A Year of Weigh-Ins: Week 6

So I'm pretty sure my scale is broken.  And I'm not just saying that because it gave me a number I didn't like.  I mean, literally, I think my scale is broken.  This week has been pretty good for me as far as eating goes.  I've been eating breakfast, which is a big step for me.  I also got snowed in and couldn't go to the store, so that actually helped me stay on track!  I still feel like I'm not all-in, though.  I feel like I'm just phoning it in most days.  I'm off the rails some days and then sometimes I eat healthy all day and go to bed feeling accomplished.

When I stepped on the scale this morning, I expected a little bit of a loss.  The number I got...305.2.  What?!  I haven't seen a number that high in over a year, and there is really no reason I would have gained almost 4 pounds this week.  So I got off, made sure the scale was zeroed out and stepped on again.  This time I got 291.4.  Somehow I managed to lose 14 pounds in less than 20 seconds!  I checked the scale, made sure it was level and tried again.  306!  Okay.  One last time on the scale.  284!

I have no idea why it is being crazy.  Maybe replacing the batteries will help or maybe I just need a new scale.  So there is no real weigh-in for this week.  I'll figure out my scale problem by next week because I am still committed to doing a year of weigh-ins.

A Year of Weigh-Ins: Week 5

Last Week's Weight: 303.2
This Week's Weight: 301.6

I am happy that I lost a couple of pounds this week, but I am tired of yo-yoing back and forth.  I need to get it in gear.  I am just having a lot of trouble staying consistent.  One day I will do great and the next I will binge on sugar and eat double the calories I was planning on eating.  I know I am going to be extremely busy with work this week, so it's going to be a real test for me to stay on track.

A Year of Weigh-Ins: Week 4

The week was going great until Thursday.  I walked every day and was tracking and staying under my calories.  I feel like I've been just struggling along for the last few weeks trying to get into a healthy frame of mind, and early last week I felt like I was finally getting into the groove.  Then Thursday came around.  I ran out of food and needed to go to the grocery store.  I fell back into my old habit of not eating breakfast or lunch and I let myself get too hungry.  Then I didn't have any food in the house.  My intention was to go to the store, but I ended up getting fast food.  Then I just kept eating all the way through the weekend.  Once I get into this cycle of binging, it's like I just can't get out of it.

I promised myself that, good or bad, I was going to weigh in every week.  I really didn't want to see the number this weekend after a horrible weekend of eating, but I know that I need to see what I'm doing to myself.  I can't just pretend that I'm not doing any damage to myself.  So, of course, the number was bad.  I'm basically back to Square 1.  But I know what works.  I know that this isn't going to work unless I really focus on eating throughout the day.  I'm really going to strive for that all week.

Starting Weight: 312.0

Last Week's Weight: 298.2
Today's Weight: 303.2

I'm not giving up this time!

A Year of Weigh-Ins: Week 3

I'm very happy with the weigh-in today!  I still need to work on eating throughout the day, but I did so much better with it this week than I have been.

Starting Weight: 312.0

Last Week's Weight: 302.0
Today's Weight: 298.2

Weight Loss This Week:  3.8 pounds!  Woo hoo!

I never want to see the 300s again, so I'm going to make this a great week!

Finally

I woke up actually feeling hopeful today, more hopeful than I have felt in a long time!  Yesterday was the first day in I don't know how long that I didn't eat any sugar!  I feel like I just needed that one day to break the chain.  Now I feel like I might be able to actually get somewhere.

A Year of Weigh-Ins: Week 2

Starting Weight: 312.0

Week 1 Weight: 300.2
Week 2 Weight: 302.0

This Week: +1.8 pounds

I knew this weigh-in would be a bad one because I didn't do anything I planned to this week.  I ate whatever I wanted and I continued to binge eat sugar.  I really need to snap out of this funk.  Every night I plan to start fresh in the morning, and every day something happens that derails me.  I really need to focus on eating throughout the day instead of letting myself get too hungry. 

I know I can be successful if I can just eat like a normal person instead of going long periods with no food and then stuffing myself with horrible food.  When I get too hungry, that's when I eat way too much, and the food I eat is never good for me.  Then I feel horrible about binging, sleep badly and wake up feeling too sick to even think about eating breakfast and the cycle begins again.  I wait until I'm overly hungry and then binge.  I feel like I'm in a never-ending circle.  I'm going to make this a better week.  I have to make this a better week.

A Year of Weigh-Ins: Week 1

Highest Weight: 312.0
Week 1 Weight: 300.2

To make myself accountable and keep myself from turning off that part of my brain that actually wants me to do well at this whole healthy living thing, I have made a promise.  I'm going to weigh in every single week for the rest of the year, no matter what the number is.

I know that getting healthy isn't about defining yourself by a number on a scale.  I'm going to try not to live or die by the number I see on the scale each week.  I even thought about not weighing myself at all and just taking measurements once a month or so.  But, ultimately, I'm trying to figure out what's going to work for me this time when it hasn't worked for me before.  Weighing myself once a week has always been more motivational to me than a detriment.  Knowing that on Monday I'm going to have to step on that scale and post the number has kept more than a few weekend binges at bay.  Where I have run into trouble in the past is when I start obsessing about the number, weighing myself at least once a day and sometimes multiple times a day hoping for a better result.  Then whatever that number is dictates how I feel about myself that day.  I will no longer let my self-worth be attached to a number on the scale.   

 

Staying Present

I've always been the most successful when I have consistently tracked my eating and weighed in regularly.  I have an uncanny ability to come down with amnesia and "forget" about the fact that I'm supposed to be eating healthy.  When I force myself to write down what I'm eating, I have to stay present.  I can't just pretend I don't need to make changes and that it's okay to eat whatever I want in whatever amounts I want.

