I’d Say It Works…

Three weeks ago, the day right after Christmas, Jason and I got right back to work losing weight. As you know, because he’s been writing the last few blog posts, Jason’s been kicking my butt on weekly loss since then. This isn’t to say I haven’t been losing a decent amount of weight. He’s just been losing so much more!

• Jason -0.8; -86.6 total; -8.2 since Christmas
• Jenny -2.6; -62 total; -7.8 since Christmas

As you can see, Jason didn’t lose as much this week, but he’s still kicking my butt! In fact, when you average out the last three weeks, Jason has a -2.7 average to my -2.6. And I’m not complaining. Before the holidays, my weekly average had settled in around -1.4. It wasn’t bad. It was consistent and I was working hard to get back to where I had been two years ago.

What’s significant this time around? Simple Start. The first week getting back to healthy eating, a decent loss is kind of expected. For the last two out of three weeks, though, we’ve been doing the new Simple Start introduction to Weight Watchers that Jason has already talked about.

So, I’m going to talk about what happens after your two week Simple Start.

After the two weeks, you basically have a choice to make. You can:

• Continue with a similar program by doing Simply Filling, which includes more food choices than Simple Start (basically anything that is a Power Food, designated in their literature and apps with a green triangle)
• You can switch to tracking, which doesn’t limit what kinds of food you eat, but you have to weigh/measure and track everything (which Weight Watchers can teach you about)
• Get the best of both worlds by doing a combination! This is what we’re going to do, so it’s what I’m going to talk about most.

Back in the day when Jason and I first joined Weight Watchers, they had the Points program (tracking) and something called Core (eat specific foods until satisfied). The trick was, while you could change from one to the other, they wanted you to do so one full week at a time. Not the case anymore. The current versions of these programs are Points Plus and Simply Filling. The awesome part is that you can switch between these day to day during the same week!

Something that Jason and I noticed is that while we did really well five days out of seven, two days each week, we were just so done with the limited food list. I needed real cheese & sugar and we went off plan. Not terrible, but enough that I wonder if we might have done even better than the over 5 lbs we each lost during the two weeks of Simple Start. I need to get back in control. I need to get back to solid meal planning that we can stick with.

So this week? My meal plan is going to include mostly Simply Filling meals, because it really has helped us get off to a great start this year! Instead of getting tired of my meal plan, though, we’re also going to plan at least two days where we’ll switch to tracking, so that we can work in some meals that, while not unhealthy, don’t work as well for Simply Filling, to keep things fresh and interesting. This way, I still get to enjoy the things that Simply Filling doesn’t like, but I get to be in control, instead of feeling like I “broke my diet” by eating forbidden foods.

This is why Weight Watchers works. It gives you the flexibility you need to find a way that is sustainable so that it can become a lifestyle NOT a diet. It’s about finding what works for you over the long haul, not just to get to goal. In my life, I need to eat mainly healthy foods. But life happens and I need to know how to handle it by tracking when needed in order to make the plan work around my life, so I don’t get frustrated and go completely off-plan.

So what do I think about Simple Start? It works! We lost weight! But I am so glad that Weight Watchers isn’t only Simple Start. I’m glad they have a plan I can adjust to fit my life.

East Meets (South)West

Today I wanted to share a little recipe (sort of) for a meal that we came up with last night and then made for lunch today. The end result was basically a lettuce-wrapped burrito, but the idea came from lettuce cups. So we took the eastern lettuce wrap and combined it with the south western taco/burrito and it turned out pretty well.

Simple Start
I talked about Simple Start just a little bit last week, and we’ll probably get into it in more detail when we actually have the time to write it all out instead of just doing the quick posts that we’ve had to lately out of necessity/time constraints. Basically, Simple Start lets you stop tracking your points in exchange for making you eat from a “small” (quotes because it’s actually fairly large) list of foods that are healthier for you and take your body longer to process which means you’ll feel fuller for a longer period of time. You eat as much as you need to, so you stop when your body signals to you that you’re satisfied, so you don’t have to weigh and measure what you’re eating.

One of the things that’s good about Simple Start is that it allows the majority of the proteins that you would normally eat anyway, except that some of them have certain restrictions such as ground beef needing to be at least 95% lean or else you do have to count points for it. The drawback is, the things that aren’t part of Simple Start (aka. Simply Filling) are often things that you need to create certain meals that you might be used to. For example, let’s say you’ve got ground beef, shredded cheese, sour cream, salsa, assorted vegetables, 45-calorie bread and tortillas at home and you need to figure out what you’re going to cook for your next meal. The first thing I would think of in that situation, which is the situation we were in last night, is burritos. While we can have burritos on Weight Watchers while we’re using the PointsPlus method, tortillas are not allowed in Simple Start unless you want to spend your weekly points on them (49 points for the whole week).

The “Recipe”
While we were driving back home from Amarillo last night we were talking about what to do for lunch today with the things we already had available at the house. The two things that kept coming to mind when we were thinking about what to do with the ground beef was sloppy joes and tacos/burritos. Neither of those things can be done on Simple Start because sloppy joe sauce does not count as a Power Food (those are what you’re required to eat for Simple Start, I can give details or examples if anybody needs them), and neither do tortillas or taco shells. That doesn’t mean we can’t eat them anyway, it just means we’d have to spend our weekly points on the things that aren’t allowed.

So we started to come up with alternatives that would allow us to eat the meals that we wanted by making simple changes. We didn’t have any other type of sauce that would work as a substitute, so the sloppy joes were out. For the tacos/burritos though we were thinking about some of our options. Since shells or tortillas were the thing we needed to get rid of, I knew we needed some kind of base that provided the structure you needed and/or a simple flavor that did not contrast with the fillings but did add bulk to the meal so that you got full without having to eat a lot of extra protein.

Rice was my first thought, which would work well but completely lose the taco/burrito concept since you’d just be eating it all with a fork. The next few ideas all fell into the same trap as they were similar things like couscous. But then I remembered an appetizer we ate at a Mongolian grill a couple of weeks ago (not for the first time) which was lettuce wraps. We could use the green leaf or romano lettuce in place of a tortilla or shell, but otherwise treat the meal as though we were eating tacos or burritos.

I went for the big leaves of lettuce first, so I started out with something like this:

Then I rolled it all up like a burrito and ate it like this (though I did wrap all those lose ends of the lettuce better when I had access to both of my hands after setting the phone down):

I had intended to use the lettuce in a burrito fashion to begin with, so I was surprised when Jenny mentioned that this was the new way to have Taco Tuesday, and I looked over to see her eating hers like a taco instead. So I grabbed a couple of the smaller leaves of lettuce and made myself a couple of mini-tacos too.

