The road toward health isn’t always an easy one.  To this point, my brain has been in the right place, but I hit a wall this weekend that left me feeling a lot of doubts, and because this blog is about being truthful with myself, it’s important that I record this here as well.  This isn’t an easy post, nor is it a particularly cheerful one, but it is absolutely part of the head games that must be dealt with in order to succeed.

I’m a little blue at the moment about weight loss.  I think it’s a number of things getting to me; hopes that I would have lost more by now (which is unreasonable, but who says emotions are reasonable?), the fact that my knees have hurt like hell all weekend, seeing a pic that was taken of me over the weekend.

I’ll get to feeling pretty good about myself, and then see a pic of how I really look and then just want to hide in a hole somewhere. I know I have to accept myself where I am at, at this moment, but man, it’s hard to look at pics like that and not just feel like a total fat slob outcast.  We had a group photo at an event, and there I was, trying to duck down and hide my body a little bit; a lot of good that did.  It made me look worse than if I’d stood up straight. 🙁  It’s also tough on me because I’ll be feeling like I look good, and my self confidence is up, and then *bam*, one photo blows all of that for me.

I also felt ponderous this weekend; probably in part to feeling like I overate, and partly because my knees hurt.  I had put in a really good week of exercise, which makes my knees hurt but I accept that’s part of the package; it has also been storming for the past few days, and that also makes my knees scream at me.  Nonetheless, when my knees hurt, I feel awful overall.  It gives me the perception that progress is an illusion. It makes me realize how fragile my mental state is in regards to working forward on my plan.

I’ve been tempted, lately, to go ahead and weigh myself, in hopes that the number will be good enough to make me feel better, but I’m also fragile enough right now that if it wasn’t a good number, I’d have a hard time working up any enthusiasm for staying on plan.  I dunno.  Maybe I should just bite the bullet and go ahead and do it, but I have this voice telling me not to.  I’m nearly seven weeks into this, and I don’t want to do anything that might trip me up.

I can honestly say that having a wedding anniversary didn’t help matters, either.  I have been mentally flogging myself for not being absolutely pure on the anniversary dinner itself or breakfast the next morning.   This is what gets to me; I become of two minds when this stuff happens.  I know that I didn’t do any damage at all to my plan.  I know that in order for carb and calorie cycling to work, I have to bring my carbs up to a certain level, which I’ve been not so great at doing on the weekends.  But I still feel like crap for eating carbs, and I’m letting too much crap get in my head.

Part of it started at dinner, when the side items weren’t as low carb friendly as I thought they might be; I got crab-stuffed catfish, and I knew there would be a little breading with the crab, and had planned for that.  I hadn’t planned on there being gravy on the green beans (wtf?) and brown sugar on the mashed sweet potatoes, although I should have figured that one.  I didn’t eat much of the green beans… frankly, they didn’t taste that good to me, anyway.  I scraped off all the brown sugar I could off the mashed sweet potatoes.  It was probably a 50 carb meal, with the biscuit.  But when the waiter told me they didn’t have the low carb cheesecake that I’d seen on their website and then acted like he didn’t understand why I’d give a crap about not wanting the extra sugar, my brain was filling in a little voice that wasn’t there: “hey lady, you’re as big as a house anyway, why the f*ck do you care about how much sugar you have?”  I was filling in a silent judgment that I imagined to be there.  Maybe it was; maybe it wasn’t.

That meal stuffed me, and I felt uncomfortable about over-eating.  I just don’t do that much anymore, and it feels really bad to me.  I left a lot of food on the plate, but I’ve worked hard at eating smaller portions and my stomach has shrunk to the point where I just don’t eat that much.  But I still felt horrible about perceived over-eating because I was uncomfortably stuffed.  The same was true for breakfast the next day, and part of that was because I’m cheap enough that I didn’t want to just eat eggs, bacon, and coffee and get popped $11 for it.  So I overate again.  I feel freaking horrible when I overeat.  I just do.  I feel like I’ve blown everything when I do that.  I don’t want my stomach to start expanding again.

There’s also another three day weekend coming up, and having an extra day to figure out what I’m going to do exercise and diet wise just stresses me out.  I know it shouldn’t, but it does.  I don’t want to become obsessed with this; I want to feel confident that I can get through event days (holidays, anniversaries, vacations) without adding stress.

Sigh. Such head games I play with myself.  It’s a low point, for sure, and I’m sure there will be more of them.  I need to admit these times to myself, because last time, I got to feeling this way but wouldn’t admit it, and instead, ended falling off the wagon instead of just working through them.  I’m not going to feel perfectly aligned with my goals every day.  Instead of backsliding, I need to do what I did to start this plan; fake it through if I must, but don’t deviate from the goal.

Don’t worry, friends. I’m picking myself up this morning.  Carbs, calories and portions are back to normal, and I feel a LOT better, just not being stuffed to the gills.  I just need to get this stuff out there and recognize that I’m feeling this way, and push through.