Lesser of me

I was pleasantly surprised today when I stepped on the scale at weigh in and discovered that I had lost 4.4 pounds. Despite having the munchies all last week, I really tried to remain focused and only eat low point items when I had any cravings. I also think part of my success was because I may be over counting my points. I'm not being intentional about it, but I realized last week when I went to lunch with a coworker who is also following Weight Watchers that we came up with very different point values after eating the same lunch items. She is very strict about tracking her points through Weight Watchers online, while I was really lazy last week and guessed the number of points (which I don't recommend). Anyway, after eating our lunch, my friend tracked that we had eaten 13 pts, while I had tracked 17 pts for the same thing. I'm obviously cheating myself and need to make sure that I'm eating enough food everyday...but the 4.4 pound weigh loss is still great.

Another thing that I noticed was that I was less paranoid about how many points I was eating last week. I just ate when I felt like it and when I got the munchies I made sure I ate all low point items, like soup, veggies, low fat popcorn, etc. I even dedicated my Friday evening to going out with some friends and chowing down on all-you-can-eat crabs. I probably had about 8 or 9 crabs, which is a lot for me since I'm not someone who usually eats a lot of crab. By the way, they were delicious. Crabs are low in fat (and points) and I had about 10 points left over for the evening (that is unless I over counted points earlier in the day) so I ate until I was satisfied. It was very liberating to know that I could freely eat without being obsessed with points.

Now I wish I could find exercising liberating. Unfortunately, I'm still struggling with exercising. It was a little chilly last week so I didn't do much walking. However, yesterday I went shopping with my mom and nephew at Target and bought two new exercise DVDs: kickboxing and dance moves. I'm hoping that these DVDs will motivate me to get my body moving in the house when it's too cold outside. One of the DVDs even came with a pedometer. I'm going to start wearing it throughout the day to see how many steps I take on an average day and see how much I can improve on that.

One more thing before I forget...as I was looking (and struggling) to find something to wear this morning, I discovered that all of my size 18 pants (yes, I'm a big girl) are now too big (belts don't help at this point) and that I can wear my size 16 pants even though they're still a little snug. When I lose another pound or two, the 16s should fit perfectly. All my shirts are pretty baggy too. I'm determined to get into my size 14s by late May/early June. I have a whole bin of size 14 spring/summer clothes from when I lost weight a couple of years ago that I need to get into before the season is over!

I'm determined to be at least a size 10 by my birthday in December. That's my goal and I'm sticking to it!