My One Month Plateau

So if you look at my weight tracker you will notice that starting at June 30th I plateaued for 4 weeks. (5 if you count the week it took me to get back to my weight at the beginning of the plateau)  In the long run it doesn't seem like a very long time, but when you are in it, it seems to last forever.  I know exactly why I plateaued.  It's because I stopped trying.  I stopped tracking my points and I didn't care to eat smaller or healthier portions and I was consuming as many desserts as I possibly could.  This lasted pretty much from my sister's wedding to my birthday, and it happened right on cue.  The last two times I started weight watchers I didn't make it past four months.  I would do really well tracking for about three months, and then the novelty would wear off and I would get tired of tracking and think that I could do it without tracking and so for the fourth month I would not track and eventually I would stop weight watchers all together.

So I hit 183 and I was able to squeeze into my bridesmaid dress and since I had been feeling a lot of pressure and anxiety over fitting into the dress, my weight loss came to a screeching halt.  For the next month I really didn't care much about what I ate.  Combine that with the fact that I pulled a muscle in my back and wasn't working out because it hurt, and you have a recipe for weight gain disaster!  We had a lot of left over wedding cupcakes and I think I ate half of them!  Then of course my birthday was coming up and I had to have Ice cream and cake..... several times.  Lets not forget the pizza!  So as you can see in my weight tracker, I went all the way back up to 187.

So what was different this time around than the last times.  Why didn't I just stop all together?  Well the first real motivation was that I hadn't even reached the weight that I had attained after Lily was born.  My lowest weigh in with Lily was about 170.  I had a very strong desire to reach this weight again.  So I picked a date: the day after my birthday.  For the end of June and through July 20th I could eat whatever I wanted, but I knew that the day after my birthday I was going to get back on track.

This was key.  I think I needed a break that was more or less unstructured so I could decompress after all the freaking out of fitting into my dress.  But picking a date that was not tomorrow, but an actual date in the future that I could think about and know that that is the day I will be getting back on track helped to make it tangible; and I was able to stick to my date instead of saying "oh I'll just get back on track tomorrow."  Which, as we know, tomorrow never comes.

Another motivator for me was that I had been taking pictures of my weight loss every 10 pounds and I made a chart that showed my weight loss progression thus far.  I had four pictures on it: My pregnancy photo, my start photo, 200 pounds and 190 pounds.  Before my plateau I was only three pounds away from being able to take another photo and continue my chart.  This was actually a huge motivator for me since I really wanted to put the next picture on my chart and I couldn't do that until I got back on track and reached 180.

After one week I lost 4 pounds since I shed all my food weight I gained from my birthday and such.  Most of the weight I gained from the last month was not really converted into fat since it hadn't had enough time to sit on me.  So after one week I was back to where I started at the beginning of my plateau, and at the end of two weeks I reached 179.5.  It took me two weeks to lose 3 pounds once I restarted.  That is pretty good since you aren't supposed to lose faster than 2 pounds a week.