Roles Reversed

Lately, I’ve felt like nothing was going to stop me gaining more weight. When we go off plan, it’s not uncommon for me to gain three times as much weight as Jason does. I don’t eat three times as much and he doesn’t exercise three times as much. My body is just three times more stupid. I have gained back most of what I lost last year during the recent seven months. I’m not happy about it, especially since I had been so close to getting back to where I had gotten down to during our first big effort four years ago.

I don’t handle stress well.

It’s not that stress makes me want to eat. It’s that stress overloads me. My work has been insanely busy this year. We keep hoping to relocate and our house needs a lot of work before we could possibly hope to sell it. Jason injured his back (bulging disc) halfway through a bathroom remodel in April. By the time I’m done with work, I am so mentally drained that planning is the last thing I am able to focus on. Stress doesn’t make me want to eat. It makes me sloppy.

If you make decisions off the cuff, more often than not, you choose easy, quick, less bother/clean up. We started eating out for most meals again. It was almost like the kitchen remodel that took over our lives two years ago was back to haunt us. Our lives were out of control and so was our weight.

As Jason said last week, we were finishing up the last of our mini-vacations for the summer. We had a fantastic time with family and friends. We also spent a lot of time on the road. This meant snacking, quick lunches at fast food/gas stations and sitting for hours on end. Not generally conducive to weight loss.

But it was weird. I did lose. Jason didn’t.

• Jenny -2.8 (-30.6)
• Jason +5 (-64.2)

This isn’t the way this usually happens.

I don’t know if I pulled myself out of vacation mode a little more than he did. Although I didn’t track, I did try to choose relatively healthy options and stopped when I felt satisfied. I tried not to leave too many meals feeling full or overstuffed. (Breakfast with friends – shout out to Alas and At! – being the notable exception.)

We’ll be going out tonight (shopping in Amarillo for a wedding gift) and a wedding reception to attend tomorrow, but we are otherwise back on plan. We did some grocery shopping last night and I’m hoping for some time today to arrange the meals so they’ll work well with our points. I don’t know what the numbers are going to show next week. Maybe they’ll regulate and we’ll get back to our usual results of Jason with a big loss and me with a baby one. Maybe I’ll even have a gain if some of my vacation simply hasn’t caught up to me yet. At this point, it doesn’t matter. What matters is that we will be cooking and eating healthy food at home.

I got a new cookbook at our meeting last night with healthy versions of comfort foods. Since we’re starting to be in the time of year that I crave comfort foods, we’re going to be trying quite a few of them. If we find any we love, we’ll be sure to share them here.

In the meantime, we’ll keep you posted as we get back on our journey.