Two Weeks

When you start dieting, you're all gung-ho. You come up with all these ways to do it right. You print out sheets upon sheets of a food journal. You sign up to sparkpeople. You enter your food at least every night, if not as you're eating it. You obsess about both exchanges and calories. You exercise religiously. You swear off of all white carbs. You don't go out to eat because you don't know how and you don't know how many ounces of chicken are in that salad you got. You weigh and/ or measure your food. All. Of. It.

Oh? You don't. Well, I did.

And I started to see results. And they were good. And encouraging. And then I went to the MD, and he told me even better news. And that was encouraging too.

Then it got to be alot. It got old talking about it all the time. It got tiring to write about it. It got exhausting living that way. No matter how many times I convinced myself this was just a diet and at some point in my life, I could stop and it would be fine, I knew that wasn't true. Because the thing is? That I can't stop. If and when I stop, I gain weight. I've done that no less than two times now, and more than anything I don't want to do it again. All those 16, 18, and 20 sized clothes that I packed away? I want them to stay away. So I can't keep going how I'm going, all orthodox and rigid-like, but I cna't stop either.

So I decided. I would let the journaling and calorie counting go. I have a very good idea in my head of how many exchanges I can eat and how to get them in throughout my day. I gave myself two weeks to just do the exchanges in my head. At the end of two weeks I would see how I did. I also took something of a break from blogging on both this blog and my community blog. I just needed a break.

Today was the last day. I was down close to two pounds, which for this point in my journey, ain't so bad. I'm picking back up the pieces I miss- blogging- and for now letting go of the journaling and sparkpeople. I am going to keep a very close watch. If I find either my habits slipping or my weight going in the wrong direction, back to journaling it is.

In the meantime, I have to find ways to live with this. For, well, a long time. For me, this is the first steop. Seeing if I can do it without the journaling and calorie counting. Doing real-life eating sensibly, in my exchanges. We'll see from there.

On another but possibly related note, this blog has been mostly all weight loss all the time. I've had a few non-weight loss (or gain, as the case may be) related posts, but will probably do some more of that. So I can share a little more of my life. Not just the fact that I'm losing weight.

And successfully, at that.