Struggle Street Part 1/2

I've been on my weight-loss journey for 2 years now and I won’t lie, it hasn’t been a breeze.  There have been lots of bumps, boulders and slips along the way. For the entire 2 years, there have been 2 struggles that I still have to work really hard to deal with: 1- tracking my food and 2- dealing with the scale.

In this post, I’m going to dig into the first item.  My next post will deal with #2…otherwise, you guys would be asleep before you even finished #1.

I feel like I have so much knowledge when it comes to food. Be it counting calories, eating clean, following Weight Watchers (WW) and so on. With every route that one can take to lose weight, what you eat is the biggest part of that journey. Four to six years ago, I lost 46 pounds by counting calories using myfitnesspal.com. Being the anal-retentive, structure-loving, accountant type person, I loved counting calories. Everything has a numerical value and it was a black & white world. It was like a fun Price is Right, math game for me... play with numbers to see if I can get to my daily calorie intake without going over. It was all about creating a deficit of 3500 calories for a pound.

After gaining back those 46 pounds (and then some), and taking a 3 year break from caring about what I was doing to my body/overall health, I joined Weight Watchers. Just like any good newbie, I started off really well when it came to tracking/recording all of my food. At the beginning, I had a really hard time with the 'free' fruits and some vegetables. In the past I had been so focused on the calories and other info associated with every food, that I found it ridiculously hard to believe that a banana could be ZERO points! I heard numerous times at the WW meetings that we weren't there because we were eating too much fruit. And eventually, I had to agree with that…I wasn’t there because I was eating too many bananas and thus I embraced the PointsPlus system at WW. From the day I joined WW (June 2014) through to January of 2016, I was a dabbler with tracking. I knew that if I was honest and tracked everything I ate, I'd lose weight. Yet, I had the hardest time doing it. It made logical sense to do it, but it was almost as if I got cocky and thought I could stay in my daily points range without writing everything down. Boy, was I wrong.  I ended up flip-flopping… the weeks I tracked I would lose 1-3 pounds and the weeks I didn't I would either lose less than 1lb or I would gain.

So, why do I find tracking so difficult? Why is something that has a proven track record when it comes to helping people lose weight so hard for me to do? Here's how I see it. I am a perfectionist with a fear of failure. I have been a perfectionist for as long as I can remember. When I was younger, my perfectionism came out through my school work. On my weight loss journey it comes out through tracking my food. When my good food game is on, I have no issue tracking.  However, should I slip up a TINY bit and eat something that I would consider to not be full on healthy... I have a tendency to not track the entire day, or to purposely leave that one thing off my food log. I know that's not cheating anyone but myself but both of those things equal failure to me. The perfectionist in me sees that I've failed by not sticking to my healthy eating 100% and I've failed by not being entirely honest with my food log.  I know you’re saying “Don’t beat yourself up…we all slip up” but all of this failure causes a lot of fear within me- not just the fear of letting me down, but the fear of letting everyone down who knows I'm on this journey. What is continuously shocking to me is that when I don't track, I have a tendency to UNDER eat. I know, I'm just as shocked as you. Turns out through my journey, I've learned to just reach for better food and make better choices which result in a lower point intake. I bet you didn’t think that people who go to WW under eat!

So what have I learned with all of this tracking turmoil? I like to think that I have finally accepted and learned the importance of tracking. Tracking my foods is just another piece of evidence that I’m doing things right. I have committed to continuously tracking as of August 1st! To ensure that I follow through with this, I am sending my food log to my trainer every day - just another accountability check for me on this daily road to a better me! I’ve also learned that I’m human and that is TOTALLY OK! I’m going to slip up and I might not have a perfect food log every day. But that’s part of being human, it’s part of living life... I’m not going to tell you I never eat a donut or chocolate or pizza, I have just learned to eat it less often and am sure to savour it more when I do indulge. One quote I repeat a lot is- It’s not what you did, it’s what you do next that matters J