Completion of Week 4!

It's Monday! Today has been a fantastic, yet busy day. I have one month down and 35% of the goal has been attained. I couldn't be happier. Today's official result was a loss of 3.4 pounds for a total loss of 22.2 pounds. It's officially been 27 days.

Today, because I hit a 'benchmark', I saw the doctor when I was in the office. I admitted to him that I struggled this week with the fact that the scale was moving at a much slower pace. The only change I'd made is incorporating the Wii Fit, but on a 6 day per week schedule of 45 minutes of cardio/step aerobics. I was pretty bummed toward the middle and end of the week that it appeared I'd only end up losing about two pounds. I KNOW two pounds is good, but frustrating when you are coming off of a 6 pound loss the prior week, with no changes. I was reminded frequently this week as I expressed my annoyance at "only two pounds" that I was still losing and that two pounds was a nice, healthy, easy to maintain weight loss for one week. I KNOW all of that--I've been on so many different programs throughout the years...it's all stuff that I know, but still!!

I also heard a few analogies over the past few weeks about how much I've lost and relating it to other things. One of my friends said something to the tune of it's like carrying around 12 boxes of butter...well, yes, I suppose it is, but, who does that? I don't carry around boxes of butter, ever...so that didn't really work for me as a great comparison. Someone else told me this week, ya know, it's like carrying around a 16 pound bowling ball, you're not doing that anymore. That kind of worked, but again, I don't typically go around carrying 16 pound bowling balls, unless I might be going bowling. Last night, however, I found an analogy that worked for me. I got home rather late, after being gone from mid-afternoon watching football and needed to feed Cocoa. I went to get her food out and remembered I needed to refill the container. I went to the garage to get the new bag of dog food I had just bought for her. It was an 18 pound bag of dog food. I brought it in the kitchen, picked it up to pour it into it's container...and it hit me....that's an 18 pound bag of dog food! Holy Crap! As of last Monday, I wasn't carrying that around ON ME anymore! Today, it's that bag, plus some! As I was walking upstairs to do my Wii Fit tonight, I thought that about a month ago, everytime I walked upstairs, I was carrying that dog food bag with me, but not anymore! Sometimes you just have to find the analogy that works for you.

There really hasn't been any struggles to report or any issues this week. Work is insanely busy, but that's a great thing in my opinion. I am adjusting well to what I can eat and what I need to do to get my water in and what works for me. I still have not deviated off the plan, and it does get easier and easier to adapt to what's on there. This weekend I had dinner out one night. It wasn't quite what I thought it was going to be, but I ate the part I could, and left the rest. The frustrating part of that was if I had just ordered a salad, with grilled chicken, It would have worked perfectly. So much for trying to do something a little different! I'm determined, I will reach my goal and look forward to every Monday to see how I'm progressing toward the next benchmark.

I think I've blogged before about "treats" and people suggesting that maybe for each 10 pounds I give myself a treat of one meal, whatever I want. I've not done that. I don't have a desire to have a "treat" meal. I am not having any issues and I really don't feel deprived of anything eating healthy, so why bother to "treat" myself at this point. As fast as the pounds are coming off, I'm good with waiting for something special to treat myself. At this point, the treat will be a glass of wine or an ice cold beer at my birthday party.

In closing....Have a fantastically awesome week!

“Discipline is the bridge between goals and accomplishments”