Unsafe at Any Size

Well sorta.  I know tracking works, but my perfectionism is getting in the way of tracking.  Instead of seeing it as objective information about what I’m doing, I see it as damning evidence that I’m doing everything wrong.

When I lost 100 lbs, I was a great tracker.  I was doing something I called “flore”, flex points but eating mostly core foods (now called filling foods).  I didn’t eat activity points or extra weekly points.

I can’t do that now, so instead of owning what I’m doing, I’m just not tracking.

So, instead of tracking online, I got myself a little notebook.  I’m starting by just writing down the foods I’m eating–no quantities, no points.  Some days I’m getting everything in, some days I stop at noon.  But I’m not letting it drop.

How do you get back on track(ing)?

Not my feet, not my scale, not my weight

Whaddya know!  Tracking works.  You know that, and I knew that.  I know it again, too.  I lost 2 lbs this week, for a total of 113 lost.

I know that tracking works, so why did I stop?  Because it was all too much.  When I was originally tracking, I was doing flore- eating core foods but tracking points.  I wouldn’t eat my weekly points or my activity points.  Not surprisingly, it was very effective, but also hard to maintain.

When I got down to 22 daily points, I panicked.  This isn’t the way I wanted to live my life!  So I stopped tracking.  For the most part, my diet has changed enough so that worked well.  But after the Halloween debacle, it was time to get serious again.  Not too serious, though–I’m going over my daily allotment of points by a few each day.  And that is ok!

I’m hoping Thanksgiving won’t be very challenging this year, even though I’m not doing the cooking.  We are traveling to LA, and my sister and mother in law are both doing Weight Watchers.  We’ll have pumpkin pie for the kids, but we’re going to try Hungry Girl’s Pumpkin Smash.

Speaking of pumpkin, I now do a variation on the Hungry Girl pumpkin pudding, but instead of using premade pudding I use an immersion blender and blend in a can of pumpkin into 2 cups of milk, vanilla or butterscotch pudding mix, and some pumpkin pie spice.  Add a little lite Cool Whip, and you’ve got a fantastic dessert.  No, it’s not pumpkin pie, but it’s great for every day.

But oh no! Apparently, we are looking at a pumpkin shortage this year! Ohhhhhhhhh noooooooo!  Should I go and buy a crate of pumpkin now?  Screw the Eggo waffle shortage people; this is serious.  (Serious=it affects me.)

At least half of the Hungry Girl recipes feature pumpkin; why, I’m eying a chocolate and peanut butter fudge recipe on her site right now that uses a can!

I AM going to clear out the local Lucky.  If you can’t find pumpkin to make your pie, you can blame me and my pumpkin hoarding.

Not my feet, not my scale, not my weight

I knew the news wouldn’t be good today, and sure enough, it wasn’t: gained 2.2 lbs.  I’m pretty sure I didn’t eat that much Halloween candy; it must magically multiply in my thighs.

But the good news is, I do know what works, and that is tracking.  I haven’t done it consistently for about a year (?!? could it be that long?), and my weight has more or less drifted downward.  But now it’s drifting upwards.  I threw out all the clothes that don’t fit me, so that’s not a direction I want to go.

So thanks to DH Joel who hit me with the “Duh” stick.  Sometimes, it takes the obvious to get unstuck.  I’m back to tracking.

I realized I’m going to have to be a little less hard core when it comes to tracking.  When I was making good progress, I was doing something I called “flore”: eating mostly core foods (now filling foods on Weight Watchers) but counting points, using just my daily points and not eating any activity points or weekly points.

That worked great when I had 28 or 30 daily points, but now that I’m down to 22 daily points, it’s no wonder I found it too restrictive.  The solution is not to give it up altogether, but to do it the way it’s supposed to be: with room for life.  No program that is inflexible is something you can live with.

So here I was, moaning and groaning how I’d fallen of the wagon, how I was eating all the kids’ candy, boo hoo, what should I do.

So what does my husband say?

“Sounds like you should start tracking again. And set a goal.”

Sputtering. Bu-bu-but.

Leave it to a guy to cut through the crap.  I’m starting tacking again.  As for a goal?  Hmmm…

When you don’t hear from a healthy lifestyle blogger for a while, it’s usually not a good sign.  I’ve fallen off the proverbial wagon, and I’m having trouble getting back up.

I’ve been falling for a while… not tracking points for months and months.  I don’t track when I don’t want to know what I’m eating.  I was kinda making sure things stayed ok… in essence, I was doing Core (or Filling Foods, the newfangled term from Weight Watchers).  When you do Core, you limit your foods to certain foods and then only track the non-core foods.

I was still doing ok, though, drifting slowly down.  But then, they changed the schedule of classes at my local Y.  I had been going three times a week, twice a week to a boot camp class after work and once a week to kickboxing in addition to daily walks.  But the boot camp class moved from 5 pm to 5:30, which meant instead of going directly from work to the class, I would have to drive an additional 15 minutes home to get the kids from after school care and drive back to the Y since their after school care ends at 6:30.

Needless to say, any exercise plan that requires that much extra work (and driving in rush hour traffic) won’t work for long.  Instead of doing a class, I was trying to do some running* and then some hand weights/balance ball exercises.

Then daylight savings time ended, and with it that plan.

As darkness fell on my exercise regime, some people in my house actually went door to door and took the best kind of candy from our neighbors and stored it in big bags in our house.  Then, those people (ok, I should probably call them my children) would ask for it every night, and would very generously let me eat the Milky Ways and peanut butter cups because they were happier eating skittles and other kinds of candy that would definitely have been second or third tier back in MY day.

The good candy is now disposed of (note the crafty use of passive voice here!  Nothing here says that I disposed of it by eating it), but now I’m up a few pounds, without any kind of eating discipline and exercising irregularly.

Normally, a Weight Watchers meeting is a good way for me to get back on track, but last weekend our family celebrated a Bat Mitzvah.  For those who don’t know what a Bat Mitzvah is, it is when a girl turns 13, reads from the Torah (holy scrolls), and then has a big party and gets lots of money.

We skipped the big party, but not the delicious luncheon.  Did you know that restaurants make sandwiches with real crusty freshly-made bread (NOT sandwich thins), chicken, grilled onions (yes, with real olive oil, not Pam) AND with big slabs of brie (no laughing cow)?

It’s true.  Not only did this abomination to Weight Watchers exist, but I ate it.  Not half, the whole thing.   I also ate the chocolate cake with hazelnut whipped cream that came after it.  I would give myself credit for asking for the salad instead of the fries with that sandwich, but that meant I just ate my kids’ instead.

So I’m looking for my resolve.  Have you seen it running around your neighborhood?  Should I put up posters?  Offer a reward?

How do you get back on track?

*For the purposes of this blog, we will call the running-like motion without any appreciable speed running or jogging.  This is to humor the blogger, and by no means is an accurate representation of the activity described.