Overall we both think this was a great success. It allows us to eat the flavors that we want in the way that we want without consuming the extra points for the filler. If we were really craving the flavor of the taco shell or tortillas then we could certainly go ahead and use them, but we don’t need to. The lettuce provides the crunch that you’re used to having, and it serves well as a vessel to get the food from your plate to your mouth. Unless we’re feeling those cravings in the future, I’m pretty sure this is going to be the preferred method of doing tacos and burritos at our home from now on.

As far as recipes go, it doesn’t get a whole lot simpler than this:
Ingredients
95% (or better) Ground Beef, as much as you’ll need to feel satisfied (we used 3/4 lbs)
Fat-Free Cheese, if you’re not doing Simple Start use whatever cheese you want (we each had probably 1/3 cup)
Desired Condiments, we only used salsa but could have added Fat-Free Sour Cream or similar products
Green Leaf Lettuce, or any other green that’s sturdy enough to support everything else
Taco Seasoning
Water, for the taco seasoning as needed (seasoning packet will tell you how much)

Instructions
1. Brown your meat in a skillet on high
2. (Optional) Remove excess fat/moisture from the skillet using paper towels
3. Add taco seasoning and water
4. Bring the beef, seasoning & water to a boil then reduce heat and let simmer per your taco seasoning’s instructions
5. Take your individual leaves of lettuce and add meat, cheese, and other toppings as desired and either roll into burrito shape, or fold into taco shape
6. Eat until you’re satisfied
6a. Insert into mouth
6b. Chew
6c. Swallow
6d. Repeat step 6
7. Leave us a comment and tell us how fantastic it was

That’s all there is to it!

Squats Are Evil

Seriously.

Wanting some more competitive scores on Fitocracy (points are skewed very heavily towards weight training vs cardio), Jason picked up a couple of weight sets at the store. Mine is a 3, 5, 8lb set and we got to work Saturday morning. If you’d like to see the details of my first strength workout, you can click here. I basically did up to 10 reps each of squats (10, 6, 6), bicep curls, tricep extensions, shoulder presses, one-arm rows in each of the three weights.

It felt good and I was confident in what I accomplished, so I told him we should do another workout. But not just another workout, we should do MOAR! We shouldn’t just step up the weight, but add two more sets of each to step back down. That workout is detailed here. I rocked it for a newb!

Until I woke up the next morning.

You see, the most recent experience I had had with squats was freshman P.E. in high school. I remembered nothing about pain. Of course, I also hadn’t done 72 weighted squats in one day in my life ever before that either. I died. My legs wouldn’t work. The most frustrating and disconcerting thing was that not only did it hurt to walk, but my legs kept trying to go out from underneath me. My thigh muscles were revolting to such a degree that they just refused to help my knees go the right direction. I hated feeling like I had traded one successful day for what would end up being four days of hardly being able to function.

I drank water, I stretched, I rested my legs and worked my arms, I whimpered and hobbled a lot.

I knew I was retaining water while I healed, so I was starting to get worried about this week’s weigh-in,  especially since I knew it had also impacted the amount of cardio I had just gotten used to doing. I just put my head down, focused on healing and getting in the activity I could do (dumbbells work on arms/shoulders).

Turns out I didn’t need to worry.

• Jenny -1.8 (-54.8 total)
• Jason -1.2 (-78 total)

I have exactly 10 more pounds to lose before I’m back to where I was before everything went haywire in our lives two years ago. It’s my goal to lose it by the end of the year. If I work hard, don’t get too caught up in the holidays and make sure I can focus, I feel like I can meet that goal.

I am happy to say that although I still think squats are evil, I haven’t sworn them off entirely. I’ve started working some body weight squats into my evening strength training (6 last night!) and my muscles have healed enough that I was able to complete my usual morning walk at pretty close to my normal pace. This is very good news, as I am starting to train to participate in a local Holiday 5K Fun Run/Walk (as a walker) to benefit Habitat for Humanity in three weeks. This means starting to get up earlier to increase my walk by 50% since I don’t have time to increase distance where my alarm is currently set to go off. But you know what? I can do this.

What goals do you have for the holiday season?

Getting Swole(n)

Friday has finally arrived (thank goodness!), so it’s time to share the results of our weigh in!

Before we get into that though, I wanted to take a minute to share what’s been going on this week. I usually put results up at the top and then give you the big wall of text afterwards, but this time I’m going to change it up a bit just for the sake of change. *gasp!*

Fitocracy & Getting Swole
Jenny and I decided to take advantage of the time change over the weekend by tricking our bodies with that free hour of sleep to wake up early and go to the gym. We missed one morning due to dogs being stupid-crazy in the middle of the night and waking us up three times, but we made it up that same evening right after work. So we’ve officially gone to the gym every day this week.

*pause for applause*

Jenny went back to her staple of walking around the track at the youth center, and I went with my usually “come up with something on the fly and do it”. For the first few days I went with my own plan, which was cardio for Mon/Wed/Fri and lifting on Tue/Thu. I’m not following any particular wisdom in doing that though, I just got an idea and decided to do it. Since I don’t want to fumble along without making any real progress, I decided to ask the community at Fitocracy.com for some ideas of workout routines that I could use.

I got some good tips on there, and I found a 16 week routine called “Get Swole” by Cory Gregory that I’m going to try my best to stick to. I’m not going to follow the diet portion, and I’m not going to invest in all the supplements, I’m just following the lifting. I won’t go into too much detail about the plan, because this post is about weight loss, not weight lifting. I’ll be happy to share some information if anyone is interested. The workouts are pretty tough, but they’re laid out well and give me some solid direction to follow in the gym so that I’m not standing around trying to figure out what lift I’m going to do next.

We’ve been tracking our progress on a site called Fitocracy. It’s a fitness site that was originally designed for gamers to track things in a fun and engaging way, but the site kind of took off and caught on quickly enough that the developers had to catch up to the community, so now it’s basically a fitness version of Facebook and only loosely tied to it’s gaming origins. It’s still a good, fun way to track your workouts and we enjoy using it.

I’ll drop a couple of links for you here to our Fitocracy profiles in case you want to get on there and take a look around a bit.
Jenny’s Fitocracy Profile and Jason’s Fitocracy Profile

Results
And here we are with our results from last night.

