That whole pants thing?  You know, the one where I said I’d try on pants in a smaller size until they fit, instead of a weekly weigh-in followed by a weekly mental flogging?  Well, that’s working.

Each Friday, I’ve been trying on my goal pants.  This morning, the button and buttonhole at the waist touch each other but don’t quite meet.  A couple of weeks ago, I was lucky to get the pants up over my hips.  This is good progress.  Maybe, by next week, I’ll be able to do the whole lay-on-the-bed-and-suck-your-gut thing and be able to button them.  (Oh, come on.  If you’re here and reading this, I bet you’ve done that.)

I won’t be weighing in again until I feel like I’ve lost enough weight that these pants are fit for public consumption, but I think at this rate, that’s still a few weeks away.  Better just a few weeks away, though, than where I started!  Even though the goal pants don’t fit, yet, I can tell that I’m losing weight; the jeans I wear were getting embarrassingly constricted.  Now, they fit more like they’re supposed to fit.  They’re not baggy, yet, but they definitely look and feel better.  I haven’t really noticed any substantial difference from the waist up, but I’m sure that will come.

A confession: although I failed in my last weight loss effort, having written this blog helped me get back on the wagon.  I was actually googling a term that’s related to my knee problem, and was surprised when *this blog* showed up in the search results.  It caught me by surprise, and that, with a number of other factors, convinced me that I should give this another try.

I’m glad I’m back in this, again.  I think I’m more ready this time, to see it through in the long term, than I have been on recent attempts.  I think it was smart of me to use some other indicator than a scale to measure my progress; I noticed while rereading previous posts, this morning, that I was scale-obsessed in the last attempt.  Minimizing that dependence has been good for me.  Self-awareness is helping.