My Next Decision

My success came to a screeching halt this week. There's been a family issue that unexpectedly took up a lot of my time, however at this point even I know that that's just an excuse. I could have squeezed in a 20 minute walk if it were on my priority list, and yet I have not even 1 sticker on my chart this week. I am infamous for self sabotaging.

Even if I had been getting stickers though, my eating is still very out of control. I managed to eat breakfast everyday, but I'm still binging in the afternoons and evenings. So even though I've worked out more in the past two weeks than I have in the past few months, I still gained weight. Gosh I must have gained 10 pounds in the last month alone.

So after weeks of soul searching and trying a gentle approach, I realize I need more structre if I am going to have any kind of success. I decided that I'm ready to once again join Weight Watchers. The plan works for me. Whenever I follow it I lose weight and I feel that I am determined enough now to follow through with it. I am starting to see that watching what I eat is not a punishment for being fat. I am at a point where I want to stop abusing myself with food, and learn how to nuture myself and start feeling good. I think I am ready for that.

My meetings wouldn't start until next week, so I will be trying to mentally prepare until then. I intend to clear out the garbage from my house and stock it with WW friendly foods and snacks (I am very familiar with the plan, being a WW veteran and all). I will continue to keep a sticker chart for my workout progress, as moving is essential to the WW program.

So, I had another huge set back. But in this learning curve of life I've taken the lesson from it I think I needed to and will hopefully let it propell me onto a better path.

My Second Week

Sucess is such a relative thing!

This week I have two squares on my chart staring back at me with no stickers. So in that sense, I suppose I did worse this week (though I was sick one of the days). Still it was much easier this week to keep going despite my missed work outs. The compulsion to view myself as a failure was not as strong and so I was able to continue through a setback. In that sense I was far more successful.

I will continue this last week with the same 7 day goal I originally set. Though next week when I reset my goals for the next 3 week period, I think I will make some adjustments so that the goal is a little more reasonable, but still increase my level of activity.

I have been 100% with my goal of eating breakfast everyday though and so I am very proud of that. Even the day I was sick and unable to keep things in, I made sure to at least have a glass of orange juice with pulp in the morning. A habit is definitely being formed and I believe I can continue to build on this progress. My next food goal will be to aim for preparing a proper dinner at least during week nights, so that I am eating a regular breakfast at breakfast time, and a regular dinner at dinner time (as opposed to the constant grazing I do all day now). I am going to take the stress of finding highly healthful recipes off me for night now and just concentrate on making dinner every night. I figure once I get my eating patterns reset, then I can tweak it with the more healthful goals (not that I'm striving to cook unhealthy stuff now).

So week 2 not so bad!

My Imperfect Perfection

Okay so today marks the end of my first week. Did I earn my reward?
No, BUT here's the breakdown:

Breakfast was eaten every morning so I was successful on that front. I have to say that making myself eat breakfast did help control some erratic eating patterns throughout the day. I find that I do not crave typical breakfast foods which are carbohydrate based in the morning though, I crave more protien rich foods (just wondering how good it is to eat eggs so often, anyone have a good suggestion for non egg based protien rich breakfasts?) The protien rich breakfasts also help me to feel more energetic and fuller longer.

Working out was not a failure, although my "all or nothing" mindset is having a hard time accepting that. I worked out for 20 mintues everyday except Sunday. Now, I have lots of legimate reasons why I did not do 20 minutes on Sunday, but I'm not sure they really even matter. The bigger point is am I going to let that one day cancel out my efforts and ruin the rest of my plan?

If I can make it through the remaining 2 weeks with only that 1 missed day, that will be quite an accomplishment. I am right back on the horse today with working out again, but when I look at my chart all I see is that one square with no sticker in it. I have to start retraining myself to be proud of all the stickers I did earn and use that empty sqare as a motivator to work harder, not as a means for reminding myself that I wasn't perfect which will in turn lead me to quit (since I can't do it anyway).

A wise poster once told me that I should strive for improvement not perfection. Excellent advice, let's see if I can do it!

My Sticker Chart

So the long weekend is over, school officially started and I am ready to get myself moving...literally.

To movitvate myself, I took a lesson from my 4 year old and made myself a sticker chart. My daughter has already taken charge of monitoring my progress and is sweet enough to share her stickers with me for days that I do well!

The goal is to do 20 minutes of activity every day for the next three weeks. Each week I sucessfully complete I will earn a reward (which I will put up on my sidebar somewhere once I figure them out!). The weeks need to be consecutive in order for me to earn the reward for weeks 2 and 3, otherwise I start the count back as week one.

I am also using the chart to monitor my first food goal. My goal for that is simply to eat breakfast every day. Something I have a very hard time with. I figure, start small and build from there.

The goals are simple and basic, yet have been too much for me to master until now. I realize that in order to reach that big picture, I need to start with baby steps and build on them once as I master each one. I chose 3 weeks as my initial starting point because I read somewhere that it takes 3 weeks of continually doing something before it starts to become habit. As each behavior becomes habitual, I can then start to add on. The chart worked like a charm for my daughter, so why not try it for me!! I need to have a place where I can physically see my progress and be accountable!

How do you all keep yourself accountable???