In the middle of difficulty lies "ficul"... and I guess opportunity too

First of all, look at my cute little weight loss tracker above this entry! Pretty cool, right? I'm not technologically gifted, so it is good I even figured out how to put that on here. 

I'm not sure what I've done to anger the scale gods, but they have not been kind to me the last couple of weeks. I'm down 0.8 lbs this week. Weirdly, I would not be that upset about it if I knew what mistakes I had made. But I honestly do not. Even with my dad's birthday party (and the smallest slice of ice cream cake ever) and the allure of all that Super Bowl food, I was still right at my correct number of calories every day. Plus, I had a really spectacular week in the gym and went pretty far over my expected calorie burn every day, which is awesome. But at the same time, I'm not having crazy gym time like a couple of weeks ago, so I don't think it's a matter of overtraining. It's difficult to fix something when I don't know where the problem lies. For that matter, I don't even know if there is something to fix. What can I say? I've been pretty lucky thus far in my journey not really having a plateau. Maybe that's what this is, and the only thing to do is switch my workouts up a bit and keep powering through. It's just another chance to show that I will not let anything stop me from reaching my goals.

So obviously this week, I can't use my weight loss as motivation for the coming week. But as I collapsed on the floor by my scale this morning, pounding the floor with my fists and screaming, "WHY ME? WHY HAVE THE SCALE GODS FORSAKEN ME?" (ummm not really, but that would be good if I were on some kind of weight loss soap opera), I had a sudden flash of insight. Someday in the not-too-distant future, I will reach my goal weight. When that happens, I will not have weight loss to motivate me anymore. All I will see is the number hopefully staying the same week after week, year after year. So I'm looking at this week as practice for the rest of my life. I have to find something other than a number on the scale to keep me making good decisions and not regressing into a pile of Big Macs and slothdom (again, not sure if that is an actual word, but it sounded better than "sedentariness"). So without further ado, here are some of my non scale victories (NSVs) this week:

1) As I wrote about in my previous entry, I killed  it at the gym this week. Like my lack of weight loss, the timing of this sudden breakthrough is a mystery too, but a good one. Suddenly, almost every day I'm smashing my previous personal best times on the elliptical and treadmill. Plus, I have found the ever elusive runner's high.

2) There were several events this week that could have derailed me this week. I helped my dad celebrate his birthday, which per his request came complete with my mom's awesome lasagna and ice cream cake. In keeping my resolve to have some moderation, I had some of each. But unlike previous years and ginormous slices of each of those, I had a serving size (actually half a serving size of the ice cream cake). The same goes with the Super Bowl. I didn't pile fistfuls of wings into my mouth, nor did I sit glaring at everyone in the room eating wings while I sat in a corner eating carrots. I had some treats and I had some carrots too. So while the crazier side of me may want to freak out and blame those events for my small weight loss and vow never to have treats again, the rational side of me knows that was not the case.

3) I've started a small love affair with my legs. Well, maybe I wouldn't really go that far, but I do finally not hate them. I've had big legs my whole life, even when I was playing competitive soccer. My legs just have a lot of muscle mass and are never going to be stick thin, even if I weighed next to nothing. But I've kind of made my peace with it. My legs now are rock hard and I am very proud of that. They are powerful and super strong. And that's nothing to be ashamed of.

4) I've really started to believe I will make it to my goal weight. I'm not sure if I can honestly say that has ever been true before, mainly because it's pretty hard to believe in something that is so far away and that you have never seen before as an adult. I mean, the smallest I have ever been in my adult life was 170 lbs. The last time I was at my goal weight of 128 lbs, I think I was probably in 7th grade. So yeah, it was a little hard to picture that when I started at 328 lbs. But now as I'm getting closer and closer, I can start to see it and believe it's really going to happen. And when it does, I have big plans. I already have my dad working on figuring out a way for me to put back on the 200 lbs I lost with weights and then take it off, like they do in Biggest Loser at the end. Yeah, I will raise my corniness flag and wave it proudly. Plus, I'm pretty sure I want to go sky diving. We shall see. The plans may change.

So while this week was kind of a bust weight loss-wise, I had many more important victories than that. I'll keep doing what I'm doing, and eventually the scale is going to cooperate. Well, it will if it knows what's good for it (which it probably doesn't since it's an inanimate object).