I made an interesting observation this morning. As I was waking up, I sat up in bed and, groggily, looked at my sillouette on the wall. It looked like the sillouette of a normal person! I was a little taken aback and thought wow, I've lost so much weight that even my SHADOW has changed! That's pretty freakin' cool if you ask me. It's one of those little non-scale victories, or NSV as I call it, that I've learned to treasure. I've really payed attention to all the NSVs in the past few months as my weight loss has slowed down considerably. Like last Friday when I put jeans on for dress down day at work, and they almost fell off. I just spend oodles of money on back-to-school clothes, and didn't even consider that my dress down day jeans might not fit! Oops! While the pounds don't always come off as quickly as I'd like, paying attention to things like how your clothes are fitting is a sure sign that you're on the right track. I'm also finding that the more I run and work out, the easier it gets.
So another weird thing that happened this week was the mystery of the missing pounds. I've been on this yo-yo lately...I'll lose a few pounds, gain a few, lose a few, gain a few...it's very annoying. In general the scale is going down, it's just got a very frustrating way of doing it. I think my scale likes to toy with my emotions. I was at the doctor two weeks ago and was not quite where I wanted to be, but have been averaging a pound a week weight loss for the past two months which is not great, but it's still progress. I lost 3 pounds the week after my appointment, then the week after they reappeared. I hate the pound reappearing act. My scale thinks it's a magician. So then of course for a week I'm sitting at the same weight. No budging, nothing, even though I've kicked up the exercise and re-structured my diet. I got on the scale yesterday morning and, no kidding, I lost 5 pounds OVERNIGHT (I have this really bad habit of weighing myself in the evenings too. I really shouldn't do that). I was like, what the heck!?!? So I stepped on the scale about 4 more times, moved it to different places, and sure enough the number was real. This morning I was down another pound. 6 pounds in two days, that's pretty flippin' awesome. I have no idea how, but who am I to argue with the almighty scale? ;)
I think sometimes our bodies aren't quite ready to let go of the pounds as quickly as we'd like them to. We hit plateaus because our bodies need to adjust. A friend of mine explained it in a way that our bodies lose quickly for awhile and then at some point it's like "hey, hold on a minute will ya? I need to catch up here!" So our body needs to take some time to get acquainted with its new, smaller self. My doctor also explained to me at my last visit that your metabolism changes as you lose weight. 100 pounds ago, every move I made burned calories because it was an effort to make any movement at all. Now moving isn't as much of an effort and my body doesn't burn calories as easily. I have to put forth more effort (aka: EXERCISE) to burn off calories. There's a lot less of me to move around, and if I want to have even less I have to move a lot more! Simple formula really.
I'm learning more on this journey every day, and I hope I never stop learning. I love reading about others' journies and talking to people who are also trying to get healthy. Who says you have to be rich and famous to be an inspiration?
"Give to the world the best you have, and the best will come back to you." -Unknown
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