I know what you may be thinking: a four pound gain? How does that make you feel “spectacular”?

It’s because I allowed myself some time off, not to stress over getting to the gym, instead focusing on leisurely walks down the beach with my boyfriend.

It’s because instead of counting calories, I ate and drank as I pleased.  I tried not to go too far overboard … but there were three mornings with more than one breakfast, and nightly calls to room service for ice cream.

It’s because I spent time with my family, swimming and goofing and lazing around.  We even spontaneously went to a yoga class and I was proud to be called a show-off.

It’s because I worked out a lot leading up to the trip, so when people brought out their cameras on the beach, I didn’t cover up my bathing suit or hide, instead choosing to flaunt what I got.

It’s because the whole time I was in Cancun, I felt like I was glowing.  And according to some of the pictures, I was:

And I’m off to Mexico, looking the best I’ve ever looked, feeling the best I’ve ever felt.

BRING ON THE MARGARITAS.

Got back on board with the diet healthy eating and exercise … and BAM, off comes the booze weight and I’m back to where I was pre-wedding.  Holla!

I leave for Cancun in exactly a week (no joke, at this time next Wednesday I’ll be at the airport), so I’m hoping to drop a few more L-B’s prior to departure … that way I can feel awesome in a swimsuit and take guilt-free advantage of the cabana boys bringing mai tais directly to my hammock.

… Is it next Wednesday yet?

Maybe it’s the fact that my boss called me svelte a few weeks ago.

Maybe it was the e-mail (subject: “Damn girl!”) from my best friend that said, “I know I have said this several times but.. girl? you fiiiinneee. You look amazing!” (Love her.)

Maybe it was looking at pictures from a recent wedding and finding almost no double-chins, even in the candid shots.

Maybe it was my dad seeing my dress on a hanger and saying, “No way, this is way too small for you!”

Maybe it was the extra hour of sleep last night (holla for early bedtimes) or the papaya color of this sweater.

But I think mostly, it is the slow realization that I am no longer who I was.  I am strong and healthy and beautiful, and  I deserve much more credit than I give myself.

I’m not even going to pretend to be surprised by this.  Last week I gained 1.2lbs and this week I gained 2.0, but I’ve been so incredibly busy that my only sense of surprise is the fact that I didn’t gain MORE.

I’ve spent the past two weeks running around like crazy.  Had a big work event on the 19th, visitors on the 20th, two singing concerts on the 22nd and 23rd, then on the 26th I left for 5 days for a wedding weekend, during which I didn’t work out and I drank more wine than in the year preceding.

So I started this month at the exact weight that I started last month: 180.8, just like May 5.  And instead of being disappointed at regaining the 3lbs I lost in the first two weeks, I’m just going to be thankful at the stability of hovering around 180 … ’cause it could be a lot worse, eh?

In my head I was already composing a post about how hard it is to travel & how I need to be more careful when I spend weekends away, because Monday morning my weigh was back up at 180.8lb.  I guess this shows two things:

1. How volatile weight loss is.  Just two days of being back “on plan” (working out and eating not-crap) can be enough to put me in an ok place.

2. How to set up success.  I’m lucky that I set my weigh-in date on Wednesday.  If it were Fridays or Mondays or (god forbid) Sunday mornings, I feel like I could be constantly disappointed.  But with a mid-week weigh-in, I have significantly less distractions.

And now off to work for our biggest fundraiser of the year.  Wish me luck!

I don’t have much time to write, but I just fell back into my routine – weight training, running, yoga.  Eating less than I’m burning.  And losing the weight in the smart way instead of the fake diety way?  So much more satisfying.

I’m itching to break the 178 mark so that my total loss can officially be 50lbs+.  Hopefully next week, but work has been so busy that it might take a little bit longer …

I’m not talking about the weight on a scale or number of weekly run mileage.  I’m referring to my fitness/nutrition/lifestyle blogroll.

Some of them are funny, some are angry, some are verbose while others are covered in photos.  Some are corporate promotions but most are just blogs written by real people … and each one of them gives me some kind of information, encouragement, motivation and support that was lacking before its entry into my reading list.

I don’t know how I started on A Weight Lifted (a cross-reference from a different blog, but sadly I can’t remember neither the blogger nor the article), but her recent book review on Geneen Roth’s “Women Food and God” got me thinking and exploring more of Ms. Roth’s body of work.

While I may soon buy some of her books, it was her article on the Huffington Post that helped me realize exactly what happened with South Beach last month:

… we use the hunt for answers to abdicate personal responsibility–and with it, any semblance of power — for our relationship with food. Underlying each frenzied bout of passionate involvement in the newest solution is the same lack of interest in acknowledging our own part. The same conviction that “I don’t have the power to do anything about this problem.” We want to be done, we want to be fixed. But since the answer is not where we are looking, our efforts are doomed to fail.

