July 18, 2003
July 11-18: gained 2.75 pounds
I’ve been in WW a solid 2 years. I stopped maintaining this website a year and a half ago, but I continued going to meetings. However, I haven’t kept to the program as much as I would have liked.
Whenever I do journal, and keep to the program, I lose weight. But I find I lack the discipline necessary to keep this up for long periods. Luckily, since I have learned new eating habits, and I now know how to eat sensibly, closing my eyes and “using the force” seems to result in maintenance rather than gain. A lot of this, of course, is due to continuing going to meetings, since I know when I go up a pound I have to apply myself the following week to lose it.
Most of those 2.75 pounds last week were due to going out and drinking the night before weigh-in. According to my home-scale weigh ins, that weight is gone, two days later. Once I reach lifetime, I’m set. I’m a Jedi Master when it comes to maintenance. But I’m still 15 pounds away from that goal. (My goal of 150 pounds hasn’t really changed, but 155 pounds is the upper limit for my height, and that is going to be my ‘official’ goal. That way I will build in a little padding to help maintaining lifetime.)
A little over 12 weeks ago I switched to an At-Work meeting, and my weigh-in day has changed from Wednesday to Friday. I decided this weekend to recharge this website, without even realizing the total coincidence of my last weigh-in day. I knew I had started in late July of 2001, but I didn’t remember it was the 18th. Exactly 2 years. Two years, 104 weeks, 35 pounds. 35 pounds that I’ve kept off, and are gone for good.
I’ve experimented with several exercise activities. I was walking daily at work with some coworkers for several weeks, but then the coworkers dropped out, and it was very difficult to keep it up when I was the only one walking. And then the summer heat in St. Louis hit, and there was no way I was walking in that. There’s a yoga class in my neighborhood on Wednesday evenings I’m thinking about trying.
My co-workers are different from my co-workers back in Week 19. Approximately Week 26, I was a participant in what the company lovingly referred to as the “Involuntary Severence Program.” Lots of other terms out there for it. As my WW leader at the time told me months later, “You could have responded by eating a lot, but you didn’t.” She’s right, but I couldn’t afford to. I finally found another non-temporary job March 10th, 2003. I am no longer a computer programmer, but write to corporate and private foundations and ask for money on behalf of a local non-profit. Grant writing. Rather than producing reams of code to benefit a Fortune 500 company, I am actually returning something to the community. My salary is about half what I was making previously, but I’m enjoying it.
206.6/171.5/150
35 pounds since July 18, 2001