Week 3: Goodbye, scale. Hello again, elastic pants.

Total Weight Lost:  7 lbs

I expected this week to be challenging for two reasons.  One, we had company.  And company is as good an excuse as any to go out to eat, have dessert every night, and buy all the snack foods I don’t normally allow in the house in the name of hospitality.  I was pleasantly surprised by how easy it was to stay on plan even with guests.  Of course, it helped that one of our guests was pregnant and following a very strict diet (which is weird for me, because my plan during pregnancy was more like “eat everything in site, and if you don’t see food, go buy more”).  Anyway, between our guests’ healthy eating habits and Nicole’s rigorous nap schedule (which doesn’t allow much time for eating out), I did okay with avoiding the usual gain that comes with out of town visitors.

The second thing that I thought might be a challenge was our anniversary on Friday.  Now that I’ve found my soul mate, I have little use for the evolutionary desire to attract a mate.  I like to celebrate that fact by getting dressed up and going out for appetizers, dinner, drinks and dessert.  We had the babysitter lined up and everything, but Nicole and I both woke up with colds Friday morning, and we had to cancel.  Instead of my much anticipated four course smorgasbord, I ended up cooking a healthy meal at home.  Not much of a celebration of five years of marriage in my mind, but it was certainly nicer on the scale the next morning.

Now I’m down seven pounds, and I keep thinking I should be seeing some changes in the way my clothes fit.  I was puzzled momentarily until I looked down and noted my daily uniform of a tee shirt and elastic waist pants.  Not just any elastic waist pants, but the ones I wore during the last months of my pregnancy.  It turns out that your weight has to change A LOT before elastic pants will fit incorrectly.  It’s one of their finer qualities.  In order to more accurately check for improvement, I pulled out my tub of pre-pregnancy clothes and found my favorite pair of jeans.  I’m not going to lie, putting them on probably counted as my daily cardio, but I did get them buttoned and zipped.  They even looked decent if you didn’t look above the waist band where all the extra stomach that didn’t fit in the pants was hanging out.  I only left them on for about ten seconds because A.  They were wildly uncomfortable and B. I was afraid I was going to pop the button off of my favorite pair of jeans, but at least I have an idea of where I’m at now.

I’m happy with the way things are going, so my only added goal for this week is to give up my obsession with the scale.  As some of you have pointed out, one should not weigh oneself everyday while trying to lose weight.  I expect that means one REALLY shouldn’t weigh oneself several times a day and a couple of times at night after getting up with the baby.  In an effort to decrease my weigh-ins to once a week, I’ve shoved the scale into the back of the cabinet under the sink in our bathroom.  It’s not completely inaccessible, but I’m hoping I’ll at least be too lazy to drag it out multiple times a day.  And that, my friends, is progress.