taking a fat day

I wish there was a category of illness that included just feeling really ponderous, just completely weighed down by your body. Calling in fat, if you will. Admittedly, my BMI recognizes me as merely overweight rather than obese at this point, but there are still fat days which come and go. Tuesday morning I was down to a new low weight, but then this morning I somehow had packed on two pounds overnight. This morning on my way into work I caught my reflection in the glass on the door and just didn't like what I saw. After months of feeling really good about how I look, it was a familiarly icky feeling I was hoping was gone. But here it is again.

I think part of where this is coming from is that I haven't really lost any weight since the end of April/beginning of May. I haven't gained any weight, but I keep jockeying up and down three or so really annoying pounds, and I'm frustrated. I hesitate to call it a plateau because I know that it mostly comes from exercising without regularity and really just eating whatever I want, at least sort of. I haven't gone hog wild but it is kind of out of control for this weight (brownies have been implicated, and pasta. Why must I love the pasta? Why??). The exercise part fell away for a while because I had bronchitis and I coughed like someone with consumption every time I ran very far, and for a good week there, I just didn't feel up to it. So I knew that would result in a weight loss stall, and I was ok with that. But I've started back into my exercise routine, and I've decided to train for that 10 mile race, so I'm going to be running or cross-training every day between now and Labor Day, which is when the race is. So that part should come together shortly.

I also know that eating whatever I want at this weight really does make a difference. I think if I was consistent with my calorie deficit, I might make more strides but I gotta say calorie restriction for about six months is a really long time to go without a lot of things I love. I keep thinking I just need to buckle down for a month and I'll be over this hurdle, but living on 1500 or so calories is proving to be just out of my grasp. When I'm working out, I try to burn 500 calories per day, so that should give me leeway to eat a bit more, but for whatever reason eating a bit more isn't cutting it. I'm back to tracking my food intake, so hopefully that will help too. These are the tools in my toolbox, I know. They're the way I've lost just about every pound ever, so I just need to pull them out, dust them off and push through.

This is the hard bit, and I knew it was coming. In fact, I'm amazed it took me this long to get here. But I have 6 more pounds to lose. I've lost 94 pounds but these last six seem to be really hard to shed. Some of the stall could be explained by water retention, and I've also been doing The 30 Day Shred, which may account for weight loss stall--muscle weighs more than fat, blah, blah blah. But 2 pounds overnight! Gah. I'm at a loss.

Does anyone have any advice? I could use some, or just a pep talk or something. It's a low day around here, in addition to being a fat one.

I should also say that I really don't know if anyone other than a handful of my friends (Hi Kim! Hi Chris!) are subscribing to my blog at this point. Sometimes I don't post because I think the only people reading here have already heard what's going on with me via normal email correspondence and I hate to bore them by putting the same info up here. This would explain the lack of discussion about my 10K race. So if you're reading this, please let me know. Post a comment, say anything, give me some advice or just say hi or ask me about my race and I'll post that story here. Now that I've gotten to a tough bit, I may come here a bit more to try and work through that.