Category: weight loss

This is my second week at 173.4 and I have to say I am happy with that!! All was going well until Friday night when I over-did it (insert gasp of disbelief).

Have you ever been to a restuarant preview?? It happens before a grand opening–the restaurant fills with customers to give the staff a test run before opening night. Through our church, we were invited to such an event Friday night, for an opening of a new, independent eatery about 5 minutes away from my house. Everything by the alcohol was free, and people were invited to make a free-will offerring to the St. Vincent DePaul society instead of paying for dinner.

So we eagerly made our reservations and showed up and were seated in a very nice dining room filled with familiar faces. I seriously hope that this family decides to occassionally host fund raisers for the church and has “everyone” (well, OK, not the 1500 or so families all at once) over again. It was really, really, nice.

The food was outstanding. We received a sampling of appetizers, chicken velvet (read:cream), salad and I chose an entree sampler–small pieces of steak, salmon and chicken, along with garlic mashed potatoes and veggies. After the first three courses I was full, but ate my dinner any way. After dinner I was stuffed, but ate the cheesecake anyway. This is where I have (some) of my issues–over indulging for really no good reason.

“It was a special day–it was ok to eat too much!” A special day for whom?? Was I opening my own retaurant? Was I paying for the meal? Was it food I could never eat again? The answer to all of the above is no. And what I need to learn is that when the answer is no, I need to learn to literally shut my mouth and stop inserting food.

Onto this week/next week (vacation)!! I have small goals–perhaps I’m not setting the bar high enough, but that’s another issue all together. This week I’m focusing more on water (it waxes and wanes in my world), and the plan is to maintain what I’ve done—my motivation this far has been to get to the beach…….and I’m getting there Sunday. I’d hate to look like a beached whale when I get there!!

It was with great relief this morning to see that the scale hadn’t increased from last week. Over the weekend I had a weird weight gain (seriously, how does one gain 3 lbs over night??) and then have been watching the scale inch back down since Saturday morning. Very, very odd. I’m blaming it on hormones.

Anyway, it was a good week over all–I didn’t feel deprived, I felt in control and I attended a swank wedding brunch with the best cheesecake I have ever tasted. It was so rich that *I* was content with 1/3 of a piece.

While I was getting my hair done last week, I read interesting article that talked about how excess calories can start to be stored as fat as soon as 4 hours after eating it!!! Can you believe it?? That once your glycogen store is topped off (what’s used for quick energy), anything excess is stored as fat. Eat an extra 500 calories every day for a week and that’s a pound!! That’s why I knew I hadn’t gained 3lbs from Friday morning to Saturday morning –10,500 extra calories in less than 24hours?? No way.

So now we are onto to week6. 6 weeks down, 6 1/2 lb gone. I’m happy with that!!

Exactly 12 years ago today I attended my first Weight Watchers meeting. I had just graduated from college, and was living with a girlfriend in a college town, looking for a teaching job, as well as a job to tide me over til the school year started. My recollection is that one day out of the blue Robin said something about going to Weight Watchers. I don’t even remember what it was, more than likely, since we’re a lot alike, it was something to do with a pair of shorts not fitting or something. So I went with her. I wasn’t particularly down about my weight at the time—I didn’t particularly enjoy clothes shopping (this was back in the day where most mall stores went up to say, size 14 at the most, and I was more an 18/20, and destined to shop at Fashion Bug and Lane Bryant), but other than that, I wasn’t lamenting my weight. I should have been.

I was 5’10” and weighed 225 lbs!!! (This is 20lbs less than I weighed in 1993. When I went for my physical my sophomore year in college, I weighed 242lbs. I don’t know how, really, but lost close to 20lbs without really noticing or trying. )

Back to 1995. Robin and I jumped in with both pudgy feet and we both lost about 20lbs in about three months. I think a lot of it was just moving out of the dorm (and the all you can eat buffet with soft serve ice cream machine), the fact that the summer of ’95 was one of the hottest on record and that we had each other for support.

I stayed right around 200lbs for the next seven years or so, give or take 10lbs. Again, I wasn’t really too concerned or obsessed. I was happier fitting into size 14s, but had summers (and winters) where my clothes were more like 16s. Then at a Fourth of July picnic in 2002 my friend Alisa was VERY upset. When we finally got her to spill the beans, it was because her husband had made a comment about her weight. After we got over being mad at Jack (who in general is a very kind, very smart man), my friend Sharon and I, being the pals that we are, promised Alisa we’d go to WW with her if that’s what she wanted to do. Sharon had also done the program before, with great success. I knew that I could lose more weight—I had recently blamed my khakis for shrinking myself.

I’ve posted before about the “zone” I was in the last time I did WW—how I planned my meals, exercised religiously and got into the best shape of my life. And weighed, for the first time ever, the weight on my driver’s license.

Today, 12 years after my first WW meeting, I am proud to say that I weigh a FULL FIFTY TWO and ONE HALF pounds less than I did on June 5, 1995. That means that today I weigh 173.5lbs….and only have 3.5 pounds to go til I get back to my driver’s license weight.