I am overweight!!!! Hooray!

Hello, strangers (IF anyone was following my blog, I'm sure that they would have given me up for lost by now!). I'm back with the shocking and wonderful news that I am STILL on the wagon, along with the even MORE shocking and wonderful news that it is working...This morning, I tipped the scales at 193 pounds (well, 195 per scale, but scale claims that, with absolutely nothing on it, the air weighs 2 pounds. Also, the scale in Hawaii when I went skydiving was a full FOUR pounds below my evil scale, so I feel like it is a fair estimate).. Rather than fitting into the grim-sounding category of "Morbidy Obese", I have slipped down into plain old garden-variety "overweight"! HOORAY!
No. Seriously. HOORAY! I am legitimately excited about being "overweight" after so long as full-on fat. It is taking me a LOT longer than I wish, BUT I am maintaining a positive attitude. I am keeping in mind that this is a long-distance race and not a time trial...sort of like when I finished the Army 10-miler. No one was impressed with my time, but I went the WHOLE DAMN TEN MILES.
I have a few challenges coming up. Starting yesterday, mama is in town. We are leaving tomorrow for a road trip to the Grand Canyon. After we get back (flying home on Sunday), she is taking my baby girl back to Kentucky :( Vacation/depression has, in the past, been a deadly combo, BUT I am determined to stay on track! I am going to spend a week wallowing. After that is over, I intend to pick up with running. We shall see....
In parting, enjoy this picture of "overweight" Steph, rocking a new Target dress.

Success (?)

198 lbs as of the morning of my birthday.

I have my grill (a present from mom and dad, which makes it even better). Apart from that, I failed to reach my admittedly pie-in-the-sky birthday goal (and, having done so, the rest of the goals are pretty much unreachable).

To perk myself up, I concentrated on the fact that, as I enter my 35th year on Earth, I am FINALLY under the 200 pound mark again. The more I thought about it, however, the more that I realized I had a lot more than that to celebrate.

As I mentioned previously, my weight problem stems, primarily, from a binge-eating problem. I am the classic yo-yo dieter. I have lost over 50 pounds three times in my life, and over 20 at least a dozen times. When I found my elementary school diary a few years ago, I saw that I was obsessively monitoring my weight and counting calories even back then- AS A TEN YEAR OLD. My metabolism obviously doesn't believe that I really "mean it" this time. However, looking over my food journal for the past 36 days, I realized that I didn't experience ANY huge disasters. I resisted movie-theater popcorn, a hail-and-farewell steak dinner and even birthday cake (to be clear: I ate SOME of each of these things, I just didn't exceed what I had budgeted for). I can't think of a single other month in my entire life when that was the case- where there wasn't at least SOME episode of eating an entire pizza, or going through the drive-thru at McDonalds and THEN having three peanut-butter-and-marshmallow-fluff sandwiches and then thinking, "OH, what the hell, I've blown it already!" and scarfing down a bowl of unbaked cookie dough and a bag of chips. This is HUGE! Even though I didn't meet my dream-goals for the month (2 and a half pounds a week just isn't going to happen, it seems, even though I have stayed between 1200 and 1400 calories every day! :( ), I have the confidence that I CAN do it someday. I haven't felt like I am missing out on life, and so the thought of doing this until the end of forever doesn't feel overwhelming. If I lose 2 pounds a month for the next two years, I will be frustrated, but I will end up where I want to be (and if I can eat like this for two years, SURELY I won't blow it again!).

I will get there eventually!