Hi, Turtles,
Boy, do I have a hard time posting! Today my cat walked across the keyboard and deleted the post as I was writing it! She's the cat we nicknamed "Pest" and "Mischief". (Her official name is Smokey.) This is a long post. I didn't realize I had so much going on before I started writing.
Mousie, isn't it a relief to find that you do not have an eating disorder? It's easier to deal with plain vanilla overeating, even though no one would call it "easy". Just easier.
I went through a similar process as the one you're going through a few years ago when the weight loss experts seemed to be saying that if you have a lot of weight to lose, you must have an eating disorder. I found out that I'm not a compulsive eater, either. I just had trouble due to hormones (PMS issues) and, as a child, I never was allowed to trust my body's own hunger/satiety signals, so I didn't know how much food I actually needed. I've been working on those two things ever since.
Since then, I've realized that there are a couple of other issues I had to deal with. Getting rid of the "good food/bad food" issue. Learning that I must eat what I want, no matter what anyone else is eating. My dh wasn't happy when I threw two pieces of candy away after one bite because I detest chocolate with cherry in the middle. I wouldn't have chosen them if the manufacturer had deigned to tell us what was in each chocolate. But there was no way I was going to eat the nasty stuff. He said that he would have eaten them, anyway, and he hates cherry, too. But he doesn't like to throw away stuff like premium chocolate. (This wasn't THAT great. If Godiva is a 10, this stuff was a 5.) His attitude is the kind of thing I had to get rid of so I didn't eat calories I don't want or need just to please someone else. Or because it's a "treat". Or because someone made it "special". Etc.
The worst is that our culture seems to venerate junk food. You're considered "a weirdo health food nut" if you don't want to join in when the crowd's (over)indulging. There's an attitude, promulgated by the food processing companies, that we should eat all the junk they sell, but be thin, too. A lot of people buy into that. When they decide to make an effort to lose weight, they go to a lot of trouble trying to find junk food that they "can eat". I used to eat a lot of food I didn't like as a substitute for the food I wanted. I did that because I couldn't fit the food I wanted into the current version of WW I was following. That wasn't working for me, so I stopped doing that. As you know, I decided that if I couldn't eat, in some amount, the foods I really liked, I wouldn't follow a weight loss program ever again. Thank goodness WW came up with one that allows me to decide what I eat.
The other thing I had to do was to get my mother's weird food rules out of my head. Like "3 cookies is one serving". One cookie is plenty. But as a child I felt deprived if I ate less than three.
Or, "You should eat now because you don't know when you'll be able to eat later" or "because we're not going to be able to eat for a long time." How about bringing food with us so if we get hungry later, we can eat?
And my father's joke grace about "them that eats the fastest gets the most". I had to learn that "getting the most" meant eating more than I really wanted or needed. But sometimes, especially after my brothers became teenagers (one of them could, and sometimes did, eat a whole chicken at one sitting), I was afraid I wouldn't get enough food because they (and my dad) would have gulped down firsts and be on seconds before my mom and I finished putting the serving dishes on the table and got any food on our plates.
That attitude stayed with me even after I grew up and was in charge of the food. My guys eat lots more than I do and I had to teach them that I don't eat all that I want at once. I save some for tomorrow. It takes me four days to eat a game hen because I only eat a quarter of it at a time. I used to get really nasty if they ate my leftovers. I'm not as strict as I used to be about that because I no longer have that feeling that this is the only time I'll be able to eat that particular food, another leftover from my mother's attitudes toward food. If they eat my stuff, I just buy the ingredients and make it again. Or wait until we have enough money to eat at that restaurant and order the dish again.
What you have to realize, though, is that my mother was born in 1934. She spent her childhood in the depression and with WWII rationing. So, she does a lot of hoarding and saving and worries about not having enough. She won't part with anything. She has margarine containers leftover from when I was a child that she uses to freeze individual servings of leftovers in. She has more food in her pantry for one person than I do for four people. At Christmas she was surprised that I didn't want to take home a piece of aluminum foil to reuse. I understand why she is the way she is, but understanding it didn't take away my need to deal with the consequences of it in my life.
You're doing really well with learning how to deal with what you need to do to make this work. It's great that you realize that right now, you need to work on other aspects of your weight loss journey and aren't beating yourself up over not losing during this time of exploration.
BTW--the purists be danged! If a combination of approaches is what you need--GO FOR IT!
Judy, I envy you getting your computer running better. We have some plans to fix ours so it runs better, but it's going to be March or April before we have the money saved up to buy the parts. We don't replace computers, we upgrade parts. My dh is a hardware guy and it's cheaper to get the parts and put them in yourself. I do the software and I'm getting to hate that job because the plug and play often plugs, but doesn't play!
Regarding the scale: You're right. You ought to stay off of it. It's not the only indicator of success. Maybe you should think about writing down in your tracker at the end of each day one success you've had that day that doesn't have anything to do with the scale. You drank your water. You exercised. You noticed an item of clothing getting looser. You fit into a smaller something. Whatever. I discovered that, for me, once I stopped focusing only on the scale, the whole thing got easier and I did better.
You also might consider not eating in the low range if you're exercising regularly. That combination has backfired for a lot of people. Exercise causes your body to need more fuel. When I exercise, I'm hungrier and eat higher in my range. Sometimes, I eat over, using activity points. When I can't walk, I eat lower in my range because I'm not as hungry. If your weight loss isn't what you expect, try continuing the exercise, but eat a bit more. Also, remember Lauren't report about how exercise can cause weight loss to stop for a while, but you'll lose inches. That's one main reason to think about other types of success besides the scale. Good luck to you as you add regular exercise to your program. It does help a lot and you'll find, as time goes on, that you miss it when you can't do it for whatever reason.
I was able to take a walk yesterday. It's clear again today, so I should be able to walk again. Good thing. I need to do a few errands again. I'm eating within my range and have some banked points. I will probably need them over the next couple of days because TOM is imminent and I get hungrier the last couple of days before it comes.
Hope all of you are having a great day!
Happy turtlin'!
Lin
272/235/135 or so
Am I a turtle or WHAT? Next week I'll be returning to my regular Tuesday meeting -- and fighting the crowds of people who join this time of year. We had triple the number of folks last night as were present a week before. 
"Birthday cake" last night with my family, and lots of sleep.