Meeting Tomorrow!

I'm very excited to report that I'm going to be attending meetings again starting tomorrow. I re-activated my monthly pass and I'm ready to get down to business. I had a long talk with my fiance Dave last night while watching The Biggest Loser. I told him that I'm glad he loves me the way I am right now, but the truth is, I don't love myself. I hate to look in the mirror, and I want my old body back. Enough is enough. And he said something to me that I needed to hear. He basically told me that in order to succeed and not get frustrated, I'm really going to have to pass up a lot of temporary gratification in order to see my long-term goal again. He is oh so right.

Basically I'm really good at following the plan when I've got absolutely nothing going on in my life. When I mess up tends to be when my life gets chaotic, or when I'm out with friends. I have been really bad at succumbing to peer pressure, or just doing what everyone else is doing to fit it, but no more! It's so silly to think that the temporary feeling you get from a big plate of wings and several beers, or a weekend bender of candy and sweets outweighs the lasting mark of healthy living and the resulting weight loss. Not to mention the fact that I feel on top of the world when I am on plan. And, usually when I veer far off track, I feel terrible and am frequently upset with myself.

I've done a lot of reviewing of what does and doesn't work for me with Weight Watchers. I started the program for the very first time when I was 20 years old, the summer before my junior year of college. I never bothered to learn about activity points and I wasn't very good at "banking" extra points for treats, but, I had a young metabolism on my side, and, sort of following the program was enough to take me from 172 pounds, to about 150. I am 5'3", and 150 is still considered overweight, but I looked and felt great. I'm a curvy gal, and the lowest I can ever see myself being is about 145. That's my hot weight. If I ever got lower, then great, but I just think it would be too hard to maintain.

Anyway, I learned a lot of bad habits along the way. I learned that I could still lose weight if I had a "cheat day" after the day I weighed in. I probably over-exercised in order to make up for my nights spent in bars and for those after-hours trips to McDonalds. And somewhere along the way I taught myself to feel enormous guilt whenever I slipped off track. This, I believe, has led to my current bad habit of just letting everything go out the window whenever I've simply had a bad meal, or a bad couple of hours of eating within a day. Then the other day, I had an epiphany and realized just how DUMB it is to accidentally go over my daily points by 10-15, and think that the smart thing to do is just to continue being bad that day. Even if I rounded out the day eating exactly what I'd planned on eating before going overboard, I'd be WAY better off than if I just continued down the wrong path all day/week/month. This is so incredibly obvious, but somehow I've missed the boat.

I also missed out on Tools for Living. I'll be honest and say that I've poo-pooed them for years. I just never bought into it. Recently, I've taken a second look at them and realized that there is definitely something to them that I've cheated myself out of for years by not incorporating them into my lifestyle. Part of my realization came from reading BitchCake's blog. She does an excellent job of using the Tools for Living in her daily life, and reviews them frequently for those who are unfamiliar with them- a la people like me! She also does an incredible re-cap of her weekly meetings, and posts them early in the week. They are so thorough, I have used them in place of meetings for a long time now. They are actually what got me to be more "in my head" about things lately. Thank you, BitchCakes! :)

Since she does such a wonderful job of summarizing the meetings each week, there's really no point in my doing the same thing here on this blog. Instead, I'm committing to attending a weekly meeting EVERY WEEK, no matter how well I think I did on plan, and, I'll recap my week and include a feature called "What I Took Away", focusing more on incorporating tools for living and learning lessons for me, as I work on learning how not to throw in the towel when I have slip ups. I want to use this space as a bragging area for the things I do right each week, and I'll get a little emotional at times too. I'm looking forward to finally posting some stats that don't just look like a yo-yo either! No more up/down with the weigh-ins, I just wanna go down, down down!!