I am not comfortable

I’m not comfortable in my body. My skin feels too tight and I don’t like the way certain parts of me jiggle when I walk. My knees hurt. I fear that my fatness will kill me one day. I suffer from sleep apnea. I have dreamed on more than one occasion that someone was strangling me and I couldn’t breathe. I know that it’s because I had stopped breathing in my sleep. I’ve been lucky. I still wake up in the morning.

I’ve been doing Weight Watchers since the Fall of 2006. I lost about 24 pounds by January, 2007. I felt great, but I still had a lot to lose. I quit smoking in February, and I stopped dropping pounds. I got frustrated and “took a break” from WW, and also from quitting smoking. I smoked and ate almost what I wanted all summer. In November, I quit smoking again. I was depressed over the holidays. In January this year I decided to go back to WW. I had gained all but 3 of the 24 pounds back.

I now have eleven weeks of meetings under my belt but only a 6.4 pound weight loss to show for it. Clearly I have not been applying myself. This week I decided to switch from the Flex plan (where you count the points value of every bite you take) to the Core plan (following a specific list of food and tuning in to your hunger signals). Core is difficult for me and in the last six days I’ve realized why–it forces you to change the way you eat in a way the Flex does not.

It’s been a tough week. There’s been chocolate (not Core), McDonald’s food (definitely not Core), and ice cream (can you see where I’m going with this?). But, until I went over my weekly points allowance (on McDonald’s day), I kept track of every single extra point I ate. I didn’t eat much bread. I only had McDonald’s one day this week. I changed the way I do my morning coffee. Tiny changes, small steps.

My oldest friend is also struggling with her weight and is also doing Weight Watchers. Ideally, we would go to meetings together, go grocery shopping together, workout together. But she is on the left coast and I am on the right. Weight loss is a journey, made by taking one tiny step at a time. This blog is born of our desire to support each other, to make this journey in tandem. Won’t you join us?

Welcome to 2FatMamas!