Here's where I own up to it, I'm on a break...from the scale.

Shocking, right? Me, a professed scale lover who weighs in every day, on a break from said maintaining tool. The last time I weighed in was last weekend, and I'll probably weigh in tomorrow, but this week has been a no-go.

All summer the scale has mostly been showing me numbers I don't want to see and that's been wearing at me. I jump on the scale hopeful and step off angry and defeated. This past weekend the number was up three pounds from my maintaining weight. I'm okay with that number, things are still looking and fitting fine. It's the knowledge that at my current daily deficiency it'll take three months to lose those few pounds that is so hard to deal with. If I stay vigilant.

The extra three pounds itself is somewhat easy to figure out. A season of 100-300 calorie daily binging, getting my body up too early in the morning for training and jumping on the scale before I can manage to get in my morning constitutional, the increased sodium intake in delicious fall food, added with TOM and the resultant constipation I could set my calendar by. It's a party of poor circumstances happening at once.

Maybe I'll get on the scale tomorrow and be pleasantly surprised. It would help to know that after I've finally been able to get my mind back in the game, my body is following suit.

But until the weight is gone I can't take a break from counting and measuring everything that goes in my mouth no matter how small, I can't stop increased amounts of exercising at least six days of the week, I can't slack. With the holiday season rolling in that is beyond scary to contemplate. About the only thing I can manage for the sake of my emotional state is to cut back from the daily weigh-ins to once a week. Besides at this point I'm pretty much also on a break from maintaining (and being able to eat more and exercise casually) and actually facing weight loss mode.

Wish me luck that I can be back to maintaining once my anniversary in January rolls around.

I think it is important to note as I mentioned to Bob:
The weight isn't a measure of how I look. I look and feel damn good. The weight is a measure of how well I'm controlling my eating and my addiction. I have been failing at that all summer long. If I sit back now and accept the weight for how I look, soon enough I'll be facing another gain when I lose control over food. I must expect to lose control, because 1) I am an addict, and 2) I can never give up the habit of eating. Gaining the weight back doesn't happen in big jumps, it happens through tiny amounts of complacency. Unfortunately a food addiction is never something I can be complacent with if I want to keep the weight I lost gone permanently.