I’ve said this before, and I’ll say it again I’m sure, but I honestly feel a lot of times like the Weight Watchers meetings are more for me than for the members. This week’s topic is about slip ups and how to learn from them and use them as spring boards for success. Being in a room full of people who "get it" and who share their own tips and strategies for bouncing back after they fall off the wagon is such a refreshing place to be. Yesterday morning’s meeting really struck a cord with me and I left there feeling recharged and ready to recommit, finally.
I can’t even go back in time to pinpoint exactly WHEN I fell off the wagon, but here I am struggling to climb back on it. I am a champion at coming up with a million excuses as to why I had stopped caring – taking a new job, lots of traveling, my birthday weekend, weddings, focusing on dating/my social life and not necessarily weight loss – but I’ll spare you from getting too into it. They are just that – excuses. I am not at all alone in having a ton of things going on in my life, and it’s up to me to make weight loss and being healthy a priority.
Over the last several months, I’ve been sort of in a haze with Weight Watchers. I’ve still led my weekly meeting, but I basically stopped exercising, cooking, and eating healthy. I dubbed the start of my new job the time to recommit to being healthy, but that first week, I ate out every single meal. While breakfasts/lunches were healthy, dinners were not and involved way too many drinks. I also didn’t work out even once, which wasn’t that unusual because my exercise routine had been spotty at best for the last several months. Several weeks of no working out, 1 or 2 workouts max, and just very inconsistent activity levels. Couple that with unhealthy eating and too much drinking and going out, and guess what you get?
Weight gain!
Shocking, I know.
I’ve been trying to avoid it and pretend it hasn’t happened, but it has. I can feel it in my clothes and see it in my face and I don’t like it. I wish it was easier to do what I know I need to to get back to where I want to be, but it’s not. I have to be mindful of what I eat and drink, and make exercising a priority. It sounds so simple, but it’s much harder to execute than it is to talk about it, as we all know.
Last week, I wrote a post at the beginning of the week setting some weekly goals and sharing my menu plan. It helped me to ease back into a healthy lifestyle, and I’m proud to say that I ended up working out 4 days last week. I also ate several meals at home and brought my lunch to work every day except for Friday. I tried hard to be healthy throughout the week, but then with birthday celebrations over the weekend including happy hour turned into night out on Friday, all day tubing on Saturday followed by a night out, and then a boozy brunch on Sunday, it shouldn’t surprise you to know that I undid all the progress I had made weight-wise.
This week, I have less going on this weekend and no birthdays to celebrate, so I’m hopeful that I can make good decisions throughout the week and weekend and make some progress. I leave a week from tomorrow for St. Maarten for one of my best friend’s weddings, and I really want to look and feel my best, since there will be a lot of photos. Not to mention the fact that I will be in a bathing suit in front of a lot of people. So there’s that.
So far, I did a 30 minute interval run on Monday, and woke up early to go to Body Pump this morning, followed by 15 minutes of intervals on the stairmaster. I’d like to workout tomorrow and/or Friday as well, and really focus on sticking within my daily PointsPlus for the rest of the week. I also want to try to limit drinking, though I do have a couple things going on later this week so I’ll try to stick to 2 glasses of wine (7 pts+!) so I don’t blow the bank points wise, or get to the point where I care less about making bad food choices.
I honestly feel sort of like a broken record because I know I’ve committed many, many times to recommitting, and here I am doing it again. But this just goes to show that leading a healthy life requires constant attention and good decision making. It’s all about making one good decision, and then another, and then another, rather than big picture thinking “I’m going to be healthy!”.
And could this fortune I got my first week at the new job be any more fitting?
Tell me.. what is your favorite inspirational quote?