Jenny: -0.4
Jason: -0.6

I’ve been kicking butt at the gym this week, setting a new personal record for completing a 5K on the treadmill and a new time/distance record for cycling, and then doing the first day of Get Swole yesterday (my arms were killing me). I didn’t know what to expect, not because I thought I’d done bad or anything, but because when you introduce new exercise into your routine you never know how your body is going to react. Muscle growth adds weight that may counter-balance your fat loss when it comes time to step on the scale, and your body is going to retain fluids while it tries to repair itself from the damage of your workout.

I knew that regardless of what the number of the scale was this week, I did an amazing job with my exercise and that’s more than enough success for me no matter what the scale showed!

Jenny was in a similar mindset. She even kicked up her speed during her Wednesday morning walk and got some high intensity time in there! After we weighed, Jenny was discouraged at the small loss when she had put in so much effort during the week. But, just like going off plan and eating crappy food for a week might not come back to bite you in the butt on the scale that same week, the results of exercise don’t always show up right away either. Especially when you’ve just started exercising and your body is still trying to figure out whether it’s supposed to go into survival mode and hold onto its energy reserves or if this is just something new.

Her discouragement carried over a bit this morning, and when the alarms went off she told me she was going to stay home and get some more sleep (which would mean we’d have to go this afternoon per our agreement). But instead:

And why did she do that? Because she’s amazing!

Welcome to Château d’Plateau

As promised, I’ve taken over today’s blog post regardless of results since Jenny has been writing all of the posts for the last several weeks. And, as you’re about to see, it’s a good thing (for her) that I did:

Jenny: -0.2 lbs
Jason: -0.0 lbs

Jenny’s been kicking some consistent weight-loss booty here lately. She’s done a fantastic job, so before we go any further let’s pause for a second to give her a big hand:

Château d’Plateau
On August 29th I earned myself another 5 lb star for pushing past the 70 lb weight loss mark, and I was focusing in on reaching the milestone of 75 lbs. I was feeling pretty good about myself at the time and we pushed ahead. The following week, I guess I was feeling so good about things that I didn’t bother tracking anything that I ate that week. Not that I was eating like crazy or anything, I just wasn’t actually tracking. It’s an easy habit for me to fall into since my wife is also on Weight Watchers, has fewer points than me, and takes care of all of our meal planning. As long as I don’t do a whole lot of extra snacking then I can pretty safely skip tracking because I know she’s not going to go over her points which means I’ll stay within mine by default.

As you might expect though from not following the plan completely, the next week my weight stayed the same.

The following week I knew that I should have been tracking the whole time, so that’s what I did…for a few days. And then I stopped. Don’t ask me why, I’ve slept plenty of times since then and my memory sucks to begin with. It’s a pretty safe bet that I stopped for the same reasons though, that I don’t really need to track when Jenny’s taking care of things for us. That’s what I tell myself anyway.

Guess who stayed the same on the scale that week, too…

I did a fairly good job of tracking the next week. I missed a couple of days here and there, but for the most part I was tracking everything and my reward was a loss of 2 lbs. That brought my total weight loss up to 72.2 lbs and I was starting to get pretty excited about reaching that 75 lb goal. I had spent the last couple of weeks staying exactly the same on the scale, and I’d had enough of the boring views from the windows of Château d’Plateau and found myself a loss.

The following week (September 26) I scored another 1 lb loss, bringing my total loss to 73.2 lbs, and my current weight down to 270.4 which put me right on the edge of two different milestones at the same time. I was now only 1.8 lbs away from 75 lbs lost, and only half of a pound away from being in the 260’s which I haven’t seen in about thirteen years.

[sarcasm]Oh, how I missed you, Château d’Plateau![end sarcasm]

From there I went back to not tracking for a week. Why would I do such a thing when I know from experience that it doesn’t work? Because I’m a dork, apparently. Sure enough, history repeated itself and my weight stayed the same. I knew that I was close to those goals, and I wasn’t going to let a stupid thing like not tracking slow me down again, so not only did I track every day the following week, I also started going back to the gym and taking the dogs for walks, runs, and play times at the park.

Surely exercise would get me off the plateau, right?

Not this time. After a week of tracking and exercise, my weight stayed the same again. Somewhat discouraged by that result after a week of going to exercise, I continued on with the same plan of tracking and exercise. The exercise I did just fine, but the tracking only lasted for half of the week.

October 10: My weight stayed the same, yet again.

The following week was last week, and things got a little crazy. I wasn’t tracking again for who-knows-why, and then on Wednesday I got a call from our explosives facility saying that the database was filled with duplicated data and they needed me down there right away to fix it. I was already planning to go there this week, but they needed me early so I bought a plane ticket and flew down to Dallas that night. I missed the weigh in last week because of travel and work. I stayed there over the weekend so that I could monitor the database and respond to anything that happened during that time.

Even though I’ve been traveling to this site regularly for almost six years now, I recently changed which town I stay in while I’m there and I’m not as familiar with the restaurants in the area. I got recommendations for where to eat from some of the employees in the area and stuck to those for the most part. The bad news is, none of the places that I ate at are in the Weight Watchers database, so I’d have to make guesses (educated though they might be) which I hate doing. The good news is, I wasn’t there to indulge or to binge, so I made good decisions. Sure, I ate some pizza, but we’re talking a 12″ wood-fired pizza that I ate half of and saved the other half for another meal and I’ve got enough points to eat a large pan-pizza from Pizza Hut by myself, so I’m not worried about a little one.

I was planning on working out while I was there, but I was working about 12 hours every day didn’t feel like working out once I was there. I tracked down the local Weight Watchers meetings intending to go weigh-in, but times just didn’t line up the first few days and after I made the decision not to exercise during the eight-day business trip, I decided I’d just put off the weigh-in until I got back home.

I got home on Wednesday night, so last night of course was our normal weigh-in night. We had an interview with local church leaders to go to, so we agreed that if I did reach my 75 lbs lost mark last night we would stay for the rest of the meeting, but if not we’d just head to Amarillo (~60 miles) for the interview early. As you saw at the top of the post though, I’m on my fifth week in a row staying once again in Château d’Plateau.

Dealing With Plateaus
This certainly isn’t the first time I’ve been on a plateau, or even the first time I’ve blogged about it. I first brought it up in January 2011, again in May 2011, and then again April 2012. My plateau’s aren’t the worst, they usually last a few weeks for me. I work with a guy that was on a plateau for over three months.

Plateaus suck.

Personally, I’d rather see a gain than see that I stayed the same. Every once in a while, sure I can handle staying the same. But for five weeks in a row? No. Screw that, I’d rather have a gain and know that I’m failing than to stall out at 0.0 lbs. I spent three weeks going to the gym every day, and I still stayed the same. Then I spent eight days out of town, eating out for every meal at places I had no clue about in regards to nutrition without doing any exercise at all, and I still stayed the same. It’s incredibly frustrating to see the same number on the scale regardless of how strictly or how loosely I followed the plan.

