The Dreaded Weigh-In

This morning was my fourth weekly weigh-in since I started my weight loss journey, and I can honestly say it's the first one I dreaded. As I approached the weigh day all the other weeks,I was full of joy. I had been sneaking my measurements and could see that they had gone down, and of course, my CDWIs (Constant Daily Weight-Ins) offered mostly good news, too. If my weight bumped up at all, it was only by a pound or so, and then it went right back down the next day or even lower.

But all this week my weight has been creeping higher and higher, no matter what I did. I actually upped my walks from 25 to 30 minutes this week, so I am exercising more, not less, and I increased the incline on my treadmill from 1% to 2% just to make my workout a little harder. The only thing I didn't do this week was my arm workout because I overdid it last week and pulled a muscle, so I took the week off to give it time to heal.

Yeah I know. It's damned hard to hurt yourself with three pounds weights but I managed it.

I stuck closely to my nutritional plan - no sodas, no ice cream, no cinnamon toast - just healthy food in reasonable portions consumed before 8 at night except for that one meal out on Wednesday, the night of the by now legendary Chocolate Eruption. But that one lapse was last Wednesday and the weigh-in was today, so I should have been alright, right?

Wrong.

Every day last week, the scales crept up and up. I was pulling my hair out (like I really need to add baldness to fatness). What was I doing wrong? I was exercising, I was eating right, but my stubborn body was hanging on to every fat cell like it was a pearl beyond price. The Keebler Elves of Fat were working overtime inside my Pillars of Hercules to make sure my thighs stayed properly plumped.

Now I am NOT starving myself. First of all, I like food too much to do that; secondly, as a medical reporter I know not eating enough sends your body, particularly the female body into panic fat storage mode. But despite my care to eat normal meals at normal times, my body has gone into panic fat storage mode anyway. In fact, my body is currently in panic fat manufacturing mode. If I listened closely enough (and understood thigh) I swear I could almost hear my thighs whispering to each other in their guttural, prehistoric tongue: Ugh, woman eat last of woolly mastodon this morning. Must conserve fat. Must make fat. Must make more fat. Ugh.

So anyway, here's the tragic truth of the weigh-in:

I know. MY EYES! MY EYES! That's what I said, too. But since I pledged from the beginning that I was going to be honest on this blog, that's the numbers, horrifying though they are.

Hear that, oh hott one?

I GAINED almost a pound and a half, apparently from breathing in too much air; either that or my scale's been smoking crack cocaine. I GAINED .2% in my body fat, going from 40.4% fat to 40.6%, and this after 4 weeks of walking 6 days a week. According to my fancy, Harvard-educated scale, all that exercise caused my muscle mass to fall from 28.8% of my body to 28.7%. What? How can I even stand up? It's a wonder I have enough muscle power to press the keys on this computer.

HOW CAN I STILL BE SO FAT AFTER FOUR WEEKS OF EXERCISE AND MODERATE EATING? HOW CAN I HAVE ONLY LOST BARELY A POUND IN A MONTH OF HARD WORK AND DEDICATION? WHERE IS KIM LYONS WHEN I NEED HER?

I walk on a treadmill so I know exactly how fast I am going, 3 miles per hour, so it's not like I am crawling like a slug upon the ground. But no matter. I still GAINED a half inch in each thigh this week, the same half inch it took me three weeks to lose. But before you kindly try to tell me that maybe it's muscle, let me just say...muscle doesn't jiggle.

All this goes against common sense, logic, fairness, all that's holy, and I think maybe even Robert's Rules of Order. I was robbed, I was cheated, I was kicked around by the Universe and spat upon.

But, and but...look at my blood pressure and resting heart rate. When I started, even with medication my blood pressure was 140 over 94, not terrifying like it was back in March, 217 over 107 when I took myself to the emergency room, but not great either. Now look at it: 128 over 78 (she says proudly...). And my resting heart rate has gone from 77 beats per minute down to 65. Maybe that doesn't mean much to you but to me it means I am getting more fit, even if my damned scale refuses to believe it.

My first reaction to all the bad news this morning was to go on a binge, even though I am not a binge person. I wanted to fry up a pound of bacon and roll around in it. I wanted to slather butter on a whole loaf of bread, coat each slice with sugar, then coat the sugar with cinnamon, and stick it under the broiler until the butter bubbled up through the sugar and made a luscious crunchy crust on top of each slice. I wanted to drizzle chocolate sauce all over my hands and lick it off. I wanted to suck whipped cream straight from the Lucky Whip nozzle. Why the hell not? Apparently it didn't make any difference to my body what I ate or didn't eat; it was going to stay fat even if it had to manufacture the stuff out of thin air. So why not enjoy myself?

Here's why. Because if I let this set-back defeat me, a year from now I will still be a fat person. And I don't want to be a fat person any more. So I didn't eat all that food I fancied; I just enjoyed my carefully measured one cup of raisin bran with one small sliced banana. I did allow myself the satisfaction of going into the bathroom and staring at my scale with evil intent. I resisted the urge to pick it up and smash it against the bathroom wall. I mean, I just painted. No sense ruining a perfectly good paint job in a fit of pique.

So, Round 4 goes to the scale. But I will win the match.

I will.

Fat Cat