Weight Watchers Yay!

Those who follow my twitter feed probably saw something about this earlier today, but Weight Watchers seems to be working for me (again).

A bit of background:

Back in the middle of April, Heather and I stayed with my grandparents when we were up in D/FW for a wedding.  I stepped on the scale after taking a shower on Saturday morning, and was greeted with a site I’d never seen before: a number over 299.  Utterly disgusted with my fat self, I decided then and there that I was going to start losing weight, and not stop until I got down to what I considered reasonable (200 or lower).  Knowing that this was a lofty goal, especially keeping in mind my own willpower and tendency to gain, rather than lose, weight, I’ve decided to heed standard diet advice, and set small interim goals of 2-3 pounds per week.

I started doing Weight Watchers again on Monday, as soon as we got home. I failed miserably on Monday, so I decided to start again on Tuesday.  I didn’t take my  weight though, because I really didn’t want to get depressed again, so I simply put 300 as my starting weight for day 1, week 1.  Day 1, week 2, my weight was 290.  I’m not sure how much of that 10 pounds that I’d appeared to have lost was real, and how much was the difference between my grandparents’ scale and our WiiFit, but it was still 10 pounds, and the difference between “300 pounds” and “290 pounds” makes a world of difference to my brain and self-esteem.  I recalculated my points according to my weight change, and continued.  Now that all of the parties were over (Christina & Andy’s baby shower was at the end of Week 1), I figured I had a better chance of “being good” for a while.  Day 1, week 3, and I’d only lost 1 pound; 289 is a very sad number when you were hoping for more (less?).

But today it has started to pay off “for real”.  Mr. WiiFit said I weighed 283.5 this morning.  That’s 5.5 pounds (give or take) in the last week.  It’s close to “crash diet” speed, but I’m still starting the diet so I’m not overly concerned.  It’ll probably level off at 3 pounds per week after another month or so.  Which (if everything goes right, and math can be trusted) puts me at 190 round about mid-December.  Only I’m also not delusional, and I know that things like plateaus and holidays happen (and willpower only goes so far when there’s pie).  So realistically, I’m hoping to be near my end target by November of 2010.  We’ll see how that goes; it might take me 5 years or more.  For now, my immediate goal is 275. (I figure 25 pounds at a time is a reasonable goal system for me).

Now if I can just make myself start exercising again on a daily basis.  Sedentary lifestyle + 10 years = very lazy.  But I’ll have a toddler to start chasing around in a few years, so maybe all the chasing will help.