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!