Days 47-50: Jumping for joy

Well, there is good news afoot!

First of all, the thing I was stressing about has turned out to be nothing, and all is well. And since if it had gone the other way, it would have been potentially very bad indeed, my sense of relief is HUGE. So I've spent the last day and a half simply feeling grateful (that is, when I haven't been fighting of one of my classic monthly migraines). But hey, you can't have everything and I'll take a lousy migraine any day if it means the people I love are healthy and well!

So this is fabulous stuff. Also fabulous stuff is the fact that I somehow managed to drop 4 lbs this week and finally hit and surpassed my first 5-lb weight loss target! OK so it took me seven weeks to lose that 5.7 lbs, but who the eff cares about that, right? The past two days I haven't had much of an appetite because of the headache thing, but also I've been really watching my portions and doing my best to just eat moderately. That means stopping at ONE pastis at apéro (which we don't do every night anyway) and having ice cream only every OTHER day. (What? Did you think I wasn't going to eat ice cream at the beach in summer?) I also had the fun of seeing the scale, which is in metric here where I'm staying on vacation, drop below 100 kilos for the first time in a LONG time. My doctor would be thrilled. (He'll be even more thrilled when I show up for my next checkup this fall having lost even MORE weight; he's been threatening me with cholesterol meds for two years now.)

And my stepdaughter is working the program too, and doing extremely well so far. It's really her first time doing something like this, so for her this is also about educating herself when it comes to nutrition, food shopping and cooking. She got big results in her first 10 days but it turns out she was not really eating quite enough food every day, according to what the WW program says she ought to have. I don't think she was doing it on purpose, but it's a common issue with people on WW; they think they can lose faster if they cut out a few points of their daily food intake. And yes, in the short run, you CAN lose faster... but you can't sustain that, and sooner or later it backfires when the body goes into the starvation response and starts holding on to that body fat. I've had a chat with her about this so she understands better what she needs to do, and that slower really IS better when it comes to creating lasting change. I'm so proud of her for making this effort for herself. She'll get the hang of it, and it's great that she can use this time in the summer months to make a fresh start, before the demands of her second year of law school take over in September.

I'm excited that things are going in a better direction for both of us (it really is helping me to be helping her) and that I'm still enjoying my holidays without really worrying too much about what I'm eating. I've made my peace with the super-slow-and-steady approach to this thing. Now I can focus on the next 5 lbs (now less than 5 lbs away, actually), which will get me to a total of 10 lbs lost when I get there! And hey, another 5 lbs after that, and I can try on my wedding dress and expect to fit into it.

Onward and downward!