A Light Through the Darkness

(x-posted to writersweighin)

So Wednesday afternoon, right before Thanksgiving, I met with Dr. L for the first time. It was an interesting meeting...she isn't at all like the other nutritionist I was referred to a few years ago. We spent 2 hours talking about what has worked for me in the past and what hasn't, what I'm looking for and what I'm willing to do. It was rather revealing, and I thought I'd share.

Believe it or not, I was a skinny kid, and I didn't really gain a ton of weight until I went to college. I was an active kid, and so we realized that for me, exercise is a key to losing weight and keeping it off. But at the same time, I won't do exercise for the sake of exercise - I'm just not motivated enough, believe it or not. It has to be fun. And I won't always make the time to do it. *guilty look*

Another interesting thing is that I HATE being told that a certain food or group of foods are "off-limits" - that will just make me crave them, and then I'll snap and binge. And I hate eating exactly the same thing all the time. I need variety. Luckily, I love to cook, and Dr. L is willing to work with me on this. She's already talking cookbooks!

Her big question to me was "What are you looking for as an outcome?"

My answer was, "I want to be healthy." Honestly, I don't care about what the scale says (and Dr. L said to throw my scale out, actually) - I just want to be able to do everything that I want to do. I want to be able to fence again. I want to be able to hike all day and be delightfully sore at the end of it. I want to be able to bike. I want to be able to run around all day.

I want to be able to run again one day. Right now, my doctors say that with my knee, I'll never run again. I don't believe that. I won't believe that. I will run again.

I will.

We're not meeting again until after the holidays, so I have a homework assignment to work on this December. Each week, I have to do one good thing for myself, and one good thing for myself that gets my body moving. This past week, my "good for myself" thing was spending all Sunday playing WoW. My "good for myself thing that got my body moving" was going shopping with Donna on Black Friday. We did a bunch of walking that morning, and that was good.

Other than that, at this point, I'm not doing anything "diet-like." No counting calories. No forbidden foods. No food journals. Just listen to my body and realize that when I'm not hungry, I shouldn't eat. That's it.

I haven't thrown my scale away yet, but I did only step on it once - Saturday morning, when I got up. And I was very pleasantly surprised to find out that, with the massive Thanksgiving feast we'd had...

That I was down 2 lbs from Wednesday.

WOOT!!!

More later.