96 Days Until 30

Yup, 96 days until I turn 30 years old. For most of my twenties, I've been dreading this day, but as of today, I'm really kind of looking forward to it. I have all the things in life that I'd hoped to have by this age, and I think what was scary about 30 when I was, say, 23-24 is that NOTHING in my life was how I wanted it back then! I can't say I've been great and perfectly OP over the last week. I took a little foray into trying Geneen Roth's methods without counting points last week, got scared when I saw the scale on Saturday, and jumped back into counting points hardcore today after realizing I hadn't let too much time lapse, and that 96 days OP is totally doable.

Then I read this post by the great Bitch Cakes. It's about how Weight Watchers is not a diet. And that got me thinking. I think that sometimes I get so caught up in planning exactly what I'm going to eat, and eliminating certain things from my daily intake and making all these crazy rules for myself, and then guess what? It DOES feel like a diet. I've been treating Weight Watchers like a diet for nearly 10 years. It's my go-to thing whenever I start to feel overwhelmingly fat. It's NOT been something that I've made a part of my everyday life, and I tend to chuck it out the window whenever I have a bad day. Then getting back to it seems so hard- just. like. a. diet.

So my goal here is to drop that mentality fast. To stop making myself suffer through the latest disgusting food fad just because so-and-so does it and swears it is what made her drop 5 pounds in a week. To stop beating myself up when I change my mind about what I want for dinner and end up scrapping my originally planned food. To stop eliminating things that I love just because someone makes me feel like it's not the best choice. To stop doing things just because someone else is stopping, when it was working just fine for me. I have to be more of my own person with this in order to make it work for ME.

And with that I've decided that only *I* will see my journals on a day to day basis. I'll still take pics when my meal is especially beautiful or if it's something I think other people would like to try, but there's no point in broadcasting my imperfect self to the world on a daily basis. I think I mentioned that I recently stopped emailing my journals to my Weight Watchers email group of friends. That's because I felt like I was being defensive and snippy towards them whenever I didn't have a perfect little Weight Watchery day. I felt like they couldn't understand why week after week, I ingested nearly all of my 35 WPA during the weekends while I worked. All of this stuff made me feel like I was failing at my "diet", and thus the "screw it" attitude that naturally came along next.

Anyway, I'm very excited for the future. I'm not going to be so crazy or so hard on myself. After all, this is NOT supposed to be a diet. But any lifestyle can morph into something too restrictive and not easy to follow whenever you create too many "extra" rules. I'm going to spend the next few days re-reading the program materials and trying to act like a Weight Watchers newbie. I'm not going to pay as much attention to what my Weight Watchers friends are doing. I'm not going to feel that pressure anymore. I'm going to go back to doing things my way. This is NOT a diet. This is NOT a diet. This is NOT a diet..........