I'm with Mousie and Goals. My biggest change this time around is to focus on the long-term and really fight the discouragement I get when I don't lose "fast enough" or "consistently enough." EVERY other time I've done this, I've been "good" for a few months, seen some easy loses, and given up when it got hard.
My struggle now is to trust my body -- this wonderous lump of flesh that I both love and loathe, that I've always considered an enemy. It is not. It is doing as God designed it to do. And if I were in a famine situation, I'd probably be one of the fortunate ones who could survive on very little. But in this abundance of food around us, my body has MORE than enough to live off of and then some. That's how I got so heavy. So, logically, if I am more careful about my portions and the types of foods I choose to eat and exercise more, slowly but surely my body WILL DO what it's supposed to do and burn the excess as fuel.
It's the "slowly but surely" that I struggle with. One pound a week is my goal. It's discouraging to see people losing more than that, more consistently than I am. But over time, it's working. One pound a week is over 50 pounds lost in a year. So I look ahead to next year, rather than just next week. Next week, I may have water gain. Next week, I may have gained from a few poor choices, or a glass of wine that makes me swell, or TOM, or the fact that it's a full moon. Who knows what the scale takes into consideration?
But next year, there will be 50 pounds gone, based on the choices I make today. Looking at it as a long-term journey, where each step leads to the next waystation, has really helped me keep going this time.
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