Freedom from obsession is not about something you do; it’s about knowing who you are. It’s about recognizing what sustains you and what exhausts you. What you love and what you think you love because you believe you can’t have it.

I know I keep promising to stop returning to this topic of how two weeks of dieting messed up my weight loss progress, but I feel like she summed up in two paragraphs what I’ve been trying to say.

Instead of staying in control and true to myself, I handed the power over to a diet.  I let the diet determine not only what I was eating, but also my energy level, my gastrointestinal patterns, my emotions.  And when the diet didn’t “fix” me, I took the blame for the subsequent weight gain through a process of obsession.

And now I’m back.  I’m running again and loving it! The hardest part is forcing myself to stop so that I don’t push myself over the 10% increase threshold and re-injure any of my sore joints and muscles.  I’ve also been mostly on the treadmill to decrease impact, but as the time spent running increases, so will the time outside.  After all, it’s May in Boston – how could I resist running down the Charles?

As I already wrote, I feel now like I’m back to normal.  I’m allowing myself to do what works and to not obsess.  And though this was a relatively big gain this week, I feel like it was still a step forward.  My life is insane and my eating/exercise habits will be tough to sustain for the next 2 months or so (between stressful work events, visits from old friends and awesome vacations — I’m not complaining, I’m just saying!), so weight may continue to fluctuate.  But that’s just what weight does sometimes, and I’m not going to let a silly number get in my head and beat me.  It may occasionally win a battle, but I will WIN this war against my own self-destruction.  And the spoils of victory taste so good.

I’ve been thinking about the original NES 8-bit systems because it had two features that played important roles in my childhood – the reset button and the cartridges.   I make comparisons to these childhood memories because they both feel appropriate to my fitness mentality this week.

The Reset Button

I hope this will be my last post expressing regret about doing the South Beach Diet last month, because it took me that long to figure out how to press the “RESET” button on my body and return to a process that had been working for me. I started running again and my appetite went through the roof (as it tends to do when I run), and I decided to just eat.  I was out of town and away from my scale and I allowed myself to enjoy my food for a few days without any stress or guilt.  I had wine with lunch and ice cream as a snack and pizza for dinner … and I didn’t force myself to feel bad about it.  And when I got back home on Sunday night, I went back to my usual eating patterns and finally physically felt normal for the first time in a month.  Even if my metabolism has spiked my appetite, my stomach is back on target and I feel healthy again.  RESET.

Blowing the Dust Out of the Cartridge

Do you remember these game cartridges, and how if anything went wrong with the image, you would eject the game, blow in the bottom of it, reinsert it and expect it to work like magic?  I feel like I did that with my brain this week.

I did just fine on the “Phase One” of SBD, but once I started reading about “Phase Two,” the wheels fell off.  After starting the first week and trying to figure out how to “transition,” I read the stories of a lot of people who started to re-introduce healthy carbs (namely whole grains and fruits) and put back on all the weight that they lost, because their bodies so desperately wanted to hoard the carbs … and those stories made me paranoid.  By the time I rolled over to “Phase Two,” I was so convinced that I was going to gain back the four-point-whatever pounds I lost that I started sweating every ounce.

There’s a little-known sin buried in Catholic dogma called “scrupulosity,” which is basically when someone is so afraid to sin that he analyzes his every move in order to prevent sin from occurring.  If there is such a thing as “nutritional scrupulosity,” I had it last week.  I got so nervous and paranoid about everything going in my mouth that I felt like I was going to panic … and even with all the monitoring, I was still gaining back weight.  It came slowly, creeping up the scale, but I could see it adding up and I started to freak.

That’s the other reason I needed to take the weekend off – to give my body time to re-adjust to eating carbohydrates, but also to remind myself that food is supposed to be enjoyed, not feared.  Somehow, in the midst of my “weight loss victory” and all my number-crunching (if I can continue to lose a pound a week, I’ll weigh XXX in time for vacation!) and fantasizing (if I weigh XXX then I’ll be confident enough to wear a bikini!), I lost sight of myself and my goals and what had been successful: steady progress and life balance.

So I’m going back to that formula.  I probably gained a few pounds this week – I don’t know, I’ve tried to avoid the scale – and if so, I’m hoping to be able to shrug them off.  Sure, it sucks, but in the long run, I feel like I’ve learned a valuable lesson … and maybe even the real life equivalent of a 1up extra life.