(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.

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

When it comes to setting goals, that’s just my thing. I love it. I love yearly goals and monthly goals and weekly goals and daily goals. I love checking things as complete and obsessively keeping track of where I’m at and where I want to go. Goals are my thing. So it’s fairly easy for me to come up with my yearly resolutions and break those down into smaller actionable steps, by way of my monthly goals. 

It’s pretty easy for me to make goals, which is why I was excited to try out Nicole’s goal-setting workbook. It’s intense, it’s detailed, and it’s pretty incredible to work through if you geek out about goals, as much as I do. She breaks goal-making down in a completely different way, and it was pretty eye-opening for me, to say the least.

One thing she stresses, though, is about your obsessive goal. While I made long goal lists through her workbook, broke those down into a six-month time frame, and further down into action steps, she wanted us to choose one of the goals we set as our obsessive goal. The one we want the most, the one we’re willing to drop our other goals to make sure this one is getting marked as complete. The one that we crave the most.

My obsessive goal? I want to lose 50 lbs.

It’s been a goal I constantly am striving for and one I can never quite seem to mark as complete. It’s the area of my life that most make me feel like a failure, like I’m not measuring up. It’s this constant beast that hovers over me, pushing me down when I fail and laughing in my face when I stumble.

I connect a lot of my self-worth to my weight, and I know that’s not good, and I know losing weight won’t solve all my problems, but it’s more than that. It’s more than being skinny. It’s about pride, it’s about understanding my strength, it’s about proving to myself how capable I am of anything as long as I set my mind to something. This goal I can’t seem to achieve holds me back from so much, both physically and mentally.

Physically, I’m just tired and worn out. I want to be healthy. I want to move more easily, to not be winded after walking up a few flights of stairs, to be proud of my reflection, to stop being asked if I’m pregnant, to feel better, to sleep better, to have more endurance and strength and power. I want to be less addicted to food, especially sugar and carbs.

And mentally, I want to show myself that I can be committed and dedicated to this change. To completely alter the way I view food and exercise. I want to feel good about what I put in my body, to allow myself to indulge but also recognize when I need to deny myself. I want to be committed to the change, to trust the process, to do the work, put in the effort, step outside my comfort zone, be open to a different way of living.

It’s hard and scary and difficult and overwhelming. I feel frustrated and mad at myself when I realize how far I have to go, and I’m learning to extend grace to myself to accept where I am and understand that I have what it takes to get where I want to be.

This is my obsessive goal. If I fail every other goal on my list but emerge out of 2014 a slimmer, healthier, more energized version of myself, I will have done what I need to do. Honestly, I feel like this is my year. This is my time. This is when the change happens. I’m ready for it, embracing it, and excited to prove to myself that I can make this my reality. I can be a healthy person.

Commitment is my word for the year. It’s my theme to push me past what’s comfortable, what’s normal, what’s easy. It’s proving to myself how capable I am, even when I feel the least capable.

“Commitment means staying loyal to what you said you were going to do long after the moment you said it has left you.”

50 pounds. I’m ready to hit this one out of the park.

It just sort of hit me out of the blue last week. I have to learn how to be healthy. I don’t know how to live a healthy lifestyle. It doesn’t come naturally to me. It feels hard and takes so much willpower every day. My mind is so consumed with food and choices and regrets. I feel like I’ve been at this for so long that I should just know it. I should be running half-marathons and killing it at boot camps and eating a healthy diet and breaking all of my unhealthy habits.

And I’m not. I’m constantly failing. I’m trying to take baby steps, but even those baby steps feel like too much. I have to go back to the very beginning. I have to start with the building blocks.

At its most basic level, losing weight is about two things: eating less and moving more. I’m typically awesome at the moving more part and bad at the eating less part. But, as the saying goes, you can’t out-exercise a bad diet and I am proof of that. I used to work out five days a week for an hour, at a moderate-to-high level, but wouldn’t eat as well as I should have been eating and my weight wouldn’t change. So then I decided I would cool it on the exercise and focus more on eating well. I wanted to be less focused on exercising so much and having that take up so much of my time and energy, and more focused on eating better.

Well, that brought me to where I am today. Heavier than I’ve ever been, someone who has lost that drive for exercise and eating right. On my way home from work the other day, I had this talk with myself about being uncomfortable. I can choose this sedentary, eat-whatever-I-want path that I’ve been on and be uncomfortable with my body and my energy levels and my inability to sleep. Or I can choose another path, an equally uncomfortable path, where I have to wake up early to exercise, learn how to curb cravings, and eat a consistently healthy diet. Both ways are uncomfortable. One way leads to more uncomfortableness and feeling bad about myself and the way I look. The other way leads to feeling better, looking better, and having more energy. Put it that way and it’s a no-brainer.

I failed at all the goals I set for myself last month. I rarely exercised, am still drinking more soda than I should be, and my sweets habit is out of control. So I’m going back to the very basics of losing weight. I need to learn how to be healthy and that comes from educating myself on what I’m putting in my body and getting back to a consistent exercise practice. I just need to take it one building block at a time, start from scratch and keep telling myself this is a learning process. Each day is a new day to learn how to be a healthier eater.

