Lately, I’ve been thinking about the one time I was super successful with losing weight. Way back in 2007, I lost 30 lbs and felt amazing. I had been struggling with my weight ever since I hit puberty, seeing the scale dip up and up and up with every year that passed. I was never a big girl; just one of those girls who could stand to lose 15 or 20 pounds.

The year I lost weight was also one of the worst years of my life. I was away at college, struggling to make friends and find my place. I hated every part of living on campus, crying myself to sleep more nights than I care to remember and feeling the ache of loneliness down to my bones. (I also had a horrible roommate who would lock me out of my room to have sex with her boyfriend, take my food/drinks without asking, and was a total slob – one time, she left an apple core sitting on top of her dresser for two weeks.) So that was the year I found the essence of my faith and a new healthy living lifestyle.

My faith was there to provide comfort and hope. My weight loss was there to help me feel good about one part of myself since I felt every other part was totally useless. (What type of person can’t make friends?!) In the space of about four months, I lost 20 lbs and then, when I moved back home in May, I lost another 10 or so. I looked great, felt great, and was so proud of how far I had come.

But then life just got crazy as I started a job in a preschool, continued with school as a commuter student, and generally fell apart with healthy living when I failed my final student teaching internship. The weight crept back on. And on. And on. And on. And, as is well documented on this blog, I’ve been trying to lose it for years but can’t seem to find that magic formula I found back in 2007.

I’ve been thinking about that time in my life and figuring out what I did to lose weight, and here’s what I figured out:

1. I was a cardio monster. When I was living on campus, I went to the gym almost every day, and I would spend 45 minutes on the elliptical or the stationary bike. I didn’t do any strength training, just cardio. And guess what? It worked! My workouts lately have been heavy on the strength training side, but when it comes down to it, cardio is king when it comes to losing weight and burning fat.

Moral of the story: I need to do more cardio, at higher intensities, at least five days a week. (Though I still plan on strength training, but only about two days a week, for 15-20 minutes, because I know it can’t hurt!)

2. I tracked every morsel of food and found a community to support me. I started a blog on Xanga (yes, Xanga) to detail my healthy living journey and joined SparkPeople to track my food. I believe I was on a 1,500-calorie-a-day diet, which is a plan I followed to a tee. I wrote down everything I ate and was accountable for it. Sadly, I also found a terrible world of dieting blogs (think: girls surviving on 500 calories a day) but luckily, I found a great group of girls who were also dieting the right way, and they were instrumental in providing support and encouragement in my journey.

Moral of the story: I need to get back into the habit of tracking my food (even though it’s annoying) and I need to have a place to be accountable for my weight loss journey.

3. I walked everywhere I went. As anyone who has lived on a college campus knows, you walk everywhere. Anytime I wanted to go anywhere (whether to class, to the gym, to the student center, to the library, etc.), I had to walk at least half a mile to get there, but it was usually longer. I went from a sedentary lifestyle to hoofing it everywhere I went. I wish I could still do this! I really wish I lived in a more walkable city.

Moral of the story: I need to find ways to sneak in activity throughout the day, like walking the stairs at work, making myself get up from my computer every few hours, doing mini circuits in the bathroom, etc.

4. I ate Subway a lot. You guys, the Subway diet is not a lie! It actually works! I’m so dead serious. There was a Subway on campus that was close to the gym and all of my classes, so I usually picked up a sub after my workout and took it back to my room to eat. I probably had a sub 4-5 times a week, no lie.

Moral of the story: There is none, but I dunno, maybe I just need to eat Subway for lunch every day?!

5. I never, ever felt deprived. During this time, I never gave up drinking soda and I had a serving of chocolate every night. (And I tracked it!) I don’t remember ever feeling truly deprived. I think, at first, I just started by cleaning up my eating a bit and exercising, and once I started seeing results, it became easier and easier for me to follow my eating plan and keep up with exercising. I was getting compliments on my weight loss, loving my body, and feeling so amazing.

Moral of the story: It’s not important to quit every unhealthy habit at one time. Built it up slowly, be consistent, and the work will pay off.

***

So here’s what I’ve decided: I’m going to start detailing my weight loss journey on this blog. I know, I know. I’ve done this before. (Need proof? More proof? Even more proof?) But I’m stubbornly going to do it again. I need accountability. I need a place to talk about the ups and downs, to get feedback and encouragement. I’ll be detailing my workouts, writing down weekly goals, and talking to you about my struggles, my victories, and my weight loss. I am hoping these updates will be filled with more awesome milestones than sad failures, but we’ll see.

I am also going to start using My Fitness Pal to track my food (friend me?) and I’m doing Amber’s four-week DietBet to give me further motivation to lose weight (especially since the pot is now over $10,000!). Additionally, I’m going to settle on three goals to work towards every week that will propel me to the finish line.

This week, my goals are:

• To start tracking my food daily and following the limits MFP gives me as best I can
• To work out every day (five days of high-intensity cardio, two days of walking with Dutch)
• To make myself get up from my desk every two hours and use the stairs instead of the elevator

***

And that is that, as one of my coworkers likes to say.

