Day 1 Photo Challenge & Fat People Club :-D

Day 01 - A picture of yourself with ten facts.

• I love to be silly!
• Nothing is more important to me than the people I love.
• I don't like pools. I am all about the natural water.
• I don't feel like I live up to my potential.
• I love physical contact, but I'm awfully picky.
• I love movies, especially Disney & Jackie Chan.
• I am obsessed with words & languages.
• I love taking pictures. I love capturing moments in time forever.
• Pushing past my limits, especially physically, is one of my favorite things in the world.
• I wish I were a much better singer & musician but I'm too lazy.

I'd like to make excuses about karate & school & all of that being responsible for my major slackage, but the truth is I made a million conscious decisions. I chose to sleep in rather than make a healthy lunch. I chose to take a nap instead of exercising. I chose to eat a bag of chips instead of a salad. Those were my decisions & I chose my priorities. Did I choose correctly? I don't know. I know that I'm where I need to be in some aspects of my life but not in others. & I don't like it but I do accept responsibility for it & rejoice in the successes I've had.

I can stubborn my way through pretty much anything if I want to do it badly enough. This is especially true in terms of my eating & exercise habits. But I lack endurance. I always need to have an end in sight, & I can't change my life that way. That's why I hate things like going off sugar for awhile & other extremes. Lives have to change, not be put on hold long enough to achieve a result. It will not & it cannot last. So while I'm human & duh, I'd love a quick fix, I recognize how unreasonable it is to have that kind of expectation.

When our family went camping this weekend, my sister Amber said that she wanted to go back on Weight Watchers. I don't like being dependent on anything or anyone but I know the program works & I know I do better when I'm accountable to someone. So Wednesday we went to a meeting & got signed up. Amber's close to her lifetime weight again & I'm 55+ pounds away from mine so I've got a lot longer to go than she does. But I know how to do it, & I know my body works fabulously when I give it the opportunity. It's always incredibly tempting for me to set goals, like "I'll be this weight by this date" or "I'll lose 2 pounds a week". Those are typically relatively reasonable goals, but I don't want to do that anymore. Like I said, I can't make a lifestyle change with an end point in mind. It has to be a change.

It's going well so far. I don't know how different my scale is from the Weight Watchers scale. At least next week we are going Wednesday, & most likely from now on we will go on Tuesdays. It's always been difficult for me to weigh in on Saturday mornings. I don't care who you are; weekends are rough on everyone. I was inevitably at my heaviest every time & that puts a huge damper on your enthusiasm. I always do well during the week, so now I'll be able to really see my progress. I'm only going to post my Weight Watchers weight as official, but I am going to try to get a decent comparison next week: weigh at home right before going to weigh in.

As of this morning, my home scale showed me being down 8 pounds from my weigh-in weight. Obviously it's unlikely that they are the same or that the WW scale weighs me lighter than my home scale. But based on my last home weigh-in before that, my best estimation is that I've lost 6 pounds. I'm incredibly hopeful that I can get under 200 ASAP. I'd be thrilled if I did it before the next weigh-in but that would be 18.7 pounds at WW & well, that seems unlikely. I was high before Memorial Day weekend & even higher after so I'm not at all surprised that I'm losing quickly BUT I do recognize that 19 pounds is both unlikely & not entirely safe. But I'm doing my best!!! My biggest difficulty is getting my fruits & vegetables & dairy servings, eating at a reasonable time, & especially getting all of my points eaten. But I can & will do it. Yippee!!