The specifics of overcoming a plateau can change from one person to the next. What works for me might not work for you, and what works for each of us might not work for the next person. However, the general key to breaking a plateau is that something has to change. There’s usually one or two things that are responsible for your lack of progress. It’s usually something fairly simple, like you need to change up how you’re exercising, you need to start tracking because you haven’t been, or you need to reevaluate your tracking to make sure you haven’t miscalculated one of your favorite snacks/meals or that you haven’t been tracking something that you thought was “free” when in fact it wasn’t.

According to some of the exercise-related resources that I read online, one way to break a plateau in regards to exercising is to start doing things backwards. For example, if you’re used to exercising on an elliptical machine, then try using the same machine but instead of moving your feet forward, try moving them backward. The machine works exactly the same regardless of which direction you push the pedals, but changing it up like that engages different muscles or engages the same muscles but in a different way.

In regards to food, if you find that you often eat the same meals at least once every week then chances are you’ve become a little bit relaxed in your measuring because you’ve gotten so used to seeing the right portions that you think you know what those portions “look” like without measuring them. If you’ve gotten into those habits then you’re really gambling with your weight loss. Most of the time you find that people who stop measuring because they’re used to seeing the right portion end up eating more Points than they thought they were, while people who aren’t measuring but are trying something new have a tendency to under-measure so that they aren’t eating as many Points as they thought they were.

I’m going to read over those old posts of mine myself after publishing this one, and see if maybe I forgot something else that I should try. I’m not about to give up on this weight loss journey, regardless of how frustrating this plateau is. I need to change some things up, and I need to really get my butt back on plan completely instead of playing this half-n-half game that clearly doesn’t work.

The picture above is what was waiting for me in the break room this morning when I went to go fill up my water bottle. Four dozen donuts just sitting there whispering, “We know how you feel, buddy. Come here and let us give you a hug!”

Not today, donuts. Not today.

Weightloss Super Heroes

I’ve never thought of myself as a Weightloss Super Hero.

A recent experience has me thinking a lot about what it takes to be a super hero. Whenever I think of Weightloss Super Heroes I know, I think of my sister, who is rocking it over in the Fitocracy community, my twitter friend Chelsea who is a crossfit superstar (the girl is a beast, seriously) and my friend B.J. over at Geek Fitness. Each one of them would tell you that they’re still a work in progress (with fitness, isn’t everybody?) but they are leaps and bounds ahead of where I am and they are constant sources of awe and inspiration.

Ok, so this is where I bust out my nerd card. I really started thinking about super heroes as I tried to get to sleep last night. Most of the comic book super heroes (with the notable exceptions of the Tony Starks and Bruce Waynes, who start as billionaires with unlimited resources) start as average, everyday Joes (and Janes) who discover that they have a super power, mutation or fantastic alien genetics. They learn what they can do, try to harness it through trial and error and eventually find a way to help other people with their newfound power.

Like I said, I’ve never thought of myself as a Weightloss Super Hero. I aspire to it. I think maybe I’ll be one in a couple more years, when I have a better handle on this whole health thing. But then a couple of weeks ago, Weight Watchers contacted me via twitter. They had been watching my tweets (blog shares, food photos, meal planning, cheerleading stuff I do all the time) and loved what they saw. They asked for my address to send me a gift. I didn’t expect something as fun as this:

Surprise! I got a #LoseForGood goodie box from @WeightWatchers pic.twitter.com/35eU3jfUPY

— Jenny Griffith (@fynralyl) October 3, 2013

Contents of my #LoseForGood goodie box minus one item I’ll need help with taking the pic. @WeightWatchers pic.twitter.com/BbSgrcjBVt — Jenny Griffith (@fynralyl) October 3, 2013

#LoseForGood Super Hero Cape! @WeightWatchers pic.twitter.com/xXh5n5FDrA — Jenny Griffith (@fynralyl) October 3, 2013

Which doubles as a fantastic apron. Because @WeightWatchers is cool like that. #LoseForGood pic.twitter.com/IiisliD5fn

— Jenny Griffith (@fynralyl) October 3, 2013

Maybe I had the beginnings of a super hero in me after all. I’ve thought a lot about this over the last couple of days. What did Weight Watchers see in me that I hadn’t seen in myself?

Three years ago, we started this blog as a way to chronicle our journey. We made it public, but I didn’t really think anyone would read it, much less find inspiration here. It was created as a place to be honest about every aspect of our journey, even if we weren’t proud of the results. It was a way to be publicly accountable in a way that just attending meetings and sharing with co-workers wouldn’t give us. Jason and I met online. So much of our identities and connections were here in the ether of the inter-webs. This is where we knew our friends were, where we knew some support could be found.

I never expected as much support as we’ve received. Even through our 18 months of false starts and kitchen remodels. Even through the back-sliding and weight gaining that resulted from it. Even more than the support, the feedback we’ve had on the blog has been incredible and uplifting. It happened again yesterday. Someone told me how much our blog inspired them.

It made me feel like a super hero.

Maybe that’s my Weightloss Super Power. This is an incredibly personal topic and journey. It is often embarrassing to share just how much work there is to do. It’s hard to share disappointment and regret. But I love to inspire. When I was a teenager, I loved being a cheerleader. There was a Freshman squad that didn’t do the tumbling that was required of the JV and Varsity squads. That suited me just fine, because I’ve never really loved athletics. What I did love was getting the crowd riled up and leading the spectators in cheers. I loved the contagious enthusiasm.

The funny thing is that even though the successes we have shared on this blog have been inspiring, I also learned that the honesty we’ve committed to here has also been inspiring. It isn’t always sunshine and rainbows. Everyone struggles. If we only shared our successes, this blog would be pretty flat and one-sided. We’re real here. You know I’m Jenny and Jason is my husband and our journey has been far from perfect.

You know you’re not alone.

We don’t present perfection. No weightloss journey is perfect in it’s course. One slip-up or a million, doesn’t mean failure. It means you’re human. Maybe our Weightloss Super Power is Truth, even when it is embarrassing or makes us angry. We share it, and when we share it we find a way to be motivated or inspired by our shortcomings and share that inspiration with you.

Jason wasn’t happy about his weigh in results last night. While I lost 1.6 (making my current total 48.0) he stayed the same with a total of 73.2. He hadn’t tracked consistently this week and he’s so close to a significant milestone, he was really disappointed in the lack of progress.

