My Fitness Lifesaver

You guys. This was maybe my favorite (Jewish month of) Tishrei ever, fun-wise (only competes with Tishrei 2005, really). I got to see tons of old friends, made some new friends, stayed up late with all of the festivities in our neighborhood, and Hubbs was on vacation for all of Sukkos. #winning.

But diet-wise, it was horrendous. I gained 9+lbs in like 3 weeks. Seriously. I really tried to limit my challah intake over Rosh Hashana, but we were eating at friends' houses for all of the festive meals so "being careful" quickly became a lost cause. If I'd really wanted to, I could have made my own food, but c'mon. If you know me at all, you know I have the worst case of FOMO (fear of missing out) ever so I'd just be crying all month that I didn't get to taste so-and-so's chicken pot pie.... or whatever. Those Sukkos cupcakes that we never ended up sharing with anyone weren't going to eat themselves.

So, I cheated. And I cheated. And then I cheated some more. It got more and more out of hand, and by the week of Sukkos I was eating insane ice cream Sundaes and all the rugelach I could get my hands on. My skin broke out, my stomach was having all kinds of issues, and I actually felt gross.

When we got home from visiting friends on Sunday, I stepped on the scale and almost cried when it was more than 9lbs higher than it had been before Tishrei. And I'm human, so I started beating myself up over it a little a lot... But the good(?) news is that even the Husband was feeling disgusting after this month of binge eating, so we made a pact to do a 3 or 4 day juice-and-chicken-soup fast starting Monday morning. And here we are, Wednesday afternoon, still going strong. I'll write more about juicing later. Here's an old instagram pic of our juicer, just for kicks. We aren't using root veggies or anything else not low-amylose approved this week, so ignore the carrots.

My main intention for this post was to say that for me, MyFitnessPal has been a real lifesaver. I got on the scale this morning and saw that I was just shy of 6lbs lighter than I was Sunday morning. And somehow still felt bad about myself. Which is totally unhealthy and I should definitely be in therapy. Anyway, when I went to log it in, my phone's battery was dead and I had to do it on the actual website on the actual computer. I know. The horror. But then! This graphic popped up and it put so much into perspective and really made me see how much this low-amylose diet is really doing for me. Check it out:

That's a graph of my weight fluctuations in the past year, October 2012-October 2013. As you can see, I really started trying to lost weight (again) about a year ago, without much luck. You should know that from October 2012-April 2013 I was literally eating at most 1200 calories a day (except for those very clear binge days). It was so not healthy, and I was miserable, but I didn't know what else to do. April 2013 is when I started Low-Amylose, and while it hasn't exactly been smooth sailing, there's a difference of more than 20 lbs between the highest and lowest points on this graph, and we're less than 4 lbs away from a new lowest point. BOO-YAH!

Moral of the story? Being OCD and charting my weight-loss story finally came in handy and inspirational. And that's what's up.