up and down, up and down, will it ever stop?

So my husband swiped the lap top yesterday and took it to work with him all day, so I didn't get a chance to update with my "deflating" process.  Yesterday I was 147, which is four pounds less than the day before, and this morning I am 145.  So I just have two more pounds to go to get back to where I was before the weekend fiasco.  I am glad that it came off quickly, I was worried  that it was going to be very hard to get off.  There was a time several months ago when I gained 5 pounds in one week even though I was counting everything I was eating, and eating well and exercising.  I was devastated and I thought it would come off easily, but it proved to be very difficult and it took months to get back down to where I was before.  That was when I was in the middle of my plateau, another reason why being in that plateau was so difficult for me.  I thought I would be headed down, and then all of a sudden I would pop back up.  It was incredibly vexing. 

Yesterday was more or less a repeat of Tuesday.  We went to the park in the morning and I was able to get both the kids down for a nap allowing me to get some cleaning done.  I want to get better control of the cleaning in my house and I had heard about an app called Home Routines, so I decided to go ahead and get it.  Basically it's a glorified cleaning chart, but it helps you organize your house into tasks that need to be done every month, so it divides your house into zones and for about 4-5 days you focus on that zone and there is a check list that you can customize of things to do to clean that zone.  Then you can make daily tasks that need to be done every day, like wash the dishes and clean off the table.  I spent a decent amount of time figuring it out and customizing it for me and my house.  It also has a to do list, a weekly to do list, and a to do later list which I think is very helpful. 

I'm going to give this a try and hopefully it will help me get the cleaning done on a more timely scale. 

What I really wanted to talk about today was breaking my eating cycle.  From the very beginning I would do very well with my food for about five days, and then (usually on Sunday) I would just go berserk.  I would make a batch of cookies and eat until I got sick, and that isn't all, I would eat everything I wouldn't allow myself to eat on my "on plan" days.  I would eat so much that it would take me until Thursday morning to get back to where I had been before (three days of eating well) and then I would usually drop in weight Thursday-Saturday for a good weigh in on Sunday at which time the whole cycle would repeat itself.  While this was going on, I was still learning how to eat less, and how to cook healthier and I would make very good choices through the rest of the week, but inevitably I would have at least one or two bad days right in a row (usually the weekends) every week.  This didn't affect me too much until my weight got close to my healthy weight range, and at 150 I just got stuck and I was wondering why the methods that I had been using up until this point no longer worked.  It wasn't until I stopped this cycle that I could break my plateau, but once I broke my plateau I went right back to eating that way and didn't lose any more weight for a month.  Then of course this last weekend, which admittedly was my birthday weekend, continued the cycle.  What I want to focus on now is breaking this cycle for good.  I want to be able to eat healthy all the time and to be able to incorporate treats into my diet without over eating to the point where I make myself sick once a week.  It's always sugar that I start to crave.  I don't crave greasy food like french fries or fried food.  It's always cookies, candy, cake, brownies, ice cream.  Sugar.  Always sugar.  I was talking to a friend earlier today and she asked a question that I think could provide a lot of insight: what are you missing in your life that the sugar is filling?  This is a great question, and something that I am going to be thinking a lot about over the next several days and as the sugar cravings start to hit this weekend I am going to take some time to write down how I really feel.  Now, I don't think I could ever completely cut out sugar, and quite frankly I don't want to.  Might as well say "no more happiness!" What I want to do is focus on baking with healthier ingredients.  I found a great website: http://www.texanerin.com/  which is all about baking with healthier ingredients: sweetening with honey, agave and molasses.  Baking with coconut sugar and coconut oil instead of cane sugar and vegetable oil.  These ingredients act differently on the body than refined sugar does and the recipes on this site don't use any refined sugar.  I am hoping that cooking healthier will be able to give me that little something so I am not feeling deprived while at the same time, I don't usually overeat these foods because they are not so sweet and it is the very sweet flavor that I tend to way overeat on. 

So I feel like I have a game plan to work on breaking my up and down cycle, five days and splurge cycle.