get back to my prepregnancy weight, since my son was born in 2000, so I've clearly been carrying these extra pounds for far too long

Groan.

Again in the wrong direction. This was a horrible month. It got slightly more under control at the end of the month, but there were days that I weighed myself and couldn’t even bring myself to write the weight down. So the average should have been even worse than it was.

We’re 9 months into the year of daily weighing and monthly averaging, and the best I can say is that I’m basically right where I started. Which is of course better than losing ground, but I’m really failing at the overall goal.

S is doing this too, and having the same result as me. So as I said to him this morning, we need more of a concrete plan. Not simply saying, “We’re going to lose some weight.” We need guidelines about how to do this and then we need to follow the guidelines.

This is really important to me. I saw pictures from this summer, and though I’m not where I want to be, I am at a better weight than I was a year or two ago. It was nice to see those pictures and not have my first thought be, “I look so fat!” and not only do I want to continue to think this way, but I also want to make some progress. I want to be at my goal weight.

I just have to want that more consistently, so it can guide my eating and exercising decisions.

OK, so I gained .6 lb. in August. Still, only 2 of the previous months had an average weight lower, so I’m not too worried. Especially since I’m starting to exercise again, and I’m totally in the “It’s fall, I’m energetic again, I’m going to be on top of things” mindset.

September is a whole new month and I’m gonna kick butt.

My average weight was up .84 pounds from June’s average.

Frankly, I’m surprised it was less than a pound. I cringed most days as I wrote my weight down. It’s still below my May average, though, which stuns me.

I don’t know why this was such a bad month/why I regained some weight. I’m not as active as I could be, but I’m not completely sedentary either. I’m making some unwise choices food-wise, but again, it could be worse.

I’m going to focus on this a bit more consciously now to see if I can figure out where I’m going wrong.

And by the end of August I intend to match or beat my June average.

The bad news—the weights toward the end of the month were higher than they’d been earlier in the month.

But the good news is, my weight is down 1.96 lbs. from May’s average. And not a single weight the whole month was even as high as May’s average. So, I’ll take it!

The plan for July: Not only to keep it at this new low, but also to get the average down a pound more. I should be able to manage dropping a mere pound, right?

Yay! For the whole month, I was down 1.94 pounds from last months average. Also, if I averaged the last two weeks of the month, when I had consistently lower weights, I was down 3.34 lbs. Not a gigantic loss, but it puts me in a new “decade” of weight which is a nice psychological boost when I get on the scale. And it means I finally broke past the low number of the 3-pound cycle I’d been in, like, forever.

My goal for the upcoming month is to keep my weight in this range and try to get the average down by July 1. I’ll be more than impressed by myself if it goes down 2 or 3 pounds and I don’t expect that. It seems like the lower I go, the harder each little bit is. So I’ll be happy with even the smallest downward movement.

I’ve been almost giddy with delight stepping on the scale lately. It has been giving me very kind numbers. It started to go down when I was, frankly, too busy to spend much time eating. That progress was so encouraging that I have since been paying much more attention to my food choices so it won’t creep back up.

I’m kind of eager to calculate average for the month! :)

So, my average weight went up .25 pounds in the month of April. I was indignant and determined that it shall go down in May but thus far in May I haven’t done a heck of a lot to ensure that will happen.

I’m really starting to wonder if it’s possible for me to lose more weight. When I started to actually focus on this goal, I lost about half the weight I wanted to lose, then hit a wall. It’s probably been about a year now (?) that I’ve stayed at essentially the same weight. I lose and gain the same 3 pounds over and over and over and over.

I am exercising, and I don’t think my food/drink intake is that bad. But clearly, I must somehow be taking in more calories than I think I am. The thing is, though, I already feel like I’m very careful and aware of what I eat. So I’m really questioning whether I can, or am willing to, change my eating habits significantly enough to cause more weight loss.

Maybe I am just going to always be chubby.

I continued to weigh myself daily in March, and the news isn’t devastating. I went up less than a pound, but for the first time the monthly average included post-breakfast weights. Before I’d discarded those when finding my average weight, but I decided not to bother to do that anymore. Also, I note the highest weight of the month, and March’s highest was exactly the same as February’s highest. So that was reassuring.

However, the end of the month’s weights were consistently above the average weight from last month. That’s what was discouraging.

Off to weigh myself for the first time in April now.

So, my average weight for the month of February is down .6 from my average weight for the month of January. Not too big an accomplishment, though I guess since it went down even a bit I should be glad—I’m at least holding steady.

Oddly, I weighed less the day after vacation than I did the day before we left (and less than I do now, sadly). Clearly, I need to drink nearly every night and eat out a lot. That’s the diet plan for me.

My average would probably have been a lot lower if I’d just used the numbers from the first half of the month or so. I don’t think I’ve been particularly overindulgent with food, but Tues.-Sat. my weight went up .2 lbs. a day, then from Friday night to Saturday, a whole pound. Ugh.

I do like looking at it from the standpoint of a monthly average, though. That seems a good “big picture” thing rather than the daily “yay” or “grrr” when I get on the scale.

So S and I have now kept a weight chart for a whole month. Well, we skipped Jan. 1 and started on the 2nd.

Yesterday I looked at all the numbers. Eliminating days of post-breakfast weigh-ins, I found our average weights. I also noted our starting and ending weights and our highest and lowest weights. I put a list of these numbers above the Feb. chart I started (posted on the door of the bathroom closet.)

The goal is for the average Feb. weight to be lower than the average Jan. weight. This seems possible, right? We both did lose a little in January.