My big focus beginning of December has been recommitting to my weight loss and fitness efforts after going sideways in these areas – particularly weight – for quite some time.  In my post Health Accountability Update: Time To Stop Whining and Start Paying The Bills, I talked about how I was letting the fact that I didn’t feel motivated derail my efforts, and acknowledge that all my excuses were BS.  I received a lot of positive feedback and support from that post, and then was pleased to report some fantastic progress in a subsequent post called The Bills Are Paid Up This Month. In the span of about 5 weeks, I managed to lose 11+ pounds and I was rocking things out like nobody’s business.

Then I went to Miami for MLK Jr. Weekend.

Oh, how quickly the mighty can fall.

The morning I left KC, I weighed 215.2 – a weight that I had not just touched as a fluke one day, but one I had settled into quite nicely thankyouverymuch.  I was feeling FANTASTIC about this, and feeling pretty fantastic in general actually because I was eating pretty cleanly, dropping pounds, and getting a lot of compliments.

On my trip, I didn’t go completely hog wild, but I also didn’t try to stick to my meat-veggies-more meat-more veggies-ok, i’ll have some fruit diet plan.  I also didn’t track my calories, which I do when I’m in my normal routine.  Top that off with the fact that I was eating restaurant and airport food from Thursday through Monday and I knew it wouldn’t be pretty. End result?  I was back up to 220.8 on Tuesday morning.  YEOWCH.

Now, I am smart enough to know that you don’t gain 5.6 pounds of fat in 4 or 5 days unless you are trying really, really hard to do so, which I wasn’t.  But it was discouraging to see this on the scale.  It was especially discouraging because I didn’t have time to get my food environment in order for the week like I should before returning to work on Tuesday.  I wasn’t completely out of whack – Kip and I made dinner on Monday night, which basically consisted of Big Fat Salad, delicious chicken and carmelized onions, and some tex-mex spiced shrimp – definitely the right kind of things to eat.  We made a lot of extras so I could eat them during the week.  But that was the only thing I did right.  There were no good breakfast options in the house, I didn’t have my hard-boiled eggs to take to work as a snack, and there wasn’t enough of Monday’s dinner leftovers to last all week.  So my clean eating was a little…smudgey, like a sliding glass window that a few little kids have been pressing their nose up against on a rainy day.

All was not lost – instead of having a terrible week where I went nuts and decide to eat crap all the time, I had a so-so week where I ate up my chicken, shrimp, and salad and had some restaurant food that probably wasn’t the best choice.  By Saturday, I had dropped 4.0 pounds of my gain, which isn’t too shabby.

But my resolve? It was off.  WAY off.  Saturday, I went bowling and to the Harlem Globetrotters for my niece’s birthday, ate too much, and indulged in onion rings.  It was delicious, but I remember sitting back later that night and thinking to myself “This is what people mean when they talk about the slippery slope”.

The good news is, I think I’ve caught myself.  Sunday I went to the gym and then stocked the house with food.  I made my ever-so-critical hardboiled eggs, a pot of quite lean chili, and cooked up a couple of chicken brats.  My fridge is stocked up for dinners and lunches, and there are a couple of breakfast sandwiches in my freezer that aren’t wonderful, but that will do the trick for now. I picked myself back up in setting up my food environment, I’ve scheduled 4 workouts for this week, and I’m ready to rock it again.

Let’s do this!