriend and I. We all are very aware of our goals, and my dad (who is also extremely obese) has been known to suggest walking an extra 10 minutes to ensure he reaches his goal. I created a simple database driven website so that we can all log in and enter our goals/minutes and see how we’re doing. Everybody’s progress is documented on the home page, and colour coded! If we’re on track to meet our goals at our current pace, it shows green. If we’re a little behind, it shows yellow. And it’s red if we’ve dropped a little too far behind.

So phrases like, “I need to do an hour on the bike so that I stay in the green” are common in my family.

I’ve been doing 1400-1800 minutes all year, except for this month, when I blew it (about 900 minutes total, which is only 50% of my goal). My family really tried to cover for me, but they only hit 96% of our total goal. Next month, I really need to pull my weight.

That’s the plan for tomorrow – a little housework, lots of exercise, and stay OP!

You can imagine that the Freshman 15 was just the tip of the iceberg for me.

The only thing that I found lacking at the Guelph cafeterias was vegetables. The salad bar was fantastic and sold by weight (you learned to ‘forget’ your salad dressing until after the salad had been weighed and paid for), but there’s only so much salad one can eat. This is coming from a girl who has eaten salad an average of once a day for the past 3 years! I needed another vegetable option, but I don’t like a lot of cooked vegetables, and the peas and beans were often a little overcooked.

So I decided that I would learn to like another vegetable, and after careful consideration, I decided that it would be broccoli. Lots of people raved about the stuff, it was quite abundant in the cafeterias, and they didn’t seem to steam the green out of them.

I started by telling myself I liked it, and by getting excited when I saw it being served. Heh. I pretended that I enjoyed it when I ate it, although I was pretty much forcing it down. It sounds ridiculous, but it worked. By the end of first year, I was a true broccoli fan, and it’s my favourite cooked green vegetable to this day (and the only vegetable I can think of that I like better cooked than raw).

I think that’s pretty cool. I know it doesn’t work for everything – I hate all seafood, and that’s never going to change. But hey. I actually taught my brain something.

I’m trying the opposite now. A few months ago I was telling my boyfriend this captivating story, and I wondered if I could teach myself to not like something. Like pie. Because I really like pie. And pie is really really bad for me. So S and I have a bit of a running joke, where I’ll randomly say, “I don’t like pie” in a conversation, or I’ll ask him “You know what I don’t like?” and he’ll reply, “Pie?” Then we’ll talk about how icky it is, and how it’s full of gross lard.

So far it’s not exactly working, but maybe one day

Today one of the girls I work with came to my desk and apologized for not making it to my birthday lunch (she was ill) and gave me a little package. What a sweetie! I opened it after I left, and inside was an eye shadow that is totally my colour, as well as a little bracelet made out of pink beads with a breast cancer ribbon charm. She doesn’t know about my mother – she probably just thought it was cute, a good cause, and something I’d like (all true). Sometime I will probably tell her that her little gift meant a lot more to me than she imagined, but not just now. It’s a nice reminder of what my mother is going through, and what I’m doing.