I’m eating pizza tonight. Without reservation.

I’m eating pizza, and it’s delicious. Not to celebrate, not because I squeaked out another couple of pounds. But because it’s Monday, my “day off”, and I’ve been working all day. Which is fine, but – makes for necessity of fuel. Simple, easy fuel.

That’s been the long and short of the last seven weeks. And while I don’t make pizza a daily – or even weekly – occurrence, I am working on how to squeeze in meals through-out my day that make sense during busy work days.

(I’m also bemoaning the fact that I have clearly left my journal bag in my car, and my car is at Jan’s work tonight. Ugh. It also has my supplements in it. Double ugh.)

Here’s a fun fact: I’ve never gone Black Friday shopping. Never. I’ve reported on the insanity. But I’ve never seen one in real life. Never watched the line ups. Never seen the door crasher deals that drives people in the store. So that said, imagine my nervousness going into working the Black Friday sale this weekend. Fortunately, we survived. And now I can say I’ve seen one. But, let me also mention this – it made for an insane eating day. My staff were kind enough to bring in veggie and fruit platters. And cheese platters with sliced meat. I brought coffee. And through-out the day, this is what I ate. Little bites as we all stayed hydrated and full through-out the day.

(I also need to add in here what home life is like juggling a big job, and a host of kids and husbands, and ferrets, and Christmases. It’s not easy. And gals – whether you go home to a mess of the same things I do, or things all to yourselves, the fact is – life always has something going on. And it’s not simple, or easy to commit to a program of this magnitude. It just isn’t. If you want it, you have to commit to it. And you have to be able to accept if you’re not ready. Do it when you are ready. That’s where you’ll find your success.)

I was concerned coming in to Saturday. Jan and I talked about it, and I knew I wasn’t losing weight. I knew that the “oh, whoops, I had extra rice”, or “is that me eating ham more than three times this week?” and “what do you mean, I can’t have a second helping” was just going to contribute to what I was referring to as a plateau, but it was really lack of program. And stress. And closing in on two months of a job change that me and my family are still fighting getting used to.

So, you’d think to yourself, why would you be eating pizza tonight?

Because my Coach today said: life happens.

Shit happens. Life happens. Black Fridays happen. Pizza happens. And when I stepped up onto the scale today, this afternoon at EWYN, I was still down. And this time, I wasn’t stripped down fully to my knickers. Even with my dress on, we saw 178.6 on the scale. At this rate, my goal is to be down to my final weight by sometime in March. It’ll be making it through Christmas without cheating that will predict my success. How do you keep it down to just one turkey dinner? (I’m smiling. )

I have to add one extra piece to this – you absolutely cannot lose weight effectively if you tell yourself you don’t want to program where you can’t “have a snack” if you want it. I’m serious. It’s not how it works. I sped my metabolism up by not cheating on the program. By not making minor concessions. At the end of month 4, I’m much more aware of what little nibbles of cheating can do to throw off an entire week. Imagine how much I would have lost if I hadn’t bowed to the simplicity of convenient food? But if you’re serious about losing weight, you have to first shed the notion that you should be able to have this or that when you want to, because you can make it up tomorrow. And while that may be true for some people to a certain degree, real weight loss comes with real commitment. And I strongly urge that if you’re going to get into a program like this, then make sure you’re fully aware of the sacrifice it’s going to take.

Regardless of a tough week, a new person is starting with me at work tomorrow, I’m working to alleviate the stress, and the new way of eating – putting it all in a box and munch through-out the day, seems to be helping. Time to stop sneaking the slice, the extra cheese, the salad dressings – and then maybe we’ll balance out more than a pound or two on the scale.

And so concludes Week 19. Hello Week 20. And almost hello Month 5. Let’s finish this.

Food this week:

You can if you want to.

— c ☆