In order to keep myself accountable, I'm going to weigh in each Monday throughout 2015.  Good, bad or ugly, I'm going to post my weight here every week. 

I'm also going to consistently write down what I'm eating.  I'm not sure what I'm shooting for as far as how many calories I should eat per day.  I think I'm going to experiment with different amounts for a few weeks and see what works best for me, but my main focus is still going to be eating throughout the day and avoiding a binge for now.

Weigh-In

So here's a number I never want to see again.  Ugh!  I weighed in this morning at exactly 300 pounds.  I'm ready to lower that number ASAP.

Making Changes

I know I have to look at losing weight differently than I have in the past if I want to succeed where I have failed so many times.  I need to implement real changes in the way I live so that I don't feel like I'm constantly "on a diet," but I'm also building toward something I can maintain after I lose all the weight.  I want a healthy lifestyle to become second nature to me.

I know that isn't going to happen overnight.  For most of my childhood and all of my adult life, I have only known what it's like to be fat.  I'm not just going to wake up one day and completely change the way I look at food and the way I look at myself.

What I am going to do is identify the things I am doing now that are contributing to an unhealthy lifestyle and then implement changes, make new habits that will get me moving down a healthier road.

One of the biggest problems I have right now is my relationship with food.  I posted about this a couple of years ago in one of my last posts before I went MIA, but I am a binge eater.  I need to figure out how to stop the binging.  It is not uncommon for me to eat absolutely nothing until 5:00 or 6:00 at night.  Sometimes I don't even take a drink of water until then.  By that point in the day, I am ravenously hungry and don't care if I eat healthy foods or not.  I just want food...and lots of it.  I need to figure out why I binge and how to stop it.

I have never really been a breakfast eater.  I just didn't do it when I was a kid and continued that habit into adulthood.  I was a very picky eater when I was younger.  I absolutely hated school lunches, but my mom would rather give me money to eat at school than buy ingredients and prep something for me to take from home.  From kindergarten on, I refused to eat lunch from the school cafeteria, so I just didn't eat anything.  Then in middle school, you could buy other things with your lunch money like ice cream or just French fries.  If I ate anything for lunch at all, it would be ice cream.  Our high school had open lunch.  It was located near a group of fast food restaurants and they would let us walk to the restaurants and eat lunch.  On the rare occasions that I did eat lunch, it would be Wendy's or Taco Bell.

Habits that you form during your childhood are hard to break.  After 25 years of no breakfast and rarely lunch, I have gotten used to not eating until the afternoon.  Now I actually have a hard time even thinking about food early in the day.  The thought of eating breakfast when I first wake up makes me feel nauseous.

So, ironically, one of my biggest hurdles to overcome right now is that I don't eat often enough.  My metabolism has got to be incredibly slow because of years of going long stretches in a day without food.  I feel like I need to wake my body up and force it to start burning some calories.  In order to do that, I need to eat more than once a day.  I need to eat breakfast and lunch.

Ideally, breakfast should be a big meal, over 500 calories, and lunch should be the same.  I know I am not going to be able to just wake up tomorrow and eat a huge breakfast.  I am, however, going to start making a habit of eating in the morning, even if it's just something small.  Hopefully I can get over feeling nauseous at the thought of food in the morning and get to the point where I am hungry in the morning.  Then I can increase the calories and increase the amounts I eat.

So Operation Eat Breakfast is in full effect.  Today, I had an egg.  It's something, and something is better than nothing.  

Has It Really Been That Long?

So I was sitting at home the other night (bored, obviously) and decided to log in to Blogger and check out my old Shrinkella blog.  When I got on, I realized I hadn't posted anything in 2 1/2 years.  2 1/2 years ago I decided to take a "little" blogging break.  I truly cannot believe it's been that long.  I can't believe that much time has passed.  The sad thing is that even though I think about how unhealthy I am and how much I hate being fat every single day, I have changed absolutely nothing about my health in the past 2 1/2 years.  In fact, I am even bigger now than I was when I last posted.  I'm even more unhealthy than before.

Looking through all the old posts made me realize that I need to try again.  I have tried to get healthy and lose weight so many times.  It has never worked.  Something always derails me and I give up.

What's different about this time?  Why am I going to lose weight now when I never have in the last two decades of failed attempts dating back to my elementary school days?  Well, frankly, I have no idea.  Honestly, I don't even know if I believe in myself enough to lose the weight at this point.  I know how to lose weight.  I know what's healthy, what's not.  I just have been here before a thousand times, ready to try again hoping that this will be the time, and it always ends with nothing changing.  So I don't know how it's going to be different this time.  All I know is I have to lose the weight.  I can't continue down this path.  The life I'm living right now is not a life.

I've always been a big planner.  I sit down and spend hours writing out detailed workout plans and meal plans just to follow them for a few days and then abandon them.  Sure, there have been times I've strung together a few months of healthy eating.  I've even lost 30 or 40 pounds several times.  I've been hopeful and excited that I was actually on the right track.  But somehow I still always end up where I am now, feeling like a huge failure and needing to start back at Square 1. 

This time I don't have a plan.  I am not waiting until Monday.  I'm not waiting until the first of the month.  I'm not going to give myself a couple of days to get my kitchen filled with healthy foods and eat up the last of whatever unhealthy foods I have hanging around.  Those are all things I've done in the past to delay the pain of starting over.  Those are all things that have never worked for me.  So I'm just starting.  I'll figure it out as I go.  I don't care how long it takes me this time.  I just have to do it.