Baby Steps

I was so proud of what I did last week. I stayed within my points goal, I exercised, I got my water in every day. But, this morning, when I stepped on the scale, I hadn’t even lost one pound. Nope, not a whole pound, just seven tenths of a pound.

I am trying my best not to be discouraged by this. I mean, at least the scale is going in the right direction. The numbers are going down and not going up any longer. And, in the past, sometimes it would take a week or two before a big loss would show up after a good week (especially if I had changed my exercise).

But, in truth, it does hurt a little that I didn’t have a bigger loss on the scale this week.

I’ve decided that I need to look at my weight loss journey like I look at my training. You spend months and months preparing for that one big race day. You start small. When I first started training for my first marathon, 26.2 miles looked pretty daunting. So does losing over 100 pounds.

That first run of two miles was tough. And it was only two miles!! How was I going to run 26.2 miles? Just like that, losing .70 pounds was tough and looking at that huge goal is a little scary.

So, like marathon training, you break things down. You run two or three miles three days a week and one day a week you increase your distance. So, week one you run two miles M, W and F and then on Saturday you run three miles. You run the same two miles M, W and F the next week but on Saturday you run four miles. And so on until you are running longer distances.

Yes, there are snags along the way. My first ten mile run made me want to quit altogether!! We were an hour late to meet the team to run and it was a HOT day in August. We decided that we didn’t want to run an out and back course (which would have had water stops for us the whole way). Instead we parked one of the cars ten miles away from our start point and we were going to run to it. Well, that course was not only hot, we also had NO shade!!

If that wasn’t bad enough, we got to Leigh’s car, she had locked her keys inside. She called her husband to come get us. We were all a little cranky by this time and she yelled at her poor hubby.

We laugh about it today but it was a struggle. But, a struggle we had to face in order to reach our final goal.

So, I will keep pressing toward my goal and hopefully, one day, I’ll look back on this week with a smile