Winning – Or Not

Sometimes winning doesn’t feel like winning.

Until a few minutes ago, I was really happy about this week’s weigh-in. When we pulled into the meeting last night, I didn’t expect great things. I’d been feeling bad all week (or for several weeks) and was feeling bloated and in a lot of pain. I was determined to face the scale though, and was pleasantly surprised with a loss of 4.2 pounds. Jason didn’t fare as well but still had a loss of 0.6. As horrible as I felt, I was really proud of what I had done. It meant that I had increased my weekly weightloss average to 2.6 and had lost 10.4 pounds during the month of January. These are numbers to be thrilled with.

And I was until this morning.

You see, when we pulled up to the meeting last night, I told Jason that regardless of who lost more (the usual deciding factor) he would be doing the blog post. Mainly it was because I was feeling so horrible last night physically and I didn’t even know if I would even go to work, much less how much would be waiting for me. He was disappointed with this smaller loss and since I felt better and had more energy today, he decided I should blog after all. So, I started asking for numbers to update the tagline and be accurate in our results post. I wanted to know how much he had lost during January (7.2) and he started looking at the little milestone icons on his weight tracker.

“I haven’t had a milestone since October 2011.”

“Yeah, honey. We gained over that holiday season and then last year was hell. We’re still losing the weight we had gained during that time.”

I could tell he was upset, but it’s something that had to be faced anyway. I couldn’t help it though; I got angry. Here he was, frowning and beating himself up because he’s been playing catch up and on our last few weigh-ins, I’ve been pulling bigger numbers. He only needs to lose 1.4 pounds to get back down to where he had been before the holiday hiatus and kitchen debacle. I need to lose 36.

Have I told you yet that my body sucks? During the time we were off plan, I gained back way more weight than he did, even though he ate worse than I did. I understand being discouraged. I understand being mad at oneself for backsliding. I even understand wanting to get back to losing faster while watching someone else lose more quickly than you do.

But my hill is harder to climb. I have so much more that I need to lose, just to get back to where I had been. I have so much more to lose to get to goal (he started at a higher weight, but weighs less than me now, and being a 6 foot tall man, his goal is much higher than mine).

I snapped. “I don’t want to hear you complain about this.”

The shock (and maybe a little anger) was plain on his face.

“You can be motivated by this, but I don’t want to hear you complain. You’re almost back to where you were, but I have over 30 pounds to get there.”

Losing over ten pounds in a month shouldn’t feel like a failure. I didn’t want it to, but suddenly it did. Because it wasn’t enough to make up for all the other gains over the last year. I had been doing really well just looking forward, not looking back at the failures of the last year. His analysis of his own journey forced me to and I hate what I saw.

Even more, I hate that it made me lose this sense of victory, accomplishment and success. This isn’t the attitude I want in my weight loss, so I’m telling myself what I told him.

“You can be motivated by this.”

And I am.