Sunday, April 13, 2014

A Pensive Post

This blog has been woefully neglected for well over a week. My sincerest apologies for the unexpected, unannounced hiatus. I can't say I've been doing better with my weight loss -- in fact I've doing worse. This isn't a Weekend Wrap-Up post or a Weekly Weigh-In post. It's simply a post I need to make to get my thoughts straighten out to hopefully help me reevaluate my journey and where I'm going with it.

As I've continuously mentioned these past few weeks have been hard. Much harder than I was expected. It's not even that I'm having consecutive days where I'm sad, angry, or just feeling down. I'm having to adjust to life changes -- both good & bad -- that have completely thrown me for a loop.

So I've been emotionally eating: I'll eat when I'm happy, sad, angry, frustrated, depressed, joyful, stress, pleased, etc. Any emotion you can name, I've probably been eating for it. I remember my first year of doing Weight Watchers so clearly. The program was SO easy. I had thought that I wasn't an emotional eater because I did so well controlling everything: my feelings AND my food. I was in a safe place in my life for a variety of reasons because I had just moved some place new where I didn't have friends in the area so I didn't have to worry about eating out. I didn't have to worry about splitting my time between work, friends, the gym, and my other hobbies. I only had to worry about me for the first year of my WW journey and that made it IMMENSELY easy to follow the program.

At about 10 months into the program, I started going through some personal life changes that threw me for a loop like it's done to me now. And now as I'm reflecting on it, the circumstances of what's happening in my present are incredibly similar to what was happening two years ago when my commitment to the WW program started to waiver.

How does one control their emotions so it doesn't affect their eating habits? Better yet, how does one separate their eating/food behaviors from their emotions? How does one endure difficult or even just simple life changes without wanting to fall back on the one thing that's always been a comfort to them: food. How?

The other thing I struggle with is my motivation. I feel like I've lost any & all motivation I may or may not have had at the beginning of my journey. Actually, I can say for certain that I never had an end goal in mind when I started Weight Watchers. I started the program because I just wanted/needed something in my life to control as I was dealing with other Life Changes (again!) when I moved from Pennsylvania to Delaware. Joining WW gave me something to focus on, something to control, while other aspects in my life were completely out of my control. So when I started WW, I didn't necessarily have a motivation to do it other than having some sort of control over at least one area in my life.

While I do still want to have control over something in life, it's not the most important thing to me right now. I have something that's consistent: my job. I think it was the lack of something consistent and constant that I needed in my life (because, at the time, I had only been out of college for a year and I had no idea what a steady job was and there so much uncertainty in my life when I started WW). Now I feel I've settled down and while life can be a roller coaster of changes, emotions, and adjustments, at least I feel secure with a few things: where I am in my life (specifically job-wise) and who I am as a person. Although I'm uncertain about those things at times but I feel secure enough with them to not have that need to control my food all the time like I did when I first joined WW.

I do know what my end goal is for Weight Watchers. I want to weigh 125lbs or thereabouts. But I have no idea what I'll look like at 125lbs or how I feel. The problem is kind of twofold: I feel great about myself and my body now more than I ever have in my life before. It's not perfect but these past few months have been about loving my body the way it is in its current state. I love the fact that I've really grown into a well-rounded person with lots of different interests & hobbies that I'm not ashamed to geek out about (even though I know I'm still discovering/creating who I am as a person). It's not like my end goal is to change who I am as a person. I just want to be healthy and happy but I'm still trying figure out if the two can even go together...

With all of that being said, I feel like there is no specific end in sight. Any time I've tried to put a deadline on my weight loss, it just stresses me out and I end up disappointing myself. I don't foresee myself making it to my goal weight by the end of this year but I also don't have anything that I absolutely NEED to lose weight for by a certain time. And I don't have any big, grand plans that I can do when I make it to my goal weight. It's not like I'm going to treat myself to a trip when I make it to goal weight. I'm just not. So I literally have ZERO motivation to keep losing weight and that's starting to become my biggest hurdle, especially since I'm so content with how I look & feel now.

I realize this post has been all over the place but it really has helped me to sort through some of my thoughts. I think the biggest thing is that I need to make some sort of motivation for myself. It needs to be something unattainable until I reach my goal weight. It needs to be something awesome but reasonable. I think I need to go back to focusing on the little milestones like losing 5% of my weight then 10% of it, etc. Like, 5% of my goal weight is 8lbs. It actually seems like a lot considering how slow I've been losing since I've lost so much weight. It's doable but I know I'll get frustrated because I used to be able to lose 8lbs in month. If I can lose 1lb a week (like I had originally planned to do), then I would reach it in two months which is awesome.

I may also stop using My Fitness Pal. I know that WW works and sometimes logging my food twice in a day can be rather troublesome. I don't know, so don't quote me on that because I'm sure I'll go track my food on MFP for my work week when I'm done typing this post up. It's just a thought. I do know that I'm going to back to finding out my weight every week. Even if it's giving my phone to my mom who tells me whether I've lost, gained, or stayed the same. As long as I can have an indicator of how I'm doing because I need to reality of my weight going up to snap back into the reality of how easy it is to go back to my starting weight. And that's not some place I want to be ever again.

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