ACCOUNTANT BY DAY

Oh, my.  So I’m not actually meaning to turn this into a food blog.  It’s just that it’s autumn, for one thing, which always gets me excited again for some of my favorite foods.  And I’m doing this wedding cake, you see.  And there’s this other thing, which is that I have decided to quit Weight Watchers.  Don’t freak out.  That doesn’t mean I have decided to give up everything I learned in the past two years and become fat again.  It means I have decided to stop paying Weight Watchers $40 a month while I hover 5 pounds above the goal they have set for me.

It’s just that for the last six months I’ve been bouncing around between 4 and 7 pounds over my goal.  And it’s not like I’ve been really restricting my diet and exercising like mad and nothing is working.  Quite the opposite.  I’ve been eating more or less what I want and exercising as I feel like it and staying in the same place.  I haven’t been very disciplined at all since the funeral, actually.  And I’m pretty sure that if I really wanted to crack down on things, go back to eating very few sweets, and actually went walking every single day instead of a couple days a week, I’d have some good results.  But it’s been a tiring year and I kind of don’t feel like doing any of that stuff right now.  I’m a little above my goal, but my blood pressure is in good shape and I’m way happier than I was when I weighed 200 pounds two years ago.  And it seems like a pointless waste to pay the cash every month when I’m just hovering like this.

I spent a few weeks thinking about the whole thing and feeling guilty that I wanted to stop and that I didn’t have the gumption to just kick myself into gear and lose the last few pounds.  And this was all compounded by the fact that I made a promise to myself that I would begin living like a pauper right after the honeymoon so that I can get completely out of credit card debt.  And that just made the extra $40 seem really unbearable all of a sudden.  I began to think about this final five pounds from more of a cost/benefit analysis perspective.  Cost being, the effort required to restrict my diet further and exercise more, and the mental energy I spend thinking about it.  Benefit being, I’d lose the weight and meet this somewhat arbitrary number that Weight Watchers picked for me, and I’d get to quit paying after a few months at my new weight.  And thinking about it this way, I began to wonder if I should really be looking at it as a failure when it was possible that stopping here might be a valid option if I consciously elected it.

I’m five foot, three-and-a-half inches tall.  I weigh around 142 pounds when I don’t eat too much cake during the week (and around 145 when I do).  According to various things I found online, my non-cake weight places me just barely in the “normal” weight range for my height.  So I’m on the high end of normal.  Or the low end of overweight, whichever you prefer.  Either way, I think I’m okay with staying here at least for the time being.

So I may pick things back up one day, but I think for right now I just want to stop focusing on losing weight.  I wound up talking to my husband after my last meeting, and to my surprise he said he’d wanted to suggest this, but couldn’t think of a way to bring it up without sounding unsupportive.  We talked it over and figured that it might be nice to just leave things open-ended right now.  We figured we could set a weight limit at like 148 or something that if I reach that point and don’t get back down to my regular weight, then it’s time to recommit and start paying for meetings again.  But for now, it sounds like the best thing in the world to start exploring new foods and to stop focusing on foods and maybe work on getting more walking in or something.

But in fairness to my handful of readers, most of whom aren’t obsessed with recipes and food (and pumpkin!), I’ll try not to let this stuff overwhelm my poor little blog.

Even though I did download 18 new pumpkin recipes from the Vegetarian Times website and save them in a folder on my desktop named “Pumpkin Treasure Trove”.  This pumpkin thing is not over.