Last night was my 3rd weigh-in at New Directions. I had lost 0.6 pounds (so, not a TOTAL wash) for a total of 10.6 in 3 weeks. My blood pressure was even better than last week, clocking in at 130/68. I'm a BIG fan of that number, and so are the professionals at my program. No need to go back on blood pressure medication with that reading. :)
There was only one negative from the week--I didn't get the scale result for which I had hoped. That's a very small negative when I consider the positives. First, the obvious, the blood pressure reading. I am so very grateful to have that number back in a "non-danger" range. VERY grateful. Second, through my meticulous diet journal-keeping, the dietician at New Directions and I were able to determine that I had been calculating my carbohydrates wrong. At New Directions, we are allowed to add up the grams of fiber and grams of sugar alcohols and subtract that from the total carbohydrate count (with some rules, but I won't bore you with those). Turns out, I wasn't just deducting the sugar alcohols, I was deducting the SUGAR. Whoops. Can't deduct the sugar, just the sugar alcohols. Knowing that little piece of information, I probably spent most of my week last week out of ketosis. Add that to the fact that I had just lost 10 pounds in the previous 2 weeks and you have the recipe for why my weight loss was so small this week. Boo yah! I can fix that!
The third positive was our program class yesterday evening. I am convinced that Liz, the program manager and the "behavioral" specialist, is the diet guru to end all gurus. She has so much insight into human thought processes and behavior, it's scary. And I've learned so much about myself in the time I've been in the program--both the previous time I did the program and in these three weeks. Yesterday's class was about moving from "force" to "power." Let me explain. When you're first starting a weight loss program, a lot of what you are doing is forced. You're not used to it, it's out of the ordinary for you, it's not routine. You may be empowered, but there's not a lot of power behind what you're doing. Using our levels of consciousness and awareness, we can move from forcing ourselves to do something to having the power to just do it. I've thought about that quite a bit today. This past week, some of the struggles I had seemed like pulling teeth. I had a physical YEARNING for the tempting food that was around my house. Even something as simple as making the boys a peanut butter and jelly sandwich for lunch was just painful. Physically painful. I had to tell my brain to tell my hands to keep them the hell off the cut-off crust, that's how bad I wanted to eat that bread and peanut butter. But really, if you think about it, my SUB-CONSCIOUS wasn't hearing "you can't have that, you aren't allowed," it was hearing, "I want, gimme, gimme, you're not letting me have it." The key is to move behind the "you can't have that," to "you don't WANT that."
So, even though I wanted to keep my two goals of 1) sticking to 800-900 calories per day and 2) exercise 3x this week, I'm adding a 3rd goal:
I will, as of this moment, stop telling myself that I "can't have" something. I am a person of free will and I can have anything I choose. But right now, I am CHOOSING to not eat that. It's a choice I am making of my own free will and power. I don't want it and I will not want it. I choose to say no.
