150

I think my scale hates me.  It obviously dislikes my feet smashing it every few days, and is passive-aggressively taking it out on me by giving me bad readings.  My grudge-holding scale told me that I weighed 150 pounds yesterday.  First it said I weighed 150.2, but I refused to be satisfied with a 0.2-pound weight loss...so I zeroed the thing out and tried again, and the scale generously coughed up another 0.2 pounds.  That gave me a resounding 0.4 pound loss for the week--thanks, scale!

perhaps this method would get me below 150?

With my 1-pound loss last week, and my 0.4-pound loss this week, I think it's fairly safe to say that I've hit my first wall of this process.  Last week could have been a cupcake-induced fluke, but I stuck to the plan this week, and have no convenient sugary treats to blame.  I've watched The Biggest Loser enough to know that Week 2 is notoriously hard, so maybe this is my Week 2 (even though, technically, this is my Week 9...man, that seems like a long time).  I had great success with my new routine in the beginning, but perhaps my body has adjusted after 8 weeks, and it's time to change things up, shock the system.  I was so prescient in my original post outlining this Challenge #2:

I'll be tweaking [the plan] as this Challenge goes on, because I'm sure some things won't work for me, or the things that work for me in the beginning won't be as effective later in the process, so I'll need to modify and change things up...there will be some weeks when I lose 2 pounds, and others when I won't.

It was way easier to write that than it is to live it...  I've not been myself the last two weeks, because I've been feeling down and discouraged about not getting below 150--as much as I'm proud that at least I've lost weight each week, it's hard not to meet the goals I've set for myself.  Again, this emotional ride is more challenging than the physical one for me.

for real

So back to shocking my system--that sounds like a great idea, but I'm not really sure what to do to accomplish it!  I need to be more active on my "off" days, i.e. the days I don't have an exercise class to attend.  The weather is finally warming up again, and I've been able to take some outdoor walks over the last few weeks--I love walking outside!  If I could make walks with the boys a regular Tuesday and Thursday activity (or even every weekday!), and then do something more intense on the weekends, I think that would help me overcome this plateau.  I also think, shockingly, that perhaps I'm not eating enough?  I usually hit my calorie intake goal for the day on my WebMD food log, but when I add my exercise to the log, I'm typically a few hundred calories too low for the day (when you consider both calories in and calories out).  I have a hard time trusting that I should be eating more, but maybe this week, I'll try to up my overall calories each day to see if that makes a difference on the scale.

As a last note, one day last week, I had a large calorie deficit to make up for the day, so I decided to treat myself...  Two of my nieces are Daisies, so to support them, I bought one box of Girl Scout cookies from each of them.  I've had those boxes in my pantry for almost two weeks without touching them, which is a major feat for me!  I decided to go ahead and open the box of Tagalongs, and have one serving.  A serving, by the way, is two measly cookies--for a whopping 140 calories!!!  Ouch.  Tagalongs have long been my weakness, though--my crazy boss right out of college had a crush on a former employee whose daughter sold Girl Scout cookies (never mind that my boss was married...to the Vice President of the company...hence why the employee with the cookies was a former employee!), so every year, he would literally buy hundreds of boxes of cookies from the woman's daughter and stack them, floor-to-ceiling, in our office break room.  I would grab a box of Tagalongs in the morning, throw them in my desk drawer, and munch on them throughout the day...when the days were particularly heinous (more days than not at that place!), I could polish off a whole box in a day.  For my sanity, I'm not going to look up how many calories I was ingesting when I did that...  That just illustrates how much I love Tagalongs.  So I broke open the box last week and ate the first cookie greedily--but, um, it didn't taste quite like I remembered it.  I didn't love it.  I thought something must be wrong with my taste buds (come on, it's Tagalongs!), so I ate the second one more slowly to try to savor the deliciousness...but it wasn't delicious.  I was so confused--I'd consumed 140 calories as a "treat" to myself, and the darn cookies didn't live up to my expectations!  Maybe my expectations were too high, maybe the Girl Scouts have changed the recipe (sacrilege!), or maybe I'm at the point in my weight-loss journey where treats that are bad for me actually make me feel bad instead of great.  I don't know what the problem was, but I was pretty disappointed!

darn you, Tagalongs!