Progress - slow and steady wins the race

I am the tortoise. I want, so desperately, to be the hare. But I am the tortoise. Slow, lumbering, crawling to the finish line. A careful plodding forward, eye on the finish. That's what weightloss is.

I was becoming frustrated by the ups and downs. I've been weighing myself almost every day. Oh, boo, you say, don't do that. Bad idea. Well, it works for me. It keeps me in check. It's too easy to say, 'oh, I have four days until I weigh in again, I can work it off.' This way I am constantly checking my progress, making adjustments and keeping myself honest. Which, honestly, isn't too hard these days.

I am not starving. Last night I was so full I didn't even want to finish my favorite apples - Honeycrisp. All I had for dinner was vegetable soup, some cut up peppers, and a one roll (crusty rolls I made from Cook's Illustrated, yum!) turkey and havarti sandwich. This roll was maybe 2 inches by 2 1/2. And the apples. It was almost too much. Crazy that I would be stuffed from that.

But, I digress. Back to progress. I have lost 16 1/2 pounds. I have two more pairs of pants I can fit into. I no longer have bra cleavage (you know, that annoying bump of flesh that hangs out of your bra where your cleavage should be if you have the right size bra on?). Hooray! And it seems to be a slow and steady decline.

Out of curiosity, I plotted my weight loss on a tracker online. I thought I would see wild fluctuations up and down. Actually, it looks like a steady line downward. A nice and even decent back into my healthy weight. Even with a one or (gasp) two pound gain (what the heck did I eat?) overnight, when seeing them all in a line, it's the picture of success. This feels good. I'm not struggling. I wish I could tell you it's been hard every day. But it's not. My biggest problem is resisting temptation and overcoming thoughts that I should be eating something when I'm not even hungry.

The hard part comes when it's time to maintain it. Talk to me then.