2 Pounds Down

23 to go.

By June 1.

Good Morning Internet!

In the Great Weight Loss Journey I have embarked upon my goals are lifetime long term. I am learning how to eat in a healthy and non emotional manner. I am learning how to address my feelings as opposed to stuffing them with fast food. I am learning how to incorporate exercise into a regular routine. In short, at 27, I am learning how to live a healthy and fulfilling life that doesn't revolve around obsessing over food, not fitting into my clothes and both punishing/rewarding myself with food.

It is not easy.

I'm quite pleased to see the scale finally, after a month, budge down a couple of tiny numbers. By this point my goal system would have me down 6 pounds but I'm not freaking out...yet. I'm learning what it takes to actually lose and maintain weight for my body which is a good thing. Exercise was key in this recent weight loss so it will remain key in the upcoming months and then maintenance of a healthy body weight for my height and size.

I've started working out in the morning before work and though I can't even make it through an exercise tape entirely yet I am taking it slow to not injure myself further. Plus I'm not coordinated; it will take me weeks to even begin to get the complicated moves and steps down. Easy for beginner's my arse, half the time I'm marching in place or flailing my arms around trying to keep up with the chipper, overly tan, surgically enhanced freaks of nature squealing at me to keep going and feel the burn.

As an aside I don't understand why videos specifically marketed to women require genetically impossible women with breast implants wearing bikinis to get me motivated. Not that I want to see someone like me on film, sweating and grunting and looking overall awkward and confused, but it would be nice to see someone wearing, oh, I don't know, a TANK TOP and shorts that completely cover their ass. I also don't want to see totally ripped and cut women with biceps the size of my thighs. If my goal is lean healthy muscles why do they choose to showcase female body builders with no hips, big plastic boobies and a tan so orange Lindsay Lohan would cringe? Don't get me started on capped teeth or platinum blonde hair either, I just have to have faith that the moves I'm attempting to perform won't make me look like a roided out she-male.

In this next upcoming two week span the goal is again to lose three pounds. Actually, more like 5 would be lovely. That will put me under the next round number and into a different realm. The exercise I'm not too worried about, I just have to continue gradually and gently increasing my ability without hurting myself further. As it is my neck and shoulders and back are KILLING me today, but that I attribute more to strength rehab than anything else.

I'm better with my eating but not great. I'm identifying when I am genuinely hungry, eating when I am hungry, eating slowly and enjoying every bite, and stopping when I am full... 6 days out of 7. Because I don't yet have the skills to address my emotional eating. After a lifetime of suppressing and masking my anxiety and stress with food it is extremely hard to reprogram my coping skills. I derive a great deal of pleasure in the act of mindlessly eating, and eating alot, it is calming and soothing. I have not ever given myself another way to treat myself well; it has always been food. On this all I can do is continue to do the above and also, when I am particularly anxious and nutty, try writing out my feelings or talking them out in order to face them head on and not swallow them covered in nacho cheese.

I'm oh so tempted to go into heavy diet mode again. I want to see those numbers on the scale drop so, so bad. I'm tempted to eat nothing but salads and hard boiled eggs for the next two weeks. But that in itself is a form of emotional control, both in punishing myself with food and depriving myself of food and escaping my yucky feelings with hunger. But that doesn't work, not in the long term, and though I've managed to yo yo 10-15 pounds over the last several years the numbers never stay where I get them to. And it isn't even the numbers that I really care about; it is the tire of flab around my belly, the clothes that don't fit, the way my chin and neck are no longer two distinct and separate entities.

By Saturday March 7 I am confident that I will indeed really be down three pounds. Now I have a grasp on what it takes. I'm also living, for the first time in weight loss history for me, a normal lifestyle that I can accommodate.

Yay weight loss!