But you know what he did? This morning, when the alarm was going off and his wife was mumbling about not wanting to get up, that we’d get going really well at the gym the next week, he got up. He is determined to have a loss next week and he knows that he needs to step up his activity to get there. Disappointed, he still got up, put on his gym clothes, tied on his shoes, and harnessed the dogs. He had time for a walk/run with the dogs and still made it back in time to fix our breakfast:

He was my Super Hero this morning, and not just for the breakfast.

He inspires me.

And the Winner is…

Daisey!

Since she can’t type very well, I’m posting this week’s results on her behalf.

“Mama and Papa are totally starving me. I have to make sure I’m around when they put the food in my bowl or I won’t get anything to eat. One time, Mama started picking up my bowl WHILE I WAS STILL EATING! In a panic, I tried to cram as much in my mouth as possible. Of course I had to put it all down on the floor to eat it. I was very glad I gobbled it up fast enough that Sister didn’t steal it when she walked through the kitchen after finishing her own bowl (MUCH LARGER bowl, I’ll have you know). Mama gave my bowl back after Sister was safely locked away in the den. I don’t know why she made me panic for no reason, but I made sure I finished my bowl FAST, in case she took it away again.”

• Jason -1.0
• Jenny -1.8
• Daisey -2.5

“Squirrel!”

Daisey on a Diet

I keep trying to tell her that it’s a lifestyle change, not a diet.

She just thinks we’re starving her.

Not too long ago, we took our older dog (she’s not really old, just older than the other at 6-1/2 years) to the vet because we were feeling lumps on one side both in her skin and underneath it. After a biopsy, followed by a surgery, she was diagnosed with mast cell tumors. While the growth was fully excised, due to the nature of mast cell tumors, we’re going to be checking her for lumps the rest of her life to stay ahead of it. When she went back in to have her stiches out, she also had her Annual Wellness Exam (referred to as AWE, now isn’t that sweet?) in which the vet pointed out the plaque on her teeth and her thickening middle. She said Daisey needed to lose a few pounds.

Now, the reason I’m talking about both her cancer and her weight in practically the same breath, is that it really made me think about another experience from about eleven years ago. I spoke about this in one of the first posts we made on our blog: The PINK Edition. My mom’s life was saved by the weight she had lost just prior to having her mammogram. If she hadn’t lost the weight, they wouldn’t have been able to get close enough to capture the lump in the image and they wouldn’t have caught her breast cancer in the very early stage that it was in. We were lucky with Daisey. Her tumor formed in her skin, so we could feel it pretty easily and so caught it at a stage I. Mast cell tumors can form under the skin, near vital organs, though. The next one could very easily not be in her skin.

Here’s a picture of Daisey taken last night:

As you can see, she’s not the chubbiest dog you’ve ever seen. However, to be a healthy dog, her tummy should tuck up more and while you certainly shouldn’t be able to see her ribs, you should be able to feel them when pressing in at her sides. You can’t. If I can’t feel her ribs, how am I going to be able to feel a dangerous lump in or near her belly?

We have been calling her “Chunky Monkey” for a few years now as an endearment, so obviously we had noticed, but in our eyes, it hadn’t gotten to the point of restricting her access to food until the vet said so. I was very loathe to do this. You see, for over six years, we had never had to have feeding times for our dogs (even our lab mix). They had always been so good at self-regulating. The food was always there, so they never felt they had to eat it all in case it was gone. They ate when hungry and always left plenty of food in the bowl. For the most part, this was a really healthy way for them to live. It became a habit though, and as Daisey got older, less active, lazy and letting the younger dog do all the “work” during playtime, she kept eating the same way she had when she was only two years old. Each spring less of her winter weight would melt away and it all accumulated around her middle and on her rump.

Sound familiar?

Daisey’s weight snuck up on her (and us) just like ours had done years ago. She used to bounce around between 28-32 lbs depending on if she had her winter weight on or not. This summer she clocked in at 39 lbs. On a 100lb human, that’s like gaining 30+ lbs. Over the course of a few years, it happens, and if it’s not addressed, it becomes 40, then 50, until you suddenly have to lose half your body weight to be healthy again. In a way, we’ve learned from our own mistakes. We don’t want this to get out of control for Daisey, so we’re helping her do something she really can’t do on her own.

We switched her to a healthier blend from the same brand we’ve been feeding her since she was a puppy and we’re giving her appropriate servings for her size with the aim of losing weight. Once she loses the weight, we’ll keep her on the same food, but switch to the “maintenance” serving sizes they recommend. So, even though she thinks we’re starving her, it really is lifestyle change.

It’s very simplified and there isn’t much variety (but when you’re a dog, do you really get much variety?) but it’s a lot like what we’re doing in our own weight loss journey. We’re switching to healthier foods with familiar flavors. We’re eating less with an eye towards weight loss. Then we’re going to keep eating those same foods for the rest of our lives in slightly different proportions to maintain.

We were on vacation for part of last week and ended up slightly off-plan for about a week. We tried to make healthier choices, but didn’t bother tracking. I was really focused on being as active as I could for part of our vacation to offset the lack of tracking, and managed this one our first full day of the vacation:

That’s a lot of green!

Coming back from being out of town it can be very difficult to know what to expect on the scale. The only thing you really hope for is to avoid a gain (or at least have it be a small one). Happily neither one of us gained at all:

• Jason 0.0 stayed the same
• Jenny -1.2

A little bit at a time, Daisey’s weight will come off. And a little bit at a time, so will ours. She isn’t magically going to be the lean little dog she was before and neither will we shed the pounds we’ve accumulated over the years overnight. It is a process, a journey, a lifelong shift in perspective and habit. Sometimes we lose, sometimes we don’t, but overall we are (all three) going in the right direction.

Life Lessons: Weight Loss Budget

Today I’m going to talk about weight loss in a little bit different light, relating it to another thing that we all have to deal with in our lives, which is money. As I’ve talked to more and more people in different places, both online and in person, this is one of the themes that I keep coming back to in order to help explain how Weight Watchers works and how people can relate that experience to something that’s not quite so foreign if they’ve never looked at Weight Watchers before or if they’re constantly referring to it as a diet.

We’ll take a look at various aspects of gaining weight, losing weight, and maintaining. The purpose here is to help explain the concepts of losing weight with Weight Watchers.

