The other thing that’s really exciting is that I went back to the scene of all the ugliness earlier this year and completely erased all the bad feelings I had. We went to order our bridesmaid dresses for September and I was down 2 dress sizes. The red was December 30 and the green was May 5:

I felt like I had to post the picture though I honestly don’t see a damn bit of a difference between the two (different style dresses…whoops). But the cool part is even in the smaller size Kathy can get her whole arm in the dress with me which means by the time it shows up that dress will be too big. Yes, that’s my goal.

So I had a nice break but it’s time to get focused and keep making progress. I will be weighing in one week from today and I want to see that 1.5 pounds gone again!

How do you get yourself back “on track” after some time off? 

I tend not to take these notes to heart because I just don’t trust them (too many factors to calculate) and it ultimately doesn’t matter that much. But I like to see the number trending lower and lower so I ask for it every now and then.

Seeing this one made me really excited though because I knew I’d seen that number before…

Look familiar? Some of you have seen that same picture before. Where was it? Oh right…

But what I really want to call your attention to is not the fact that I’m recycling a picture. Instead it’s that little note about how much weight I lost in 2012.

22.5 pounds. Hm.

I posted that on June 27. Out of those 22 pounds, 15 of them were ones I lost doing Whole30. Which means from January-May I only lost 7.5 pounds. And I was all “2012 is my year! blahblahblah!”

I say this not to beat myself up for the past but to give myself one giant smack in the face for all the moping and wailing I’ve done lately. It’s not a weigh in week so I don’t know where I am right now but as of last week:

Total Weight Lost in 2013 = 21 pounds

Total Credibility Remaining = 0

As much as it’s great to be honest about my feelings and share how emotional this has been for me, sometimes I just need to shut up.

I know it’s important to acknowledge how hard it is to lose weight and how crazy I sometimes feel as I’m doing it because I want anyone else facing those things to know they’re not alone, I know how it feels too – and we’ll get through it. Sometimes you really do just have to keep going. Even when you feel like you’re close to losing your mind because it seems like nothing is working or happening.

But there’s a point when you have to stop wallowing. And I’m past that point now. I don’t feel shiny and happy and hopeful or anything but it’s no longer productive to keep talking about how discouraged and overwhelmed I feel. We all know I’m being too hard on myself.

It would be awesome to be back at 240 by the end of June this year and I think 15 pounds in about 8 weeks is a nice thing to reach for – but the exact date I reach that weight is not really important. I’ve already worked harder this year than I did last year and I just want to keep that up. And I’ve made one very important decision.

I will not start over next year.

I will keep working hard. I will keep losing weight steadily, no matter how slowly it seems to be happening. And when January 2014 gets here I will not be back at the beginning again.

I haven’t been on my scale since Saturday. It would be nice to come here and say that it doesn’t bother me but I’m a little more overwhelmed than I thought I would be.

Okay, so I’ve not hit the delusion stage just yet but I have accumulated a collection of American Psycho gifs that I’m dying to use.

Without the scale I have nothing new to report this week. I’m sticking to my habits – I track everything I eat, I worked out 6 days a week (5.5 hours total), and I’m still struggling to drink enough water. I really hope I’ll be able to come here and report some non scale victories eventually but I’m going to have to figure out what those are.

Instead I thought I would give you a little video summary of my first 1/4 (almost 1/3) of the year:

This was prompted by Alan over at Sweating Until Happy.

Some highlights if you can’t watch the video right now:

• I’ve lost 14.5 pounds so far this year. (edited 5/1: 16 pounds because I started at 276, not 273 like I thought)
• I didn’t start out strong, but I’m honestly working on my weight loss now.
• Today is a weigh in day with my trainer and if I don’t have some progress to show for this week I’ll get to change things up and hopefully see some movement on the scale again.
• I’m not giving up this time!

I don’t want to give you the idea that I’m completely past all my negative attitude just yet because I’m still working to feel optimistic again. It’s hard to accept this because just one year ago I lost 17 pounds in 6 weeks. It seems like if my body was capable of doing something that extreme one year ago it should be able to do something more realistic this year. BUT the good news is that if I don’t see progress this week then I’ll be able to DO something about it instead of just waiting and letting my body adjust. I always feel better when I know I’m doing something instead of just…whining.

Odds are high that if I’m really excited about my progress this week I’ll tweet and/or Instagram it. But if not I’ll be here next week with a game plan. And who doesn’t love a good plan?

But I did as I was told and on Saturday I took my scale to Betsy’s house where I won’t be able to casually sneak over and accidentally weigh myself.

I think we can all agree that no one is their body. We are all so much more than skin and bones. So whatever the scale says is irrelevant when it comes to determining worth.

But I have a lot of weight to lose. Not just for superficial reasons, though right now they are my inspiration (not gonna lie, not even a little), but because I know the longer I stay this overweight the harder it is on my body. I am healthy right now, but I know that won’t last if I don’t take action. And I’m young – I have a lot of life ahead of me that won’t be very enjoyable if I have health problems and/or can’t be as active as I want to be because I chose not to do anything when I had the choice.

So letting go of my easiest method of tracking my progress is terrifying. I want this so bad it hurts. And while I will still get to weigh in every two weeks with my trainer, I won’t know from week to week if I’m making progress. Two weeks feels like a very long time to just be out here with no idea where I am. I could do a lot of damage in two weeks.

But because I’m so scared, I know I have to take this leap. Obviously I’m a lot more emotionally invested in what my scale says than I want to be. Maybe the best way to fix that is to take this leap of faith and cut the cord. And also try to cram one more cliche into that last sentence.

