An Update on That Whole Weight Watchers Thing

Sometimes I feel like putting my goals on the Internet will help me stick to them.  Perhaps I'll be motivated to avoid the shame of having to publicly admit to failure. 

So ...

For quite awhile now I have been telling people that I've lost 25 pounds in my current run at Weight Watchers. In actuality, 25 pounds was rounding up, because I was hovering somewhere around 23 for like a month.  Last week I gained a bit, so my net loss was down to 22 pounds. 

But this week, I officially hit 25 pounds.  I have now lost exactly 25.0 pounds since I restarted Weight Watchers in mid-February. 

On the one hand, this milestone motivates me to keep going.  Yay exercise!  Yay fruit!  Yay measuring out portions so that by the end of the day every single measuring cup I own is in the dishwasher!  I could do this forever!  Oh, it's so worth it.  So worth it. 

On the other hand, there's a big But that keeps popping up in my head to temper my excitement.  Let me explain.

See, around this time two years ago, I had hit my heaviest weight ever.  I was slightly humiliated.  I joined Weight Watchers and lost 33 pounds.  I was about halfway to my goal. 

But then winter hit and my motivation was low and ... yadda, yadda, yadda ... I gained all 33 pounds back, plus 2 more.  So then I was at a new all-time personal high for my weight.  That was a few months ago when I began my current WW run. 

What frustrates me, then, is that I have to lose 35 pounds just to get back to where I was a year and a half ago.  Instead of losing the second half of my the weight I was losing back then, I'm just losing the first half again.  I feel like I'm never going to get to thin.  


So, I think when I finally hit the 35-pound mark, I will feel like I have turned a corner.  I realize the whole "won't be happy 'til I get back to where I was before" logic is flawed.  First of all, all weight loss is an attempt to get back to where you were before, and every weight loss experience is fraught with the guilt of allowing yourself to get to that point.  If I'm gonna go and feel guilty about gaining back the weight of my previous Weight Watchers run, I might as well feel guilty that I'm not even close to where I got on the run before that, when I lost all my pregnancy weight.  Or what about what I weighed on my wedding day (seven years ago today, by the way)?  That's a whole other milestone.  And even if (sorry, when) I hit my goal weight this time around, I'll still be almost 20 pounds heavier than I was the very first time I did Weight Watchers, the time I became a Lifetime Member.  And when I was in high school ... okay, I'm at least going to draw the line at reference frames from my adult life here. 

My point is, if I set the bar at "some weight I achieved at some random point in time," there is always the opportunity to feel like I could do better.  So why, then, am I so fixated on getting to the 35-pound mark, which is a goal I associate with my previous experience doing Weight Watchers? 

Well, it could be that the last time I did Weight Watchers is just the weight-loss experience that's the freshest in my mind, so I keep coming back to it.  And, of course, there's the fact that my most recent WW experience was the one where my lifestyle and physical factors most closely resembled those of my life today.  It's unrealistic to think that I can get back to the weight I achieved at 23, when I was single and childless, lived with my mom who was also doing WW, resided in a state with ample produce and outdoor exercise opportunities, and, you know, was twenty-three.  But it is realistic to think that I can achieve the same weight-loss that I achieved two years ago. 

But getting to the 2009 weight carries significance beyond recency and similar lifestyle factors.  There's also the fact that my 2009 Weight Watchers run was very emotionally significant for me.  It was horrifying to get to my highest weight ever, horrifying to cross the 200-pound threshold, horrifying to have to start buying plus-sized clothing.  I think I'd always been a little in the chubby range, but that was the first time I think people saw me and thought fat.  I was disgusted with myself, and I knew I had to do something. 

So, as you can imagine, gaining all that weight back, plus a little bonus, amped up my disgust exponentially.  How could I let this happen?  I had to get back to 2009's preliminary weight-loss success, to my halfway-to-goal point, ASAP. 

But, as I'm getting there, I feel like each small loss is totally insignificant.  Until I get to the 35-pound mark for this WW run, I feel sort of like I'm spinning my wheels. 

Which is to say that now that I've hit 25 pounds, I'm setting a 10-pound mini-goal.  Overall I have about 45 more pounds to lose, but I'm focusing on these next 10 for now.  I hope I'm not totally off-base here, but I think my weight-loss will become infinitely more fulfilling once I cross the 35-pound threshold.  (If you're calculating, that will also be my halfway point, and it's always more fun to lose the second half than it is to lose the first.)  

I'm considering putting one of those weight-loss tickers on my blog.  That would definitely publicly shame me into weight-loss, because you have to put your actual weight on there.  But I'm still undecided about the ticker, because you have to put your actual weight on there. 

I'll end on a happy note.  Since I did mention our wedding anniversary today, I'll put up a wedding picture:

Long, happy marriage: Good goal

Getting back to wedding weight: Unrealistic goal