Getting Started: What is a Budget
To start us off here, I’m going to pull a few lines from some websites I found that deal with establishing a monetary budget. We’ll start with this bit from practicalmoneyskills.com, “A budget is a plan for your future income and expenditures that you can use as a guideline for spending and saving. Although many Americans already use a budget to plan their spending, the majority of Americans also routinely spend more than they can afford. The key to spending within your means is to know your expenses and to spend less than you make. A good monthly budget can help ensure you pay your bills on time, have funds to cover unexpected emergencies, and reach your financial goals.”

Weight loss with Weight Watchers is no different. Let me convert that quote into weight loss terms; instead of dollars, you’re dealing with PointsPlus. “You plan for future income (weekly points, activity points, or new daily points) and expenditures (eating). Although many Americans like to think that they watch what they eat, the majority of Americans (and people of other nations) also routinely eat more than they can healthily afford. The key to spending your Points within your means is to know how much you can eat, and do so without over-eating. A good PointsPlus budget can help ensure you lose weight, have the points to cover unexpected food opportunities/surprises, and reach your weight loss goals”

When you get started with Weight Watchers the first thing they’re going to do is have you weigh in. This is what determines your budget. You have a daily budget, which is your Daily PointsPlus Target that is based on your personal metrics and any points left over at the end of the day disappear. You have a weekly budget, which is your Weekly PointsPlus Allowance which is always set to 49 on your weigh-in day for everyone. You also have another weekly budget, your Activity Points, which defaults to 0 and you have to exercise in order to build up those points. Both of the weekly budgets remain open with their points balances for the entire week, but once your weigh-in day rolls around any extra points go away and they reset to their default values of 49 and 0.

The biggest difference between a financial budget and a weight loss budget is that bills are typically handled on a monthly basis where weight loss is handled weekly. Instead of everything being due on the 15th day of every month (or whatever), you have a weigh-in day every week on the same day. Your daily budget is like paying your bills, those are points that you need to spend in order to give your body the fuel that it needs to function. Your weekly budgets are more like your wants instead of your needs.

Living Within Your Means: PointsPlus Values
The key to having a successful budget is making sure that you never spend more than you have available. The key to losing weight is making sure that you don’t eat more food than your body can handle while maintaining a healthy weight. Your body needs food, it just doesn’t need as much as we tend to give it. Just like you need to purchase “things” in order to live, yet we don’t always live within our means as we buy things we want instead.

I’m going to reference that same website above, but I’m going to take little bits and pieces from the article instead of doing a direct quote. If you want to read the whole thing, you can follow this link to Live Within Your Means.

[Begin paraphrase]
If you are like many Americans, you may find that you are spending more than you’re saving and steadily going deeper into debt as a result. This is an easy and common pattern to fall into, and one that requires some planning and discipline to reverse. Once you’ve got a clear understanding of your current budget, your challenge is to find places where you can spend less (or earn more) in order to achieve your financial goals.

Here are some steps you can take toward that end:

1. Question Your Needs And Wants – What do you want? What do you really need? Take a look at the big picture.

2. Set Guidelines – We all have different budgets based on our needs and wants.

3. Track, Trim And Target – Once you start tracking, you may be surprised what you find. Cutting back is usually a better place to start than completely cutting out. Be realistic. It will help you to be better prepared for the unexpected.
[End Paraphrasing]

It also talks about trimming expenses, but to keep it more focused on the weight loss side, I’m going to rewrite it with that in mind. Trimming expenses for weight loss is cutting back on those things that you really enjoy that are just too high in points to be eating them all the time. It could be anything from candy to bread, ice cream to ribeye steaks, sweet tea to alcohol. Different people have different weaknesses when it comes to food, and those are what we’re really focusing on here.

If there’s a food that you really love and it’s high in points then you need to make a decision. Can you live without ever eating that thing again, or can handle eating smaller portions of it? Do you have some self control in relation to that food, or do you have none at all? If you can handle it in moderation, then all you need is a plan and the determination to stick to that plan and you’ll do just fine.

For this example, we’re going to use one of the highest-points desserts in the Weight Watchers database, which is an Ultimate Fudge Brownie from Kona Grill which has a 50 PointsPlus value for a single serving. You love that brownie, it’s your favorite thing in the whole world. For some people, knowing that it’s 50 PointsPlus is enough for them to say, “You know what? That’s a dang good brownie, but it’s just not worth 50 PointsPlus to me, so I’m going to walk away and never eat that thing again.” Some people can do that, and they can stick to it. Other people, just can’t. They need to find a way to work that in.

If you can’t cut an “expense”, or a food that you absolutely have to have, then you need to try to trim it. You can do that by either eating smaller portions of it if that’s an option; this would be things like either ordering only a partial serving, sharing it with friends/family, or if you make it yourself then cutting the portions that you make or that you dish out to begin with. Or, you can go ahead and eat the full portion but cut back on how often you eat it.

Once you’ve identified these foods you need to make a plan and set a goal. Goals should be specific or else you’ll never achieve it. “Eat less brownie” isn’t a goal because you could leave a little spec of the brownie on your plate and say that you ate less of it. Be specific. “Only eat the ultimate fudge brownie once per month,” is an achievable goal. “Only eat half of the ultimate fudge brownie,” is an achievable goal. Both of those are acceptable as long as they fit within your budget. If you’ve got the points, then it’s alright to eat the whole thing. You’re not cheating or failing if you eat something that’s high in points as long as you’re staying within your budget.

Once you have the specific goal you need to make it measurable. If eating half the brownie or eating it once per month is enough measurement for you to stay within your budget then you can stop there. However, what if you had a birthday party and ate cake and ice cream and already used up some of your weekly points, and now the only way you will be able to have that special expensive food is to earn activity points? In that case, you need to update your goal to this, “I want that 50 Point dessert, and I currently have 40 Weekly points but 0 Activity points saved for it.” Now you know that you have 40 of the 50 points that you need. You know how far you have to go (50) and you know how close you already are (40+0=40) so you know how far you have left to go (50-40=10). Now you know exactly what you need to do in order to fit that dessert into your budget and you can plan accordingly. If you have 5 days left until you eat that dessert, then you know you need to get an average of 2 Activity Points per day (10/5=2) and if you know that one of those days you’ll be out of town and unable to exercise, so you need to get an extra 2 points in on the other 4 days that you have left.

Your goals also have to be attainable, it has to be something that you can actually achieve. If you haven’t been doing any exercise at all in forever, and you’ve only got 10 Weekly Points left for that 50 Point brownie on Friday, do you think you’re honestly going to be able to make up 40 Activity points in the next 3-4 days? If your goal isn’t to eat a specific thing, but rather to lose a specific amount of weight, is losing 15 lbs in a week attainable? Not for most people. If a goal isn’t realistic, then there’s no point in setting it in the first place.