With that in mind, my goals for the next month are:

• TRACK. I am not a fan of tracking my food, because it’s so tedious and time-consuming, but I doubt there are many people in this world who actually enjoy it. I will be using My Fitness Pal and aiming to try to use it at least six times a week to give me a better understanding of what I am eating and how it affects me. I’ll be sticking to the daily calorie, carb, sugar, protein, etc. limits MFP has given me as best I can.
• EXERCISE. I am aiming for four days of exercise a week for 30 minutes at a time. It’s the same goal I had last month, and it’s just something I need to do. It’s not as if my schedule is so jam-packed that fitting 30 minutes of exercise four times a week is difficult, it’s just laziness. I press snooze too often in the morning and come up with excuses for why I can’t do it after work. I just need to get back in the habit of exercising.

That’s it. Two simple, easy goals that someone who has decided to get serious about losing weight and living healthier would give themselves.

I’ve been at this healthy living game that I feel like I should have my shit together by now. I should get it and I don’t. Not yet. So I have to start at the very beginning. I have to forget about how long I have been trying to lose weight, forget about all my past failed attempts and all the regrets I have and all the ways I have badmouthed myself for failing. I have to pretend like this is my very first time. Tracking my food, and learning to become an exerciser.

It’s a learning process. And I’m a stubborn learner who wants to have it all figured out right at the beginning. But I don’t and I need to stop pretending I do. I have to remember that slow and steady is the way to go, and to give myself grace when I mess up. The important part of losing weight is your will. The will to lose weight, the will to be healthy, the will to feel better. I so want to feel better, mentally and physically and emotionally. And if I need to go back to the very basics of losing weight to do that, then that’s what I have to do.

Here’s the deal: I didn’t complete my sugar detox.

I figure I should come right out and say the truth.

The truth is that no matter how hard you know something is going to be, you never really know until you’re deep in the trenches of it.

The truth is that after an entire day of eating bland food, the thought of heating up more bland chicken and more bland veggies made me want to throw up.

The truth is that my body wasn’t ready for this.

The truth is that when I decided to quit and days after the decision, I felt no guilt or shame.

Maybe these are all excuses. You could tell me how it was “only one day” and “I didn’t give my body time to adjust” and I would completely agree with you. You are right. I didn’t give my body time to get used to foods that weren’t chock-full of sugar and butter and savory goodness. I’m sure my body would have adjusted, given time.

But is it worth it to be completely miserable?

I don’t think so.

Maybe to some people, it is. I didn’t even get to the detox part of the detox – headaches and nausea and shakes and exhaustion. I didn’t even detox. I was just miserable about the food itself and how tasteless it was to me. The thought of facing four more days of food I hated along with detox symptoms made me completely miserable.

Our eating habits are intensely personal to each and every one of us. Not everyone has to be low sugar, or vegetarian, or a runner to lose weight. (This is a point Nicole stresses a lot. And, for the record, this post is in no way a criticism of her program. I still think it’s fantastic. It was just too much for me right now.) For me, I seem to do best when I’m exercising regularly (usually a lot of cardio) and tracking my food intake. When I’m making more home-cooked meals and treating myself every now and then.

And right now, I’m not as concerned as recognizing hidden sugars in foods. The truth is, I’m not overweight because of the hidden sugars in my pasta sauce, bread, and cereals. I’m overweight because I eat too many sugary snacks and baked goods, drink soda too often, and eat more of my meals out than in. I need to get a handle on that first.

So I didn’t finish the sugar detox. By 7:00 on Friday night, I threw in the towel. Some may call me weak, some may say I failed but there was this weight lifted off my shoulders, this happiness that wasn’t there before when I made the decision. The entire weekend, I checked in with myself and realized that I felt no guilt or shame or self-loathing about quitting. And that’s when I knew I made the right decision. It was the right decision for me, at this point in my life.

Right now, I need to take baby steps toward a more healthy life. Things like making more home-cooked meals, eating out less, drinking more water, exercising, and limiting sugary treats. I realized I’ve been trying to do it all at once. Fix every single broken piece of me and then I can lose weight and then I can be happy.

Slippery slope.

Slippery, slippery slope.

There is nothing wrong with me because I’m overweight. My weight holds no bearing over who I am as a person. I am still just as charming and delightful as I would be fifty pounds lighter. It’s something I constantly have to remind myself about and recognize I want to eat healthy for other benefits, not simply for weight loss. To be able to sleep better and have more energy and feel good. To lessen long-term health problems and have more endurance with my workouts.

Maybe one day I can successfully complete a sugar detox and feel good about it. This was just not my time and I’m okay with that. I feel happy about my decision to quit and, at the end of the day, it doesn’t matter if I finish a hardcore sugar detox or lose tons of pounds. All that matters is how I feel and today, I can say that I feel good.