Monday- Weigh-In

I made the mistake of weighing myself this morning. The only reason I did was because of the diet bet I'm doing. I have a month (April 27-May 27) to lose 4% of my body weight. Since my starting weight was 159.0 pounds I have to lose about 6.4 pounds to win. 

You have to weigh yourself in the beginning and then once in the middle (which I did today). If you don't, you'll be disqualified because they don't want people trying to lose all of the weight the last few days of the bet. They want people to try losing weight the healthy way. 

If I didn't "have" to weigh myself I wouldn't have. Either way, I am regretting that I did. I think I'm going to bow out of this diet bet to save my sanity. I was feeling great this morning until I got on that darn scale. I hadn't weighed myself in a couple weeks so I was excited to see if I had lost some weight (at least a pound or two)...But no... I didn't lose ANY weight these past few weeks. I weigh EXACTLY THE SAME as I did three weeks ago. Ugh. Actually, I weight exacky the same as I did six weeks ago!! 158.6. WTF. 

Anyway, not going to let it ruin my day. F@ck the scale, I'm going on a run. 

Day 60 - Morning Check-In

Thursday, 5/7/15, 7:13am

Today is day 60 and while I've been looking forward to this day for a long time I am filled with mixed emotions. 

At this point I'm not sure if the new scale I bought is busted or if I really just gained 1.5 pounds this past week. I understand that weight can fluctuate but according to the scale I have only lost about four pounds in 60 days!! I have been diligently tracking my calories and entering them into my daily food journal using MFP and on top of that I have been exercising 3 to 5 times a week. At least once or twice a week I even do a three hour workout at the gym!! I'm seriously busting my butt so I'm really confused at why the scale is not budging. I lose a pound one week only to gain it back the following week. 

I hate to be a broken record, but last summer I lost 28 pounds in sixty days so these 4 pounds in the same amount of time seriously doesn't make sense. I understand that muscle weighs more than fat or that you can plateau for a week or two. But let's be honest... this has been going on for over a month now. This isn't caused by muscle weighing more than fat and isn't caused because of a plateau. I've been changing up my workouts, I've been increasing the intensity, I even went on a 9 mile hike two weeks ago...  What more can I do??

As much of a bummer as this is I'm not going to let it affect my progress. I made a decision two months ago to change in the way my kids and I were eating. This is not a decision I made lately and it is not something that I'm going to stop doing just because an annoying ass scale won't budge. All I can do at this point is to keep doing exactly what I've been doing and just hope that it pays off in the long run.

I always seem to fall apart after day 60 and I now kind of understand how that could happen. It's so easy to lose motivation or to be discouraged when you're not seeing the results that you think you earned.

I believe what is important is your mindset when you start your healthy lifestyle. If you go into it thinking that it's a diet, one you have to follow to lose weight and then can stop once the weight falls off, you are setting yourself up to fail. In the past I always saw a light at the end of the tunnel. Every pound I lost was not only getting me closer to my weight loss goal but getting me closer to the day I could go back to eating "normal". I would think I was in it for the long haul but in reality I couldn't wait to  go back to normal eating. Normal eating didn't mean eating donuts for breakfast every morning but it did mean having them once in a blue moon. It also meant having food with more fat, basically a less restrictive diet. But mostly I don't think I was looking forward to the day where I woulmdy have to keep track of EVERYTHING I ate. I wouldn't have o count calories. I wouldn't have to research