Measurable in time. You don’t want to set a goal that has no end date. “My goal is to weigh 110 lbs,” sounds like a good goal, right? How soon do you want to get down to that 110 lbs? By the end of the summer? The end of next year? Before the age of 85? If there’s no time limit set on your goal, then you’ve deflated your motivation. Remember, even your timeline has to be something that’s realistically attainable, but there needs to be a timeline set for achieving the goal. A lot of people trying to lose weight are doing it because they kept putting off eating healthy or getting back into shape. They put it off, then put it off again, and just kept on putting it off because there was no timeline. “Man, I really need to get around to losing some of this weight…” How many times have I said that in my lifetime? I’m not sure I can count that high. I can tell you that about 90% of the times that I said it I did so right before or right after eating something that had a huge Points value, though.

Debt: Gaining Weight
Now that we’ve talked about how the plan overall relates to a budget, let’s take a look at why budgeting is actually important. When you’re dealing with finances, you’re basically looking at how much income you have minus your expenses to see how much you can tuck away into savings or how much you can put towards paying off debts.

With Weight Watchers it’s almost exactly the same thing; you’re looking at how many PointsPlus you have available each day, minus the points values of your foods, to see how much debt you can pay off. You can’t tuck anything away into savings, because your body doesn’t allow savings accounts.

All the weight that you need to lose right now is debt that you’ve built up throughout your life. It’s a debt that you owe to your body, and one that can weigh just as heavily on your mind as it does physically on your body. What happens when you go into too much financial debt and can’t pay your bills? A not-so-little thing we call bankruptcy. When you become too indebted to your body you run into things like gallstones, type 2 diabetes, high blood pressure, high cholesterol and/or triglycerides, coronary artery disease (CAD), a stroke, or sleep apnea. Debt can be a very serious thing no matter how you slice it.

Debt, in terms of weight loss, is the extra weight that you’ve put on over the years that you’re trying now to get off. In weight loss there is no savings for you to build towards, instead you’re either relieving debt (weight gained) or you’re staying out of debt (maintaining your weight). Because weight loss isn’t a single event, you don’t simply lose it and then suddenly you get to live out the rest of your life being skinny. Your body just doesn’t work that way. It’s the same reason why diets never work in the long term. Weight Watchers isn’t a diet, it’s a lifestyle change. They give you the rules to live by to be successful and the tools to do it with. That’s why it succeeds.

Going on a diet is like getting a credit card. It has it’s perks, but if you don’t watch it you’re just going to end up even deeper in debt than you were before you started. Have you ever tried a diet, had success, and then stopped the diet and not too long after you gained back even more weight than you started with? That’s why Weight Watchers will consistently beat out every diet out there. Because it’s not a diet that tells you what you can and cannot eat, it’s a tool that you can use to live a healthy life. It’s the difference between a credit card that you abuse, and one that you actually use wisely and with control. If you use it correctly and establish a goals-based or rules-focused life style around it you can actually get ahead.

Executing the Budget: Meal Planning
I know that last section was a downer, so let’s pick it back up here and talk about how we get out of this debt and build a better life. We’re going to talk about meal planning, and a few different ways that you can handle planning head.

Weekly Planning (Hard, but effective if you can pull it off)
We’ll start off with the method that you tend to hear most often in meetings from your leader, which is to plan ahead for the entire week. Some people don’t have any problem at all planning out a week’s worth of meals in advance. In our experience, every time we tried to plan a week’s worth of meals we failed. We’d either go off plan half-way through the week and then throw the plan out the window for the rest of the week, or we wouldn’t even be able to come up with a whole week’s worth of meals that actually sounded good and then we’d just give up all together. If you can handle planning a week at a time, that’s great. If you can’t handle that much planning, then try one of these other methods instead.

Weekly planning gives you total control of what’s going to happen the entire week, which makes it easier for you to plan how you’re going to spend your weekly points and activity points (assuming that you’re going to spend any of them at all). If you know everything you’re going to eat all week long, you can more easily plan in special treats for events where you know you might not be able to accurately track the foods that you eat. If you know there’s a party on Friday but have no idea what food is going to be served there, then you know in advance that you need to keep all of your other days within your daily points so that you have your weekly points available for that unknown party.

The drawback is that by planning the entire week in advance, you need to be very conscious of your weekly points and activity points or else you will not be able to handle surprises as easily. For example, if you have already planned out your entire week and today at work your best friend invited you to a BBQ at his place tonight, then you might not have the points available to do that. That doesn’t mean that you can’t go, it just means that you’re going to have to go back and re-plan the rest of your week to allow for that surprise.

Semi-Weekly Planning (Easy-Medium, but very effective and easier to stick to it)
This is the method that we’ve adopted over the last couple of months and has been a huge success for us so far. Instead of planning out a full week worth of meals, we now break it up into one plan for Monday-Thursday, and another for Friday-Sunday. Our weigh-in day is Thursday, so right after the meeting we head to the grocery store and eat at the deli there and then do our grocery shopping with our minds still focused on the meeting and making the right choices. We shop to get us through the weekend and then on Monday we do the same thing, minus the Weight Watchers meeting. Since our meetings are on Thursday, we consider that the start of our weight-week so even though we plan on Monday and Thursday, Monday is actually the second plan of each weight-week with Thursday being the first.

Doing this, we know that if a surprise does come up, we still haven’t planned the second half of the week, so we can set aside weekly points if we need to and we still have time to earn activity points if it’s something that serious or if we’ve already spent some of that budget on a planned event earlier in the week. Since our first planning of the weight-week is on Thursday, and most “surprises” often happen on the weekend, surprises are usually much easier for us to handle.

So far we haven’t run into any drawbacks for semi-weekly planning. It has worked out incredibly well for us so far, and we plan to keep it that way.

Daily Planning (Easy, can be effective as long as you’re tracking diligently)
If you just don’t have the time to plan out your meals for any portion of the week in advance, then you can plan for a single day instead. You need to be careful with weekly and activity points this way, as it’s easier to give into impulses and temptations when you haven’t bothered planning for the days ahead. We have had success doing this in the past, but if you look at the chart of our weight loss during these time periods you’d think it was a 4 year old’s drawing of a mountain range from all the up and down that we went through because of poor planning and not thinking ahead. Overall it more or less worked in the end, but it wasn’t very effective and certainly wasn’t efficient.

