**Crickets** & Health

I have been kind of quiet here lately. There has been a lot of drama at my job lately and in my personal life as well. When I go through changes I tend to shut down a bit. I am trying to work on that - but change is hard. :)

We are trying to tighten our belt around here. This is impacting things in many ways. One of which is that I stopped my Weight Watchers account. I am pretty nervous about this, but I really have just been paying them to keep track of my weight for the last 6 months. I have been terrible about tracking my food, so I would do it a day or two and then give up until the next weight-in. Repeat weekly for months. So I decided to stop paying them to track my weight.

I took all my weight-in totals since last August when I joined and put them in a spread sheet. I will continue to weight-in every Saturday morning and tracking my weight, but I will now enter it on a spread sheet rather than a snazzy web site.

So my weight-in this morning was with trepidation. My first week without my WW crutch. Did I put on 5 lbs by clicking the "Cancel my Membership" button? Nope! I think the fear of going on my own actually made me more diligent then I had been in the past as I lost 3.1 lbs this week! WOOT! So now I am feeling like I can do this on my own and not pack the weight back on. I just have to use the principles that Weight Watchers taught me and keep myself honest about what I am doing. And yeah - I am still nervous about the decision, but having a good first weight-in on my own goes far in making me feel like I can do this.

So - My total weight loss thus far is 48.9 lbs. (SO CLOSE TO 50!)
I have lost 7 inches from my waist, 5.5 inches from my hips and 5.5 inches from my bust.
I was a US 16 when I started on Weight Watchers, and I am now between a US 10 and a US 12.

I still don't have an end number in site. I don't really feel like there is a finish line for getting healthy and strong. I am still overweight and I will continue to fight the fight. I want to get as much weight off my joints as I can so I can avoid spending my golden years getting new knees and hips if I can.

In the next couple weeks I want to teach myself to cook some new meals. I have been eating a lot of the pre-packaged Weight Watchers, Healthy Choice, Lean Cuisine meals for many months. There is no reason I can't make those myself and save some money! I recently had the Epiphany that eating canned potatoes was crazy and started buying 5 lb bags of potato's. I don't eat them quite fast enough - but even if I only manage half a bag I am still eating a fresh potato rather than a canned one AND a canned potato costs so much more than a fresh one! Plus environmentally it's a win as well. Less cans to recycle. Less processing costs. There are so many little things like that which I would really like to change.

And how have all of you been?!?