I’ve completed one week, for a total loss of 8.5 pounds.  Granted, a good portion of that is water weight, but even water weight is still weight, and I’m glad to have it off.  I’m also a lot closer to my first goal than I thought I would be; my first goal is to get under 300 pounds, and I had set an initial one month time period in order to do that.  Hallelujah!

I did go through some trials during the first week.  By my own error, I had scheduled  and bought tickets for an event on Thursday night, the second day of being back on plan; the tickets were for a tasting event for a number of restaurants.  I wasn’t able to entirely stay low carb, because there just wasn’t that much selection.  I did, at least, keep my food intake reasonable.  Other than that, my only real challenges were that I was hungry for the first few days, which I expected, and that I needed to be more mindful of drinking water.

I use FitDay to record my meals.  I fixed the water problem by adding water as part of my meal entry, and updating it as I drank.  Yesterday, I made it to 144 ounces, and was sloshing.  I’ve always gone by the rule of drinking half as much of my weight, in ounces.  Right now, I weigh 302.5 (as of this morning), and so my target for drinking water is approximately 150 ounces.

Over the past few days, I have been working on cleaning out the drawers in my bedroom.  I have a dresser and chest of drawers; I’ve done fairly well at keeping the dresser filled with clothes that fit, so it wasn’t much of an effort to go through the drawers, since most of the changes were seasonal.  My chest of drawers, however, was another matter entirely.  Just about everything I pulled out of there was in size 16, 18, and one case, size 14.  I am currently wearing size 26 in most things.

It was only 2-3 years ago that I was wearing these clothes items; and I love them.  I look forward to wearing them, again; I’d forgotten how many of them I really liked, and that I missed wearing. It also reminded me of how fit and how good I felt in that size, even though there are many who would still consider size 16 to be huge.  Not me.  Size 16 was reason to rejoice; I was officially out of plus size clothing.  Now I’m on the upper side of plus size clothing, again. I guess the good news is that this time, as I lose weight, I have every size in between and won’t need to go clothes shopping. 😉

The lowest weight I managed to get to in recent years was 197.5; that was roughly 4 years ago.  I managed to maintain but not lose, and got stuck in the plateau to end all plateaus.  Still, I looked at myself critically, and while most of the time I felt pretty good about how I was doing, there was still a part of me that screamed “not good enough!” when I’d look in the mirror.  How absolutely silly of me.

This time around, I want to love myself more.  I want it to be a much more positive experience.  I want to feel good about myself every step of the way.  I think it’s automatically assumed that the moment you start losing weight, you should start flogging yourself for being a fatty, and for ever letting yourself get to the point where you reached out in desperation for any method that would work.  While I agree that your head must be in the right place to be successful, and sometimes that means bottoming out, I also think that we’re being unfair to ourselves if we look at ourselves in disgust.  We are all wonderful creations in progress.

During the next week, I’ll start adding exercise back in.

By the way, if you’re reading this, and you happen to keep your own weight loss blog (or whatever), I’d be happy to link to it.  Just let me know.