I hung right around 301/302 for about two weeks. I was starting to feel like I’d hit a brick wall …
I’m right there with you. Stuck at ~174 for about three weeks. I think I’m still eating too much but I’ve increased my exercise quite a bit, you’d think that would help.
I was quickly knocked out of first place in the challenge and am now something like 38th or 56th (one is the team placement and one is my personal and I can’t remember which)
The guy who’s in the lead has clocked 70K+ steps in two days. Either he’s cheating or he’s running/walking 10 miles a day.
Hang in there tdn it’s just around the corner.
If it helps, I have weird weight loss patterns. I’ll lose big (2-3 pounds) then stay the same or gain a little the next few weeks, then lose a pound. Start cycle over again. Averaged out, it’s not bad, but I hardly ever see a loss every week, even when I weight more.
Sigh. I was up 1.4 today. I was sort of expecting it - I wasn’t great all week (although I wasn’t bad) until the night before weigh-in, when I went completely off. And then I woke up with a pounding headache, so I had to eat in order to take Advil, and I usually don’t eat before my weigh-in.
That’s why I asked whether wieght loss is immediate or delayed. When I lost 45 pounds 8 years ago, it seemed as thought it was plateau, loss, plateau, loss, plateau, loss. In 5-pound chunks. Then again, my home scale is a piece of crap. Now that I’m trying again, I’m using a professional digital scale, and I’ve been seeing minor losses every week. Until now. Maybe I have hit a brick wall, but will break through in the next week or two. But so much for my 20 pounds by Memorial Day goal.
I’m right there with you, tdn. I’m stuck and SO TIRED OF IT. I should have been done long before now.
I got stuck for 2 months at about 156/157. Yeah, that sucked.
I’ve been 176-179 since October or November. Sucktastic.
Your frustration is palpable Ginger. I’m right there with you.
At times like these I find it important and helpful to remember that while my numbers aren’t going down they sure aren’t going up either and staying the same for the moment is infinitely preferable to gaining weight. It is also preferable to quitting.
How can quit? That would take a conscious decision to stop eating right and exercising. A conscious decision to give in to what?..my appetite?..my desire for what?..immediate gratification?..those are the demons that got me here, those voices in my head that say “fuck it I’m doing what I want and to hell with the consequences” and yet what I want more than anything is to be fit and healthy so who am I really listening to?
It is interesting to ponder what and why I am in this situation. I live in a society where there is an over-abundance of food and and over-abundance of choices and to this point I have taken more than I need and made less than sound choices about what and how much I eat. How can I turn my thinking around so that I’m grateful for the abundance but not responsible to it? Grateful that I have so many choices but not feel required to sample all of it or every bit that is set in front of me. I struggle against the idea that wasting food is a horrible thing (I can hear my mother’s voice talking about the starving children in china) and I struggle against my desire to keep tasting something that’s delicious and feels good in my mouth even when I know I’ve had enough. If I could conquer those two demons I’d be doing great.
Sorry to go on so long. I just got to thinking about stuff…
Tomorrow’s our weigh-in. I’ve been sick all week, have exercised not at all because of it, and haven’t really been thinking “plan” in any organized way, so I have no idea what’s going to happen. I’m sick of being sick…
I’ll chime in with some good news. Two weeks ago, 245.9. Last week, 245.7. Yesterday, 245.9. I was just down near the weight loss clinic, and decided to pop in and see if the scale had anything flattering to tell me. Yep. 245.1!
I asked someone there how I could possible lose almost a whole pound in a day, and she said it’s probably liquids. Nonetheless, I’m recording today’s weight as the official one. It must be the correct data, because it supports my preconceived notion of what I want. 
Great post all around, but the quoted bit is pure gold!
This really sums up one of the major problems that Americans of a certain age have with losing weight. There are two major factors that really, really affect how I (and most likely most of my age cohort and the previous couple of generations) handle the issue of eating too much. At our WW meetings, when we’re discussing dieting pitfalls, I often say that I was raised in the Church Of The Starving Asian Child. You Do NOT leave food on the plate because, dammit, there are starving children in China and how would you like them to know that you’re wasting food!? Combined with this is a basic American thriftiness…I PAID for ALL of this food! I can’t just throw it away! My mother would kill me!
It can be really difficult to break away from that childhood programming. REALLY difficult.
Sounds like we grew up in the same family 
Thanks tdn. One of the things I like most about this message board is that the people here make me think about things in a new way.
I remember my parents using the Children Starving in China line a time or two, though now that I think of it, I’m pretty sure they weren’t serious, knowing that whether we ate everything or not wasn’t going to help or hinder children clear across the world.
I do remember my mom bellowing, “EAT!” when we were taking too long with our meals and she had had enough of our antics at the dinner table. Whenever we were out in the car and I saw one of those restaurants with the giant EAT sign, I’d hear her bellow, “EAT!” in my mind. (Is it just me or is EAT a weird-looking word?)
