Watching my Weight

Because I know you all were curious, I was able to find edamame with no problem at the commissary yesterday!  So it wasn't me--it was the fact that they were out of stock when I was looking for it the other day...phew.  I was starting to feel kind of dumb after numerous people informed me that the commissary does in fact carry edamame.  I knew I was tired on that shopping trip, but not that tired...  So perhaps that Lemon-Thyme chicken will be on the docket this week!

Yesterday was weigh-in day, and a true weight assessment from my new scale.  Last week, I weighed 159.6 on my new scale.  This week, I weighed 158.  Since the start of the Challenge 21 days ago, I've lost 5 pounds--that's 1.67 pounds a week.  Not quite 2 pounds a week, but I think I'm doing a decent job--and hey, any loss is good in my book!  I'm getting excited about the prospect of getting under 150 in a month of so (hopefully)--I haven't been under 150 since Dan came home for his 2-week R&R from Iraq in September 2010.  I can't remember what I weighed then exactly, but I'm pretty sure it was under 150--maybe 148?  I don't know, but that's the last time I recall feeling really good about how I looked.

that's funny--I usually find my weight in the pantry

 
I didn't have a disastrous weekend on the Challenge, mostly because we didn't go anywhere with dangerous foods.  I spent 8 hours cleaning the house on Saturday--it desperately needed the cleaning, and we had friends over Saturday evening, so I wanted the house to be in good shape.  Cleaning burns a lot of calories!  Sunday, I had to do my requisite commissary shop in a record-short amount of time because Jake had a make-up gymnastics class and I needed to get home so that Dan could take him--even with finding the edamame, I was in and out in 45 minutes.  The rest of Sunday was for relaxing--I was pretty tired after my cleaning Saturday, so I sat down to watch reruns of Law & Order during naptime (Jack McCoy gets me every time!  Love me some Sam Waterston...).  Since it wasn't a DVR'd show (my usual), I couldn't fast-forward the commercials--and I ended up seeing a commercial for WeightWatchers.  Now, I'm relatively new to the whole calorie-counting thing, and I know WeightWatchers is supposed to be really easy and really great, but their whole point system confuses me.  I was wondering how adhering to their point system could be easier than just plain old counting calories when the name "WeightWatchers" struck me as kind of funny.  I know it's an idiom, as in, "Oh, I can't eat that--I'm watching my weight," but I can't figure out why "watching your weight" became a euphemism for trying to lose weight.  When I'm watching my kids all day, I'm usually not trying to lose one of them.  It seems to me that when you're not watching things, that's when you tend to lose them (at least, that would be the case with kids, keys, and anything else important).  So how watching your weight can make you lose pounds is a confusing concept for me--usually when I watch something closely, I don't notice a difference (a watched pot never boils comes to mind--although that idiom doesn't ring true, either, because if that pot is sitting over high heat, it will eventually boil no matter who is watching!).  I was watching my weight before this Challenge--yep, I was watching it go up.  I did a pretty deep google search, and could not come up with an origin for this particular phrase--I have no idea why "watching my weight" came to mean trying to lose weight.  My best guess is that some enterprising woman decided that it was a more polite and discrete way to tell folks she was on a diet.

exactly.

So yeah, this time around, I'm trying to watch my weight go down, and I'm trying to watch my mouth to make sure ice cream doesn't enter too often.  The kids are most distraught over that last point--last night, Jake said, "Please can we go somewhere for dessert?  We haven't been to ColdStone in a long time...or Dairy Queen.  I love Dairy Queen, Mommy!"  Me too, kid...me too.  I guess I just don't feel safe enough to walk into an ice cream shop yet--could I trust myself to order a kid's sized Peanut Butter Cup Perfection at ColdStone, or a mini Reese's Peanut Butter Cup Blizzard at DQ?  I don't know the answer to that yet.  And even those small sizes aren't good for me--don't worry, I'm not fooling myself!  We will go back again eventually, because life isn't life without the occasional splurge, but I don't know if my willpower is strong enough for that kind of assault just yet!

As an aside, I've decided that I should have been an English major in college, and my senior paper would have been titled something like this:  "American Colloquialisms:  The Origin of Idioms and Their Continued Use Long After Meaning is Lost."  It would have been a page-turner.  Ha!