I Did It. Seventeen Pounds Down and At The Beach.

On December 31, 2011, I posted a blog called New Year's Cliché - I Have Seventeen Pounds to Lose. I planned to lose the weight in four months.  This week - seven and a half months later - on my way out the door for my summer vacation, I stepped on the scale and saw that I had finally done it.

I lost it all.  It may have taken twice as long as I hoped, but I set a goal at the beginning of the year and achieved it.  I can't say that I have ever succeeded in anything quite like this before.  I always gave up or got distracted.  To refresh... nine of the seventeen pounds were left over from my pregnancy and eight more were persistent, stubborn, bitchy, annoying pounds that I was not able to shed before getting pregnant.

The body I have taken to the beach this week is the body I want to live in.  I've learned what kind of choices I need to make to live here.  I've learned how my body responds to specific food and exercise habits.  I've learned what kind of mindset I need to maintain in order to be happy inside of those choices.  And I've learned that, apart from injury or illness, the state of my body is under my control.  I have no excuse anymore for living inside of a body that makes me uncomfortable.

Most importantly, I learned that forgiveness, patience, and unyielding persistence are absolutely crucial.  They are far more important than willpower.  Willpower will walk you through a day or two.  It will carry you right up to the moment that a colleague takes credit for your brilliant idea at work or your beloved boyfriend suddenly decides he's voting Romney/Paul.  It will carry you through lunch and dinner but not through the darkest hours of the night.

If there is a bad night or a bad week, you have two choices: forgive yourself and move on or give in to the badness.  It's your own glorious choice to make, and this is where the strength of your motivation comes in.  How much does it matter?  Why are you trying to lose this weight?  You better have a damn good reason or you will slip hard and fast.

I wanted to lose mine because I felt like this first year of new-momhood had the potential to define me for the rest of my life.  Change is always possible, but, for me, this moment allowed me to perceive a turning point and project into the future.  It allowed me the luxury of redefinition.  When I had a bad night, I moved on.  I didn't want to live inside of the badness going forward.

Patience was a new one for me.  I had to breathe as time slipped through my fingers this summer.  I couldn't hold on to arbitrary deadlines.  If I didn't get there, I didn't get there.  I had to move the goalpost back and be persistent.  It took me seven and half months instead of four.  I got stuck countless times.  I hung out in the stuck places for weeks-on-end and allowed myself that time guilt-free.  I could tell when I wasn't ready to push through.  My body was tired or my mind was panicked.  If I felt resistance on either front - mental or physical, I pulled back and changed the goal to temporary maintenance.  Pushing forward before I was ready would have destroyed my confidence and upended my focus.  I waited, keeping a steady eye on the goal, not allowing the bullshit in my head to trick me into giving up.

I wrote in the New Year's post that I would have counseled a client that four months was a reasonable time frame to lose seventeen pounds.  That would have been a mistake.  In all likelihood, the client would not have reached the goal and would have given up.  Fortunately, I was my own lab rat in this case.  The time didn't matter.  Plateaus didn't matter.  All that mattered was that I was consistently moving in the right direction.

I'm reading a book right now called Ada's Rules, a brilliant, funny, fictional account of an African American preacher's wife who sets 53 rules for herself over the course of a year in pursuit of life-altering weight loss.  Her motivations range from setting an example for her grown daughters to impressing, and possibly bedding, her long-lost first love.  The rules range from "Walk 30 minutes a day, everyday" to "Get better hair down there".  It's a manifesto for how to take better care of yourself one step at a time.  The rule that meant the most to me was "Don't stop short of your goal".

As this last month floated by and I hovered two pounds over my goal, I could easily have given in and decided that was good enough.  But it wasn't.  I needed to finish.  I needed to see the number on the scale.  I know now that I can achieve this body, and I took the time necessary to achieve it with peace in my heart.  I'm seventeen pounds down and calm... which is more than I even knew to hope for.  Now the work of long-term maintenance begins, and I'm looking forward to it.

I hate it when people post pictures of themselves in skimpy outfits online.  Tacky.

But this is cause for celebration.  I did it.  And now I'm at the beach.