2.5 more measly pounds

Happy Thursday friends and followers.  Tonight the sky is booming and lit up like the 4th of July with this crazy Thunderstorm outside.  I have wanted to write for the past 2 days but was wracking my brain about what to write about. Inspiration came today during a text exchange with my good friend K.  She is also doing 17DD and rocking it by the way.  She's about 9 days behind me but lost about the same amount of weight on c1 that I have.  You can't compare your own journey to someone else's but sometimes it's tough not to.  Usually at this point in c1 I have lost at least 10 pounds.  Tomorrow is the 2 week mark and I have lost 7.5 pounds.  I mean don't get me wrong, it's a great loss for 2 weeks but not 17DD good.  I thought about everything and asked myself the following questions:
1. Am I following 17DD cycle 1 to a T?
2. Have I cheated?
3. Am I exercising?
4. What's different this time in c1 versus other times in c1?

Here are my thoughts.  1. I have been pretty religious about following the diet.  I mean any modifications I have made were made in the previous times I have done 17DD.  For example, I cannot drink black coffee.  I try and just hate it so I add a splash of 1% milk.  It's never deterred me before in my weight loss, not sure why it would this time.
2. I cheated 1x so far but it was planned in advance for my good friends birthday.  That splurge took 3 days to recover from.  It was an amazing meal and worth it but definitely set me back a few days.  Other than that, I have been religious.
3. Nope, not exercising.  The one thing I know about weight loss is 80% of weight loss is from diet.  I think that lifting weights and cardio is important and the more muscle mass you have the more calories you burn just sitting there.  Muscle uses more calories than fat.  But, when I am in the throws of weight loss I have learned something about myself.  I am either awesome at one or the other, but not both.  Since diet is 80% of weight loss, I choose to concentrate on that portion for now.  I plan to incorporate exercise when I get closer to my goal but for now nursing my son and just keeping the laundry done and simply running around with my kids is all I can handle for now.
4.  I think the major difference this time versus the last time I did c1 is I already had lost about 40 pounds after having J.  My body was like "hey what's happening to me?  I need this fat."  I honestly think I am having to work harder now than I did previously to lose in c1.  I am still far from my goal though, so I can't get discouraged.

I remember doing weight watchers in conjunction with 17DD for support and accountability a few years back.  It was pretty helpful actually and I may consider adding that back in maybe in the new year when I eventually, inevitably, plateau and begin to lose my drive.  For now I will stay on course and keep plugging along because as my  great friend said "It's better to have lost that weight than gained it."  She's absolutely right!

I am only 2.5 pounds from my pre-baby weight.  I am really praying that I can get to that magic number by Tuesday when I begin c2.  That would be an awesome accomplishment and make me feel really empowered.  I am doing everything right.  So, fingers crossed it happens.  Until then, one meal and one day at a time.

Here we go again

I knew it was time to start blogging again and realized it, when I tried to remember where I left off the last time I blogged.  It was right around the time we decided we were going to think about having a 3rd baby.  Well guess what?  Surprise, surprise, I pretty much sneezed and got pregnant immediately. Believe me, I know how lucky I am in that arena of my life.  I have friends and family who struggled and tried for years to have a baby or experienced fertility issues after having a perfectly healthy and easy time getting pregnant the first time around.  Anyway, I got pregnant last August and the 17 day diet had to go on the back burner.  I know that it's possible to do weight watchers under a doctors care, but I honestly feel that this is the one time in your life when you should be able to not worry about your weight and just enjoy your pregnancy and the foods you love and cravings you may have.  Well boy did I enjoy.  A little too much I guess.  I gained 50 pounds during the pregnancy.  With the girls I gained 25-30 so I guess I enjoyed a lot more than I had in the past 2 pregnancies.  Oh well.  It got to the point where I refused to look down at the scale when I weighed in every appointment and preferred to live in ignorant bliss.  Well I don't think I would change it but I certainly had to pay the price after delivering my sweet baby boy last April.  I called my OB's office about a week after delivering to find out what my last weigh in was prior to delivering.  I actually had to step on the scale the morning I delivered(lucky me), so I definitely got my accurate number.  I wrote it down and said to myself "I will never be this heavy again."  And thank god about 30 pounds pretty much fell off me within the first month after delivering between the baby, nursing and having very little time to eat.  Then I began watching the calories but not really dieting and another 15 pounds came off between May & July.  At the end of July we left for a vacation to cape cod and my willpower went out the window and we ate more ice cream in a week then I think I ate my entire pregnancy :)  I gained back 5 of those pounds in a week and came home from a wonderful family vacation feeling defeated.  Have I not learned anything throughout this journey?  So it took a few more weeks for me to gear up and get my head in the game.  I am a huge advocate for nursing and was incredibly concerned about my milk supply dropping.  I weighed the pro's and con's and did some of my own research.  What I discovered was that there is no reason why I couldn't do a no carb/low carb diet as long as I was getting enough calories.  So I decided to take the plunge.  I started again on August 30th with a wedding 2 days later and tons of commitments with family and friends on the calendar.  Here's one thing I have learned friends, if you keep waiting for the perfect time to diet it will NEVER happen.  There is no perfect time with nothing going on in life.  Is it hard to diet with all of this stuff going on? Sure.  But it's reality and one thing I know is I can't stop living my life in order to be on this program so I stay on target and make good choices when I am out.  And when I eat out or splurge it deters my efforts.  A pound I have worked tirelessly to lose over several days has no problem finding its way back on my body with one splurged meal.  It's frustrating and tiring to be completely honest.  This is a struggle for me.  I know that I will never be a size 2 and I am ok with that.  It's not the way god made me.  So I just keep plugging along one meal and one day at a time.