olivermoss | (no subject)

The plateau has broken! I'm pretty happy about that. At some point I need to deal with the clothes situation. Since I haven't been able to replenish my wardrobe at all this year, I have a lot of items that are wearing thin and need to become garbage or cleaning rags. Now I also need more clothes that actually fit me. I am set for jeans. I keep jeans of various sizes because I've had weight gain during health crises before and keep extra pants around just in case. It'll be a while before I am too small for my smallest pair. Everything else is a problem though, from shirts to underwear. If this was a normal year about half the items I wear over the course of a week would have been culled from my wardrobe.

I've switched to Weight Watchers which is a much better fit. It's not ideal. I wish there were either local or identity based subgroups for the meetings rather than being in with everyone who is on at the time. There are individual coaches and there is some small community building there, but not a lot. Still, it's loads better.

At first, I was going to do both the WW points and also count calories. That was too much work. I was analyzing what I was eating way too much. I decided to just try the points thing and it's working so I'll just do that. I didn't have a good opinion of the points system because it seemed an elaborate work around to not count calories, but I feel less stress dealing with points than calories. I also like the weekly points. If I am, for example, iced in from multiple storms and drink a stout I haven't 'failed' my eating for that day. I am just dipping in weekly points and my weekly average is still good.

I am glad I tried WW again. I tried them once before when the system was very different and it was impossible to do with food restrictions. I tried them during their 'half a banana' phase when they heavily emphasized only eating half a banana or half a bagel and grocery stores suddenly started having a lot of specialty containers to keep half a banana fresh. Even with out allergies, it was a very fussy system. Their whole system is completely different now and I'm finding it easy to work with. I also had some reservations about WW, but right now it seems great.

I might feel very different in a few months, but right now I could see myself staying with WW long term for weight maintenance. I wouldn't stay subscribed the whole time, maybe a few months on and a few months off. A lot of the social spaces I have access to have strange opinions on weight loss and I need something to balance that out. I may blog more about that later, but some of the shit that's been said to me is so over the top that it's hard to even talk about. I write it out and it sounds ... it sounds nuts. I feel like people wouldn't even believe someone said something that shitty to me.

I also like that you see a much wider variety of bodies on WW. The coach I follow is actually a little bit fluffy. I am starting to suspect that Noom's daily weigh in thing was due to it being hyper focused on women wanting to lose those last ten pounds. In that range, things like water weight from a high sodium meal have an impact. Weekly weigh ins make a lot more sense for me. I also have no intention of getting the range of weight loss where I give a fuck about ounces from water weight.

It's funny that I am writing this post now, because I've been on my butt all week. Between my heels being messed up, the ice storms, and having bought food with higher WW point values that I expected to see my through the storms, this week's been a mess on that front. Also, I am probably going to open that nice pear cider in the fridge tonight which will put me over points for the week. But, eh, messy weeks happen. I am down somewhere between 20-30 pounds so I am not going to sweat a local pear cider.