Proud of Myself Today

Hi all. Sorry I haven't posted at all in a really long time. The quarter has swallowed me. Fortunately, my last lecture is on Monday, so things are starting to wrap up. I have lots to write about, so I'll try to start doing that regularly again.

I'm feeling super positive right now, so I wanted to share/record the feeling. Here's the back-story: I've been on Weight Watchers since the beginning of August because I realized that, with all of the excessive amounts of exercise I got as a teenager and through college, I never learned to regulate what I ate. I always sucked down as much food as I could get my hands on, and if I started to feel a little chunky, I'd eat salads for a week and be back to normal. During grad school I started swinging between weeks where I would pig out and weeks when I would starve myself to try to "diet," and I eventually found myself miserable and starting to hate food. In particular, I was starting to hate going out to eat/having dinner with friends because I knew that I would inevitably eat too much and feel sick for hours afterward.

Well, Weight Watchers has worked. I still pig out sometimes, but I'm more conscious about only doing it rarely and picking better foods to pig out on. The rest of the time, I'm eating consistent meals from day to day. I still get the occasional day or two when I feel hungry and "diet-brained," but for the most part I've found that I can live long term with my new eating habits.

I weighed myself this morning, and I have officially made my 10% weight loss goal. (WW has this thing where they say that pretty much everyone should lose 10% of their body weight. I don't know that I believe it in general, but it was definitely true for me.) More importantly, I'm back at my "pretend weight," meaning the weight that I used to lie and put on audition forms and that I think of as "my weight." I haven't actually weight this little since before college (not counting my junior and senior years of college when, let's face it, I wasn't doing too well on the eating disorder spectrum). I also retook my measurements that I haven't checked since I signed up in August, and I've lost almost three inches from my waist, two from my thighs, one and a half from my hips, and half an inch from my arms. My clothes finally fit again and I feel like I recognize my own body when I look in the mirror.

I'm still going to go for another couple pounds of weight loss before I start focusing on maintaining my weight, but mostly so that I can eat a lot over the holidays without feeling like a stuffed pig.

I also think that next spring/summer I'm going to try the couch to 5k program that a friend of mine did recently. (Read her blog!) I might be feeling better about my overall body, but I'm still in woefully bad cardiovascular shape. I've never been able to run without feeling like I've been hit by a truck, but maybe following a structured, well-paced program will help me ease into it.