Hi all! Today I am feeling pretty happy. I just realized that I've completed three whole weeks on WW without missing a day. Last night I was a hungry soul; we had a frozen pizza, and the only one that fit within my points range (because DH has 66 points per day, and I have 33) was EXTREMELY thin. Probably the thinnest crust pizza that I've ever seen. Delicious but not filling. We'll probably go back to our regional store brand (Essensia by Albertson's/Acme) when it's back in stock. It costs only one more point per half-pizza (15 vs. 14) but it seems more filling.
Anyway, I went to bed hungry despite all my usual evening tricks to fill the belly for bedtime: saving my smoothie for dinnertime, eating a huge bowl of cooked cauliflower with dinner, enjoying a cup of frozen orange store-brand juice for 2 points, even my daily Lindt truffle! (P.S. about the orange juice: check the cheap brands first because you can save a point per cup over the premium brands, which is great for making those late-night frozen snacks. I go to Wawa, a regional convenience store, for their store brand.)
So I was flipping and flopping around in bed for half the night. I tried eating more fruit, drinking more Propel Zero, the whole nine yards. I insisted that I wasn't going to eat even one more point, because I'd succeeded in doing an entire week of being on program without using any weekly allowance or activity points (my newest goal, since I can't make weight-loss goals happen often enough to encourage myself), and I wasn't letting it go so easily.
I got a couple hours sleep, and woke up ready for breakfast at the crack of dawn!!!
I realize that I always have the weekly allowance and activity points to fall back on (though I'm not allowed to exercise yet -- ten more pounds before my doctor will prescribe physical therapy, which I can receive free at work in our very nice exercise room, with unlimited use of the machines as long as I'm willing to get off them when the therapists need them for a resident). I do get aerobic a couple times a week while moving patients or furniture. If I'm feeling a bit breathless, I take a quick heart rate check, and sometimes I impress myself, LOL!
It doesn't take much to wear me out, all things considered. Nonetheless, I don't count the activity points, I just note the amount of aerobic movement in my tracker for general purposes.
So I try not to use the allowance just because it would make me feel as if I were overeating; I know that I'd use it to really stuff my face once or twice per week (instead of spreading it out more evenly), and that would have two bad effects: it would stop my weight loss (I can barely lose weight even when I'm eating perfectly according to the program), and it would trigger the urge for more sugar and fat. I am learning that I have to be careful with the "three whites": sugar, flour, and fat. They're trigger-y for me. I don't have to do without them, but the less that I eat of these ingredients, the better I feel.
On a positive note: everybody in my WW group has been buying themselves jewelry and new clothes as rewards for weight loss. I was sad because my weight loss is so slow that it'll be forever till I need new clothes, and I don't wear jewelry except for my pectoral cross. So I finally decided that I was going to buy a couple of inexpensive preaching robes: a black one for the first four weeks on program, and a white one for the next four weeks on program. And I'm going to put aside my knitting for charity, just for a few weeks (I've donated literally hundreds of hats and scarves and mittens to various organizations) and make myself some vestment stoles to go with the robes. That's as close to bling as I can ever imagine buying!!!!
Life 4ever: I'm a second-career vocation myself (ordained in my mid-forties after working as a legal brief writer and an EMT), and my mom was ordained at 67 after retiring as a CPA. Good for you! The work that you were born to do is just waiting for you to reach it. You'll never be able to imagine how happy it will make you until you're living it day-by-day.