The scales are up 2 pounds this week. I will do a weigh-in tomorrow, but when I weighed in on Friday I was up for the year by 2 pounds. It is easy to get discouraged by that fact. The goal of most of us here on SparkPeople is to lose weight after all, and I am still 20 pounds away from my goal. Still, since joining Spark over 2 years ago I am still down 27 pounds from where I started. This is a good thing! I need to give myself credit for that. Gaining 2 pounds this year is not terrible.

Oh, and I haven't earned my Harley shirt yet. :-(

So let's look at 2012 in review and see what I have accomplished instead of looking at the negative on the scales.

1. I got down to 193.something!! I did lose it. I gained it back, but I was able to get my weight down to my lowest weight since 2006. I proved it is possible!!

2. One of my blog posts was used to help a team challenge. I use "groupings" in my nutrition tracker to make it easier to track coffee, sandwiches, vitamins, and other things that I regularly eat. It's a little different than "recipes", and I find it is a real time saver. "Salad bar" is one I use a lot. I just click the grouping and then go down to "remove multiple foods" and delete whatever wasn't on my plate that day. I am proud of the fact that I am using SparkPeople effectively and other people can learn from my experience.

3. I became a CO-LEADER of a Spark team!! Me!! A co-LEADER!!! I have not met my goal for weight loss so I was surprised by the invitation to be a leader.

4. I became a Community Team Member on Spark. Really anybody can do this, but I stepped up and made the commitment on Spark to do it.

5. I walked 7K in February on my own, and in October I walked 5K as part of a virtual challenge. I may never be a runner, but I proved I can WALK the distance, and often times that distance is hilly.

6. I completed my NaNoWriMo challenge. I wrote 50,000 words in November! The book isn't done yet, but I wrote more in one month, on one story, than I ever have before! I have done a lot of blogs, letters, short stories, and poetry, but it was the first time that I actually carried out the goal of writing a novel.

7. I got reclassified/promoted at work. I keep kind of quiet on this one because office politics can be messy, but I had been trying to get reclassified for many years and I finally succeeded. Since I am working the job I hope to retire from it is important to me. My supervisors past and present had been working hard for this to happen, and I had been denied several times. After working harder and smarter for so long, it is great to be recognized for the effort.

8. I met my fitness goal for the year very early! Yes I need to reset my goals higher for 2013, but I was proud to reach my fitness minute goal for the year.

9. I got a bicycle! I did not get to use it as much as I wanted to, but I have one now. I hope as my daughter gets better riding her own bike I will get more time to ride my own.

10. I started a photography blog. Okay, I am an amateur photographer. Really. Click and shoot is about all I do. However I made it a goal to notice the "little things" in my life, the changes in my daily commute, the changes of the seasons, and all of that. I don't always keep it up to date, but I have a space now for sharing that sacred world that I live in. What the lake looks like in summer, fall, winter, and spring. It's another wonderful place for me to share the beauty in my world.

11. I met a number of small challenges while doing the 5% challenges like the 9 inch plate challenge, blogging every day, and other things. I have a long Spark streak going of logging into Spark every day for over a year now. When I went camping I found a wi-fi spot so I could at least spin the Spark wheel and keep my streak alive.

So there... 11 things I did for 2012 because we all want to take it to 11! Right? You know it!
Even if the scales went up, even though I am still struggling to make it to 180, or even 165 some day, I did reach some goals. I did do new things. I did prove to myself that I CAN do it!

And if I can do it, then you can do it too!! Here's to an awesome 2013!!