Close Call

My WW adventure began 3 weeks ago (tomorrow) and so far I have lost 4.5 pounds.  Good news, right?  Well it's been much harder than I thought.  I guess I haven't stuck to a diet--oops--"life-style change" for a long time.  I have tried really hard and have tracked everything I've possibly eaten.  This last week has been quite difficult as we're getting over colds and it has been hard to get to the gym when I feel like a cement truck has dumped it's entire contents in my sinuses.  I have still managed to put in some miles and it's cool to see my goal slowly being reached.

Wednesday was a make or break day for me.  I started out eating a croissant and hot chocolate for breakfast--something I used to do ALL the time--we're talking every morning.  The bad thing is that once I made that decision (after also deciding not to wake up early to go to the gym since I felt like crap) the rest of the day was a domino effect of bad choices.  For lunch we went to Smashburger, which just opened up here.  My brother and other family members have been raving about this place and since Jon and I both love a good burger, we decided to put it to the test.  Well, it was simply amazing.  The burger was the best I've ever had.  It far surpassed Red Robin or any other restaurant as far as flavor is concerned.  A new favorite.  On the downside, I completely depleted my points for the day and most of my weekly extra points as well.  Can we say "downward spiral"?  So, naturally, I'm feeling "munchy" come dinner time and had already resolved not to eat anything since I'd overdone it with lunch.  If I got hungry, I'd eat vegetables.  Instead I had a handful of chocolate chips and Pirate's Booty.  There was nothing I wouldn't eat at this point.

At some point, I found myself standing in the pantry, looking at all of the snack foods I could possibly move on to next and I realized that I wasn't really getting the satisfaction out of this binge that I would have before I started WW.  This is a good thing!  Maybe I'm learning that eating for boredom and emotional gratification doesn't work.  This is when I ran upstairs, put on my gym clothes and headed to the gym.  I ran 5.5 miles and rode the bike for 20 minutes.  I felt great afterwords.  It was late at night and I was tired but I felt good.  I had somewhat redeemed myself from a day of bad choices.

I'm sure I'll pay for the bad choices come Monday's weigh-in.  But for now I'm going to chalk it up to a lesson learned.  I figure if these pitfalls happen every couple of weeks but I'm able to pick myself back up again, I'm in pretty good shape.  I need to learn to be a little more flexible.  This is real life, after all.