The Bad Things

I mentioned in my last post that I had been to a birthday party and ate bad things, and teased that there would be a future post on this topic.  Since I ate a chili hot dog for lunch, this seemed like a good time!  :)

While I have been overweight for some time, I did not start doing anything to actively correct that until 2005 (see The History of this Fat if you'd like the full rundown).  That was the first time I joined WW and paid attention to what I was eating.  Since I started this blog (and my new life), I have been trying to monitor what I eat and make better choices.  You know that I cheat frequently, since I have written about our "blow diet" Saturdays.  You also know that there isn't much formality to how I monitor my diet, I'm more focused on being active.  But, still -- I find myself saying things like I ate bad things.  This is something that has always driven me crazy when I've known other people dieting.  I remember an Oprah episode where she had some gourmet baker on who had made this amazing cake of some sort, and Oprah wouldn't even eat a bite because she had a dress she had to fit in for an event and didn't want to mess around.  I mean, one bite?  Walk 5 more minutes on the dreadmill, then.

Again, I get into the slippery slope.  I knew that I was going to have a chili hot dog for lunch, so I did account for that in my calorie counting for the day.  But, I also knew that today I'm planning on adding my second work-out and taking a Zumba class tonight.  I knew that there was room for error.  I do try to make much smarter decisions than I did in the past.  But, when I do eat something that is NOT healthy, I really try not to quantify that as "bad."  The food itself isn't "bad" that is a value I ascribed to it when I chose to eat it instead of a bowl of carrots.  Really, I'm "bad", I'm making choices that are not best for me.  I'm trying to balance this need to lose weight with the reality of the world we live in.

Actually, I watched The Biggest Loser last night for the first time in a while.  I had been feeling kind of blue about my progress and was unsuccessful in even writing a blog post that encapsulated how I was feeling.  I just wanted to watch a show where there were people who had further to go than me and see their progress.  It's always been motivating in the past for me.  And last night's episode proved to be a mixed bag of motivation.  There was a team that was given the opportunity to work on their own to try to get back on the ranch.  They had been working out for the last 13 weeks, or whatever, at home and doing their own thing.  The mother/son pair had lost a combined total of 75 pounds.  (One of them needed to beat 91 pounds in order to beat someone who had the highest percentage of total weight loss.)  So, that was kind of amazing to see that one woman had been able to lose 45 pounds on her own in the amount of time that it's taken me to lose about 15.  Amazing and depressing, actually.  Then, there was another team that lost a challenge and had to go off the ranch for a week.  They got a $1000 to use for food, gym memberships and luxuries.  They chose to spend that allocation on some smart choices -- buying their own food, gym membership -- but then they made some not-so-wise choices like getting massages instead of having their personal trainer from the ranch come and help them.  Needless to say, they lost almost no weight and one of them was sent home.  And they had everything in their toolkit to go off on their own and be successful!  They had been working out and eating right like it was a full time job and still failed when they had to do it on their own.

Now, you can call it schadenfreude if you want, but I took a lot of encouragement from that.  Losing weight, getting healthy, changing your life is hard, hard, hard!  If someone who has been doing it as a full time job can't do it when they lose their support net, then someone like me has an uphill battle to face going it virtually alone.  Whose best current food plan has been to "eat lots of chicken."  Yes, I have Scott -- thank GOD -- going with me, but there are still bumps in the road even if your partner is in with you. 

Anyways, I veered off of the bad things topic that I started -- as I tend to do.  The long and the short is that it's not the food that it's bad -- it's the choices that are bad.  I can't keep making the decisions I made in the past, they're not going to help me get where I want to go.  All I can do is keep looking to the future and don't be caught off guard by too much cake and wine and not enough chicken. 

After all, if I keep working at it, eventually the number will follow the work. 

I HOPE!

hugs,

Heather