I’ve been on my natural Race Day high for a couple days now. It still feels fresh.
If you remember a week or so ago, I wrote about striving for healthy instead of skinny. This shift in my mindset has been so good for me. Instead of stressing all day about getting skinny, which ultimately leads to me focusing on how I’m still too fat; I’ve been focusing on being healthy…. It’s working! Focusing on eating healthy makes my days go a lot smoother. Before, when I constantly focused on losing weight, it was so easy to get discouraged, despite having made real progress. If I had a really awesome week at the scale and lost 5 pounds, I was excited, but in the back of my mind, I was still too fat, and still had more than 100 more pounds to lose. However, when I focused on being healthy, and pretty much ignored my weight, I didn’t feel so oppressed and discouraged. Healthy is so much easier to attain than the elusive magic number on the scale. I can eat a healthy breakfast, walk during my lunch break, hit the gym after work and feel amazingly accomplished. I can count 7 or 8 healthy decisions that I made throughout the day, and it feels like real progress. This past week, I was in a healthy groove, I only had a couple of slip ups, sweet tea and ice cream one day, but for the most part I was about eating about 90% wholesome healthy food. (Lean meats, no pork, very little beef, fruits, veggies, and nuts for snacks)
So today, Weigh in Wednesday was the real test. Sure, focusing on being healthy felt good mentally, and was achievable, but would that “side effect” of weight loss actually happen? Or, was I foolish to think that I could lose weight by completely ignoring the fact that I needed to lose weight? I’ll be honest, all week I wanted to test out this new healthy theory by stepping on the scale every morning. But I’m committed to my once a week only weigh-in. At this point it is completely unhealthy for me to weigh myself daily. I will NOT be a slave to the scale again. I worked too hard to break that habit. Nonetheless, I was secretly counting down the days till Wednesday so I could finally see if this new approach was working. In all my years of yo-yo dieting, I never really cared about being healthy, since I didn’t see myself as sick.
Today, I stepped up, and I had lost 2 pounds! Bringing my total to 13.6 pounds lost. When I look back over the past week, this was probably the easiest week of weight loss I’ve ever experienced. It was so freeing to let go of the pressure of “I gotta lose so much weight.” Instead I started off each morning praying that God help me make healthy decisions. Anytime I “felt fat” I asked myself, what can I do healthy right now. I can’t fix being fat instantly, but I can instantly make a decision to do something healthy, that’s easily within my control. Instead of forcing myself to track food, its easier to say, I want to see all of my healthy decisions written in one place. Don’t get me wrong, I’m not miraculously in love with keeping a food diary now. But it’s not so hard to say, “let me write down the healthy decisions I made” instead of “let me see how many calories were in this turtle sundae and how fat it’s gonna make me.” It’s taking a while to rebuild myself, but I’m working at it every day.
Well here’s to another week of being healthy!
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