Three years ago I pledged to myself that I would be a size 6 by my thirtieth birthday. Well, today is the day, and I'm mostly in a size 4 because my 6s are a bit loose! That made me feel good.
The scale hasn't been moving but I've been upping my exercise so I think I'm going to have one of those wooshes here in a couple weeks. I'm going to weigh myself on the first of August and then put away the scale until the first of September. I'm also revising my weight goal because I've noticed my belly area actually shrinking a bit even though the number on the scale isn't changing. That was my real goal, getting that pooch gone, so if that's happening maybe I don't need to go as low as I thought.
Ooooh, the phone is ringing. Probably a birthday wish!
That long-term goal worked so well that I am making another one. By my tenth anniversary, I will be maintaining at 120. (We just celebrated our 8th anniversary last month.) We'd like to do something really special for our tenth anniversary, like maybe go on a vacation without the kids (AH!), so that will make a good goal, since a vacation will probably involve a bathing suit in some capacity.
For some reason, I thought the short-term goals would be more motivating, but that encouraged me to weigh more often and I got frustrated with the little fluctuations on the scale... I went searching on the calorie counter websites to see how much I "could" lose in a month and it was ranging between two and six pounds. At first I was really annoyed - I guess I'm not as patient as I thought! - but then I realized that this is really a long-term thing, not a short-term "fix" or easy road. So, to have something to look forward to in the long-run is giving me the motivation to keep going even though I don't see a whole lot of change from hour to hour. That's probably not a problem for anyone else, but I guess I figured out a little how my mind works. It made me feel good to think that three years ago (and yes, I was eight months pregnant at the time) I was not even close to a six and now I've gone past that size.