It’s not like I’ll really get that far off course since I know I’m checking in every two weeks, and not having a scale at home has no impact on my ability to keep working out and eating right. I’m just being dramatic and worrying because that’s what I do. I hope in a few days that feeling like I’m going to spin out of control will go away and I’ll laugh at how dramatic I was about this.

So here we go with this newest adventure. Like I said, I’m still really apprehensive about the whole thing but if it gets me closer to my goal then that’s all that matters.

Do you own a scale? Have you ever made the choice to get rid of your scale?

That’s .5 pound lost since last week.

It’s also .5 pound that’s sent me into an ugly, self-indulgent tantrum.

I’m tired of saying over and over again that I want to do better, that I don’t know what I did wrong, that I’ll give it more time and hopefully things will catch up. It doesn’t help to come here and say the same thing every week.

But it doesn’t help to remember that I was losing .5-1 pound per week when I was only working out twice a week and just guessing at portion sizes 80% of the time while knowingly making poor food choices the other 20% of the time. For the past 6 weeks I’ve honestly felt like I’ve been fully invested in my weight loss efforts more so than I have been since June of last year, and yet the outcome is not different from when I was crossing my fingers and hoping for the best while I half-assed my way through. At 14.5 pounds in 15.5 weeks I’m averaging just less than a pound a week and it feels like my goals are slipping out from under me once again.

Normally when I get angsty about the scale I try to remind myself that there’s more to this than just numbers and that the scale is not the only way to decide if all of this is working. But I’ve gotta be honest, I’m just not feeling upbeat and optimistic right now.

What the pictures don’t show is a loss of 7 pounds in 6.5 weeks and I – quite honestly – think I look a little worse for it. Maybe it’s better in normal clothes and maybe it would have been more evident if I’d made myself take a picture on January 1st when I was 14.5 pounds heavier and could compare that instead of a 6 week progress picture. But this isn’t a source of motivation right now either.

So what keeps me going now? Quite honestly, the only reason I don’t walk away at this point is that I know I won’t feel better if I do. Giving up won’t solve anything. Sticking with it is hard, and I don’t want to do it – but I’m tired of wishing I’d stuck with it every other time I tried to lose weight in the past. There’s still some drowning part of me that hopes I’m on the verge of a breakthrough. I’m also so emotionally wrapped up in this it’s very hard to be even remotely objective. It’s taken me all day to write this post and I’m still not sure I want to hit publish because in many ways I feel like I’m having a temper tantrum.

Ultimately, progress in the right direction -no matter how slow- is something. It was just easier to celebrate when I didn’t feel like I had earned it.

If you want to pretend I lost 7 pounds this week, I’m good with that. But I kind of feel like we should throw out last week since it was so weird. However you want to look at it, I’ve lost 2.5 pounds in 2 weeks which seems completely realistic and normal. I want that to be higher, but I am not going to complain. It’s hard because I feel like I made a dramatic change by adding so much cardio to my routine and I’m not seeing dramatic results – but this is still good and I can still be comfortable with it.

Turning to non-scale victories now, I’m still tracking everything on My Fitness Pal (minus another trip to the caterer). I also have to report that I’ve kept my newest cactus alive long enough for it to bloom:

It’s getting easier for me to keep up with drinking all the water I’m supposed to which is really all I wanted.

I also did 5 days of workouts this week:

I normally wouldn’t take 2 rest days in a row but I wasn’t feeling awesome on Sunday so I just laid around. On Tuesday my iPod died 10 minutes into my swim and getting through the rest of that was not fun. I never realized how much having music helps me – but I had another toy to keep me entertained!

I made sure to get a heart rate monitor I could wear while I was swimming. It’s cumbersome to check it while I’m doing laps but it did help me push myself to speed up so I could stay “in the zone” so to speak. It was also nice to use it for my ballet class, just to see the comparison – and that’s why I feel okay with doing an hour of cardio on top of ballet because, as you might guess, ballet is not a major calorie burner.

If any of you are interested, Jenna is hosting That Weight Loss Challenge round 4. I’m signed up for the Google doc and photoshoot prize portions, but I won’t be joining the Diet Bets because, as you can see from my results lately, aiming to lose 4% of my body weight in a month would set me up for major disappointment (and $$ loss). You have until the 15th to sign up if you’re interested. I’ve done this every round and I always see progress (and usually make a new friend or two).

Overall I’m feeling good about this week. I’m happy to see progress and I think that’s what matters.

How are you doing this week? Anyone else doing TWLC4?

If you haven’t seen it (in all its cheesy 90′s glory), the movie takes place during one day at Empire Records – and that happens to be Rex Manning Day. Which is today. And in honor of this holiday I’m presenting you with my stockpile of Empire Records gifs.

I wish this nail polish set was real:

Monday is not my favorite day of the week, but this has me in an unusually good mood today. It’s the little things, right? So don’t mind me, I’ll just be rocking out to the soundtrack all day today.

 What’s your favorite movie of all time?

I updated my YouTube channel when I gave my blog a makeover so definitely go see. I probably should have cut this video down a little more than I did but…oh well. TL:DR version: It’s all fine, I’m just sulking.

As long as you’re here, let’s talk about water. I am awful at drinking water – I just don’t like it. I like my drinks to be sweet so I usually end up not drinking because I would drown myself in calories or chemicals. But I know drinking water is really important so I’m always trying to find ways to get myself to drink it. I’ve seen a lot of people tweeting about the Plant Nanny app so I decided to try it out.

Fast forward a few days…

Somehow I wound up with the thirstiest effing cactus in existence. What kind of self-respecting cactus just hauls off and dies after a few days with only a little water??

I tried again with a different kind of plant and in 2 days…

Well okay then. It might be safe to say this app is not inspiring enough for me.

One last thing – who else is really excited for Finding Dory?

Hope you have a good weekend!