Day 17

Hello guys! All has been well on the home front. Aside from working, classes started up again this week, so I am a busy girl.

I am happy to announce that this morning I broke the 30lb loss barrier, so I rushed out after work and bought a new charm for my necklace :) So far I have four charms to show for my journey: One present shaped charm to symbolize the gift of the Band, one pretty yellow charm for the first 10, a cat for 20, and a flying bird for 30. I am trying to get charms that hold meaning for me. I have three cat children, so that is obvious. The bird symbolizes my flight from the path I was headed down.

I am getting close to a definite low point in my weight during my adult years. The last weight I remember as a teenager was at 16.5, and I was pushing the scale at 189. I pretty much stopped frequently weighing then, because it never had anything good to say. I can say that my growth chart shows a balloon into the 200's the year after, so I guess I've gained almost 10 lbs a year since then. What's scary is that doesn't include the years where I lost 20 or so pounds, then gained that PLUS another 10 back in the same year...
 Two years ago, almost three, I did the Let's Do Lunch Diet (a pretty awesome lifestyle diet, but takes money and serious dedication) and was able to go from 240ish to the low 220's. At my current weight, I'm about 10lb higher than I was then, but I find that the difference is that I am not starved or unsatisfied. I like the foods I'm eating and I'm getting enough in that my body doesn't hate me. When I did that diet, the 240's were the highest weight I'd been, and so as I lost weight I became desperate to lose even more. I began to watch the scale like a hawk and seriously limit my food intake- I would wait and wait and wait to eat just so I could eat less calories. I was really desperate then, feeling like a failure and just wanting to be normal.  The real bummer of it all came when fresh fruits and veggies started to creep up in price as winter came, being that unprocessed foods are the main bulk of the diet, and you have to buy a lot of fresh fruits and veggies to follow the diet. The cost became a real issue for me, and even in my desperation to try and sustain the loss I'd had, I couldn't keep the weight off. I guess all of these small journey's lead to the path we are on today, but it really sucks to know that you've already passed this milestone a few times before.

I have been doing fine eating pretty soft foods. I admit, I have not been pureeing everything (grilled chicken breast strips), but most of the things I'm eating don't need it- cottage cheese, tuna salad, Greek yogurt, applesauce, 2% milk, Jay Robb powders. I guess I'm pretty terrible in that I'm pretty much only eating foods that don't need to be pureed... call me lazy, but it seems like so much hassle to prepare a meal for one person when I can just go another week eating the easy foods and then eat normally again. I have been getting my minimum of 70g of protein per day, with most days being in the high 80's or 90's. I am also back to drinking my minimum 64oz of water, and I usually have a diet Snapple or other like beverage for taste.

I definitely notice a difference in the way things are fitting. Today's outfit was my one and only pair of Lane Bryant pants (can we say poor college student?) that used to sometimes come unzipped throughout the day because they were so uncomfortably tight. Today, they stayed zippered the whole time I wore them.

On a closing note, I heard a person talking on NPR a couple weeks ago, and he made the point that of all the countries and poor people in the world, the American poor are really the only ones who are fat. If that doesn't say anything about our priorities as a country, I don't know what could. It's just the same as congress voting that pizza sauce (really?) is a vegetable for our children. How do we reverse the trend of fast food lifestyles?