Single Meal Planning (IT’S A TRAP!)
What you want to avoid if at all possible, is not planning ahead at all and always focusing just on the meal you’re about to have. If you don’t plan ahead at all, you’re leaving yourself vulnerable to both surprises and temptations. If you already know in advance what you’re going to eat for the entire day, then you know whether or not you have room for temptations. If you just wing it and give in to a temptation because “I’ve got weeklies for this” and then there’s another temptation and “I’ve got weeklies for this” those little temptations are going to catch up with you. That’s why tracking is so important as well. If you’re tracking everything then you will know for sure whether or not you have the weekly points for things.

With this method it’s easy to find yourself in situations where you had little or no breakfast, a big lunch, and then come dinner time you have a fairly low amount of points but plenty of hunger. In the final section below I’ll talk about this a little bit more, but basically if you find yourself in this situation then you are significantly more likely to give up on the plan either for the day or the whole Weight Watchers thing all together, and you’re more likely to give into temptations. You’ll be more likely to spend your weekly points and less likely to track spending them which could lead to thinking that you have more points that you actually do later in the week and end up spending points that you don’t actually have.

A Little Psychology
Alright, this part doesn’t really fit within the scope of the rest of the article here, but it’s something that can help you understand impulses that I talked about in the section above. The following information comes from an article called Your App Makes Me Fat from seriouspony.com. The article itself is actually about how developing complex user interfaces can be a really bad thing for your users, so it doesn’t completely apply to our topic, but it’s the study that’s mentioned there that’s important to us here.

I’m not going to post the whole article here, but let me summarize the important parts for you.

Back in 1999 a study was done on some grad students where they asked half of them to memorize a two digit number and the other half was asked to memorize a seven digit number. After the memorization task was complete, they were told that the experiment was over and each of the students was offered a choice of snacks: either a bowl of fruit or a slice of chocolate cake. Their findings were that the students who had to memorize the seven digit number were 50% more likely to choose cake over fruit. (We’ll talk more about this in a minute.)

Another experiment was done in 2010, this time using dogs instead of people. They had half of the dogs sit inside their kennels for 10 minutes before letting them out to play with a puzzle toy that was rigged so that they couldn’t actually get to the treat inside. The other half of the dogs were commanded to sit and stay for 10 minutes before being allowed to play with the same, rigged puzzle-toy. The findings this time were very similar, the dogs that were left in the kennels and had nothing else to do gave up on the toy after about 2 minutes of not being able to get the treat out, while the ones who had to sit there and focus on remaining obedient gave up in less than 1 minute.

What these tests concluded was that our brains use the same resource for self control and problem solving. If you focus all day long on solving problems at work, then you don’t have as much self control at the end of the day because you’ve used up all of your resources on solving problems at work. Similarly, if you’ve spent all day resisting temptations sitting in your kitchen, then you won’t be able to think as clearly at night because once again you’ve already burned up those resources.

That’s why planning ahead plays such a key role in overall success. If you already have the day’s meals planned out in advance, then you don’t have to worry about giving into temptation for the meals themselves. The more you do throughout the day, the less control you have over yourself in the evenings. That’s just how our brains work. If something makes you think, then it’s draining the same resource that allows you to say “no” to foods that don’t fit within your budget. It doesn’t matter whether the problems you face during the day are work, taking care of your kids or pets, or if you just watch TV and play games on your cell phone, you’re always burning those resources.

Planning ahead is how you avoid those dangerous situations and find lasting success.

Falling Off… and Getting Back On

We’ve talked before about the hiatus that lasted longer than it should have, but I don’t think I’d ever shared the numbers on how devastating that setback really had been for our weightloss. Part of moving forward is acknowledging the mistakes of the past and learning from them.

It all started with taking a holiday hiatus at the end of 2011. We had been so good and on track the previous holiday season, we just wanted to have fun and enjoy all the things we love about the holiday, especially my in-laws baking. It didn’t help that the plan had just changed on us (Points Plus) and we were uncomfortable with the larger number of daily points and new way of calculating that we couldn’t just do in our heads. Frankly, we were overwhelmed by the new system and taking a “holiday hiatus” was an easy out.

After the holidays, we tried to get back on track a few times. But then there was my birthday… an anniversary… a vacation… and a mouse invasion that left us without a functional kitchen for the rest of 2012. Behind all of this, there was the underlying lack of confidence in the new system. We hadn’t learned how to adapt it for what works best for us, and every time we tried to go back, it just didn’t click and we would get angry or frustrated and fall right back off.

2013 didn’t start much better. We didn’t really commit to getting back on plan. We kept trying for a week or two, get frustrated or distracted or busy and let it go. At the end of May, without really discussing it, I told Jason we were getting back on plan whether we were ready or not. I needed to get control of my life physically, mentally and spiritually and that meant deciding to bite the bullet and start doing all of the things I knew I needed to do anyway.

You see, I had a hard time coping with the shame and depression that resulted from the weight I had gained back in the course of that year and a half full of debacles and excuses. I was angry. I hated my body and didn’t want to put forth the effort if it was going to continually sabotage me. One of the effects of having PCOS is that it is incredibly easy to gain weight. When Jason and I first went on our hiatus in 2011, I had already lost 64.8 pounds and Jason had lost 51. We had been doing incredibly well and thought we would be fine taking a small break. After all, we had lost over 115 pounds together in our first year. Here’s the rub though. Because my body processes and stores extra food differently than most other people, I gained back three pounds for every one that Jason did, even though I ate better than he did during that same time. In a year and a half, he gained back 16.4pounds and I gained back a whopping 46.4. Yes, in a year and half, I had gained back 2/3 of what I had worked so hard to lose.

You’d be angry too, right?

It took me a while to stop being angry and to turn that emotional energy into determination. And that’s when I got serious. You see, I had to realize on my own, not by reading about it elsewhere, that my PCOS means I have to be in complete control over how much and what my body gets all the time. This isn’t something I can do casually, because even the littlest break will undermine everything I’ve done.

I’ve been in that place and I don’t want to be there again.

While I share this because I truly believe that being honest with yourself and others is the key to success, the main reason I share it is because I am so incredibly proud of Jason and what he has done over the last six weeks. While I am still re-losing the weight I had gained, he isn’t. In fact, he’s already eight pounds lighter than his lowest weight in 2011. We had previously been sharing only the totals since we got back on track six weeks ago, in large part because I was ashamed about what I had regained. Now we’re getting back to sharing our grand totals. You know why? Because they are actually pretty grand.

• Jason: -2 (16.4 in last 6 weeks; 59 total)
• Jenny: -3 (13.4 in last 6 weeks; 33.8 total)
• Combined 92.8 lost

Like I said, I’m incredibly proud. Well done, love.