For quite some time, I have been composing a very whiny post in my head. Very whiny. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
Ahem. You may not have noticed, since I only blog about it every other day, that I’ve been working hard on this weight-loss thing. But you reading about it occassionally is not nearly so overwhelmingly annoying as me living with it has been. It seems like I’m fighting a battle with my willpower many, many times each day:
Whiner me: I don’t waaaant to work out.
Keener me: Oh, just do it and you’ll feel better.
Whiner me: But I worked out, now I really waaaaant that caramel pecan chocolate chip cookie!
(damn those caramel chocolate pecan cookies, they will be my undoing)
Keener me: No, no, no. You don’t need cookies. Have a piece of lettuce.
Whiner me: Oh but look, chips are on sale. Sale, I say. Chips… I love chips. Chips make me happy, and I deserve to be happy.
Keener me: NO CHIPS! Chips are evil. You are better than chips. Just say NO to chips.
Whiner me: Wah! I’ve been so good all day, I’m tired, I just want to order a pizza for dinner. And the boys won’t eat pizza unless it has double cheese and bacon. C’mon, throw me a bone here, it’s been a long day.
Keener me: Oh come off it. It will take 15 minutes to throw together a veggie stir fry. You can do it!
Lather, rinse and repeat every. single. day. Damn, I’m starting to hate ‘keener me’.
And it wouldn’t have been so very hard to keep up this internal argument if I were making progress. But every Saturday, I would step on to the scale at the gym, and every Saturday the needle would be magnetically drawn to the same place, a full 10 lbs heavier than I’ve ever been. I lost that one pound the first week, gained it back the second week, and it hasn’t budged in four long weeks. It has been, in a word, demoralizing. Why try if it isn’t making any difference? Why work out two or three times a week, why deny myself the treats, why stress myself out for NOTHING?
(Like I said, whiny. Don’t say I didn’t warn you!)
BUT!
This Saturday, as I stepped on to the scale, I was braced for the disappointment. I centred my feet in exactly the same spot I always do, leaned forward the way I always do, and damn near fell off the scale when I saw it was down a full five pounds.
Five pounds? FIVE POUNDS? I lost five pounds in just one week?
So I stepped off the scale, did a little shuffle, and stepped back on the scale. I could barely bring myself to look. Still down five pounds.
I left the gym feeling a little shakey, and it wasn’t just from the 25 minutes full-tilt on the elliptical. I wanted to believe, wanted with my whole heart to believe it was true, and yet I couldn’t help but feel that someone was about to snatch this small victory away from me.
I’ve never actually been successful at weight loss before. I’ve lost weight due to stress (lost a bunch when I moved away from home the first time, lost so much when I went through my divorce that I took to saying I’d lost 225 lbs – 25 lbs off me, and another 200 lbs off my back) but I’ve never in the years of trying lost more than a pound or so. I’ve just kind of acclimatized to the new weight every couple of years.
Do you think it’s possible? Did I really lose 5 lbs last week? No wait, shhhhhh, don’t say anything. If I just never step on a scale again, I can live with only having met half my goal. I’m going to scratch this one off as a victory while I still can.
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