What do you think is the biggest key to losing weight and keeping it off?

(My obsessive goal for 2014 is to get to my goal weight of 120 lbs, essentially losing 56.6 lbs this year. So I’m sorry if it feels like I’m being repetitive with my blog posts at times but weight loss, and the bumpy ride of it, is a major focus of my year so it will most likely be a major focus of blog posts throughout the next 10 and a half months.)

In January, I did pretty well with losing weight. I ended up losing 5.7 lbs, which put me on pace to be at my goal weight by the end of December. I did it by cleaning up the way I ate and exercising. I gave myself a meal plan to follow (eating every two to three hours), I started working out harder and longer, and I limited soda and sweets. I wasn’t perfect and I could have done so much better (especially on weekends – weekends are my downfall), but it was a good start for me.

I wanted to continue my momentum in February, but things have come to a stuttering stop in the past few weeks. It just suddenly feels so hard. I’m coming up against so much resistance and everything feels like a challenge. Every hour feels like I’m fighting against myself and more often than not, I’m losing. And this is usually where I give up. I tell myself that I’m not strong enough, that being healthy is just too hard and that I’m “not that girl,” and I allow the excuses to build up.

I’m still trying to lose weight, but the month of February has seen me gain 1.2 lbs the first week and then lose .2 lbs the second week, so things aren’t going well.

Why aren’t things going well? I’m not trying hard enough. That’s the simplest way to say it. I’m giving in to temptation way too easily and I’m saying yes when I need to say no. I’m following my meal plan probably 60% of the time, but letting myself off the hook the other 40%. And there’s probably the tiredness aspect of it. Chicken and rice and veggies only sound good for so long, until the thought of eating another serving of rice makes you want to throw up. I’m a big fan of variety and I could never be someone who eats the same thing every day, but I’m also a big fan of convenience and making this healthy eating thing as easy as possible for me, and chicken and rice and veggies is easy.

I’ve been in a very negative mindset about my eating habits for most of February and finding the motivation to eat healthily and wake up early to exercise has been intensely difficult. And that’s why Nicole’s post last week came at the most perfect time.

In this post, she talks about the perfectionist trap and this all-or-nothing mentality of setting a huge, scary, mildly unrealistic goal and what happens in our heads when we realize we’re not going to achieve it. The negative self-talk, the defeatist attitude, the giving up. I do it. I’m not a perfectionist in any way, except when it comes to my goals. Then, I want to be perfect at everything and when I’m not, when I know I’m going to fail, I just give up completely. (The 12 Cookie Syndrome? It should really be called The Stephany Syndrome, because that. is. me.)

She also laid out a three-tiered goal-setting strategy. You have your A Goal, that’s your deliciously scary goal that you want really, really, really, really, really bad but it’s going to take everything in you to achieve. From there, you set two smaller goals, called B and C Goals, that will require putting in the hard work and effort to achieve, but they are a little bit easier to attain. This approach really woke me up and helped me to see that even if I don’t make this crazy goal I set for myself this year, I can still strive to achieve my B or C Goal, which will put me on the right path to attaining that A Goal in the future.

So my goals? Well, I thought you would never ask!

A Goal

I want to get to my goal weight of 120 lbs.

What this means is that I have to lose 56.6 lbs this year, an average of a little over one pound per week. That’s a tall order for me and while I want to achieve this goal more than anything, it also scares me to death because it’s something I’ve been trying to achieve for years without much success.

B Goal

I want to be at a healthy BMI.

Say what you want about BMIs, but I appreciate the way they give you an accurate gauge of what a healthy weight is. Maybe not for everyone, but for me it does. To be at a healthy BMI, I would need to weigh 136 lbs, which equals to losing 40.6 lbs this year. That’s an average of .8 pounds a week, which isn’t terribly different from my A Goal, but something about it seems more attainable. Thinking about my BMI now makes me feel sick to my stomach and I don’t want to feel that way anymore.

C Goal

I want to spend the year eating healthy 80% of the time and seeing consistent weight loss each month, even if it’s just a pound. This is a goal I can achieve, mainly because it’s not so much focused on a certain weight loss, but more on my effort.

I haven’t given up on my A Goal and I know it’s still achievable, even if February winds up being a bad month for me, weight loss wise. But having these other two goals to strive for helps to keep things in perspective for me. It helps me to see that, at the end of the day, my main goal is being healthier. Eating more wholesome foods, putting less junk in my body, and seeing myself become stronger and fitter through exercise. It’s going to be hard. It’s supposed to be hard. Nothing worth doing ever comes easily. And commitment means that I stay true to my goals, even when pushing through seems like sludging through a river of molasses. Even when every day is a challenge. Pushing through… that’s when the change happens. That’s when you find out just how much you’re willing to work for what you want.

credit

Do you have a goal – big or small! – you’re trying to achieve right now?