Ask anyone who knows me and they will attest to my distaste for numbers. In high school my report card constantly reflected how much numbers and I are not friends.
Which is probably why I chose jobs where the math was done for me (hello cash register) or where I avoided numbers as much as humanly possible (not a lot of number crunching monitoring emails and answering phones as an administrative assistant) and oh look! Even coming back to my love of writing has made it possible for me to avoid anything to do with mathematic facts.
So I why on God’s earth I chose to go on a weight loss plan that deals PRIMARILY WITH NUMBERS is anyone’s guess. And here’s the thing, when you combine something that I love (hai food) with something I don’t love, (stinky numbers), the combination is not pretty.
Not pretty at all.
Because one of us is going to lose and it won’t be the food.
Week two of Weight Watchers had me emptying the cupboards searching for any kind of food I could get my hands on. If it was edible, I wasn’t above eating it and naturally my points and pounds lost for the week reflected it. I didn’t lose as much as I thought I would (okay I gained) and it’s largely due to every time I ate more than what I should or ate something that I felt I probably shouldn’t. I would quickly decide that that day (and eventually the week) was a total wash. My friend Amy (from Resourceful Mommy) made the comment on Facebook about falling off the weight loss wagon and it resonated with me because it was exactly how I was feeling that week also. I confessed that not only have I fallen off the weight loss wagon so many times that I have bumps, bruises, and skinned up knees from it all… but darn those girl scout cookies were good! I’ve since decided that because I am so prone to falling that buying some knee pads and a helmet might not be a bad idea.
Then week three came along and I thought, “I can do this. It’s only food right?” then I ate the rest of my boxes of girl scout cookies (if Brian and I find a walmart later today… those gals with the tables set up outside may have just found their next victim, but you didn’t read that). But instead of giving up on each day, I reminded myself that tomorrow was a new one, points refilled, my water bottle refilled and a fridge full of things that were good for me. And I made it. I made it to Sunday and then I weighed myself.
Down 2.5 pounds total and we are in week four. I guess it could be worse right?
Over the course of the last two weeks I lamented on how the recipe builder was not my friend (it is VERY HARD to create a recipe using the beef and pork we have butchered); because it really wants to list out name brand foods over a basic food list, thus making it hard to build an actual recipe. I also decided I love the points calculator more than anything in the world because when I do actually find a food using the points tracker, it is more points than if I just put in the nutritional values on my own (guess what I use more, points tracker or points calculator?) and yet… exercising or finding the motivation to exercise is still the bane of my existence.
My biggest challenge, outside of the exercise, is remembering to calculate things (and that’s where the numbers and I truly fight). I either carry my phone with me EVERYWHERE so I can do a quick points enter while I’m in the kitchen preparing a meal, or carry a half dozen food packages or nutritional values scrawled on paper back to my room to calculate everything straight into the website from my laptop. It makes me look like I’m hoarding food when you walk in and find packets of cheese, hot chocolate, the bag of rice, salad dressing, a box of cereal… you name it, it’s sprawled all over my bed and I’m crunching numbers like an accountant on April 15th.
Like I said before… not a pretty picture.
While I’m not a math whiz (I prefer to stick to writing but not writing about math… that’s a no-no), I refuse to let this numbers game beat me or get the best of me.
photo by Peter Huys via sxc.hu
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