Velvet, thanks for your words of wisdom!
I’ve been on a plateau too. This morning I weighed in at 200.2. Maybe tomorrow I’ll finally see that first digit turn to a 1. Or maybe I’ll keep gaining and losing the same two pounds for another week or two. I know I shouldn’t weigh myself so often but the suspense of when I’ll finally break into the 100’s is killing me. But the general trend is downward. While there may have been no great losses, there have been no great gains either. I was stuck in the high 'teens like this and slowly got past it and I will do it again.
With confidence that I would not need them any longer, I packed up most of my big clothes this week and donated them to a little local thrift store that works with low-income and homeless people. I’ll miss some of those things but not enough to gain the weight back so they’ll fit right. And I know the women who get them will get good use from them.
Ginger, how’s your ankle doing? I’m still sending healing thoughts your way.
It’s pretty much healed. We got our van back from the mechanic (3 weeks? 4 weeks? and $2500 later) yesterday so I should be able to get to the gym tomorrow. Today’s a weird schedule day so no time.
The reason parents give kids the China speech is because sometimes getting kids to eat is a real chore. Getting them to eat anything at all is sometimes impossible. At a recent birthday party, my ex-GF’s niece’s GF could not get her son to take even one bite of a peanut butter sandwich. Can’t blame the kid, there were new toys to be played with. The mother was just trying to keep the kid from starving to death.
It may help to not think of your parents as cruel masters who were training you for a lifetime of bad habits, but loving parents who were trying to get you to eat the correct amount. Or maybe it won’t help. I don’t know.
Believe me, I know. My mom’s a wonderful and remarkable woman. She was a child during the depression and lived through times when there wasn’t enough of many things including food which, I’m sure, is why we were encouraged not to waste the food for which she and my father worked so hard.
It’s hard to shake off the guilt of throwing food away. Which reminds me of a story:
I was over at my mother’s house working on her computer. As I was leaving she was giving me all of the various things she had been saving for me, a couple of magazines, a gift she’d picked up on a recent trip, stuff like that. So she hands me a little bag of Skittles and asks if I want them, I say no. Then she asks me if my daughter would want them, I say I’m sure she would but she doesn’t really need all that sugar. She tells me how someone where she works was giving them away and she felt obliged to take them but doesn’t want them and can’t bear the thought of throwing them away. I picked them up off the table and said “here, watch me” and walked over to her kitchen trash can and tossed them in with a dramatic flair and a nice ‘thunk’ against the side of the can.
She just stood there with her mouth hanging open for a minute, speechless. And I said, “see how easy that was”. and she started to argue but I reminded her that she hadn’t even paid for the things and they had absolutely no nutritional value and she was doing herself a favor. We had a brief discussion about her pack rat tendancies and where that all came from and how hard it was for her to unlearn the “never throw anything away” mentality that she’d grown up with.
I just hope she didn’t fish them out of the trash as soon as I left.
I’m happy your ankle is better Ginger being able to workout will at least give you an outlet for your frustration.
Tikki That’s a brave thing you did and a sure sign of your commitment to success. Good for you!
I’m not as giving as Tikki. I just made $150 on ebay getting rid of my ‘fat’ clothes. Mind you, this is the third or fourth round of getting rid of fat clothes, and it’s the only time I’ve not just given them away.
You could definitely lose more than a pound a day. Water weight percentage swings of 2 percent for someone who is near 250 (me) means 5 pounds of water weight being gained or lost, sometimes overnight. I have on occasion, lost nearly that much overnight through metabolizing, breathing, sleeping, peeing and with an occasional bowel movement. I learned a lot about my body and the weight variations throughout the day when I weigh myself:
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In the morning after my #1 and #2 have been taken care of, before my shower.
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After I eat breakfast.
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After I get home and have a 2nd shower after my workout, before I eat dinner.
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Before I go to bed.
An recent example for myself: -
249.0#, 49.2%
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250.2#, 49.6%
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248.6#, 49.3%
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250.8#, 49.9%
Not an extreme example, but even tenths of a percent account for weight swings of a pound or more in this example. This is why I don’t freak over weight gains of 2-3 pounds in a day…sometimes 5 pounds, depending on the difference in water weight. My new scale that I got for Christmas that measures fat percentage, water percentage, muscle mass, bone mass, calorie intake to maintain weight, etc…It’s pretty cool to see what’s going on in your body that might explain such swings. I’ve even seen swings of fat percentages between 30% and 25.5% overnight, because of the fluctuation of my water weight…at least the GENERAL trend is that it is decreasing.
Pick a time of day when you get weighed and be consistent. If you choose different times of the day for each weigh in, then you WILL have swings that may add anxiety and/or frustration regarding your weight.