Doing better feels better!

Just a brief post today to check in. I had another excellent food day yesterday, as well as a 2 mile walk with a friend and our dogs. My knee reacted poorly to the walk - aching afterward to beat the band. It was bad enough that I iced it, which I should be doing all the time but when it's cold, it's hard to ice and makes me shiver at my timbers. I know I'll be icing it a lot after my miniscus repair Friday, so will have many blankets at the ready to keep me warm around the ice. In a way it's a good thing that the knee is being a bugger - makes me almost excited to get it fixed so I can get back to my usual activity level ASAP! I ran into an old friend this morning who told me he'd had a miniscus repair via arthroscopy, and it was no big deal. AND he said it will feel so much better in no time. I'm hanging on to that!

My weight was down again this morning, to 195.5. I knew the uber-gain that showed Monday was largely fluid and would disappear if I stopped ingesting half a candy counter every other hour. I think I'll weigh again tomorrow, and then revert to the once a week scale encounter. More often than that can send me back to eating according to the scale. I feel strong and committed right now to get on with the weight loss effort I started in June. I'm grateful for that, because the determination can slip away pretty easily if I lose my focus. I had so many good ideas and comments about committment, staying the course, warning me I was on dangerous ground...some things that were hard to hear but I needed to hear.

In particular, I've been thinking today a lot about Chris, from A Deliberate Life, who asked me what voice in my head was saying it was okay to binge the way I was doing? She advised just slamming the door on it - saying NO WAY. A simple idea, but somehow I heard it in a new way that makes me feel that the next time a binge wish wafts through my brain, I will have a concrete tool at my disposal - that being to say "Get the hell out of here! I'M NOT BINGEING!" I feel strong now about it - when in the trenches of food obsession, it won't be so easy. But I'm going to do this - I'm going to get below the 192 that's been my lowest reading so far.

I'm working on coming up with a vision of myself leaner - at goal. Up to now, I've been aware that I can't imagine myself anymore not being a large moosey woman. I didn't used to be large, fat and moosey, but it was so many years ago that my vision of my best self has gotten lost in layers of flesh and fat cells, images of myself in photos always being the fattest person, and the knowledge that I'm often the heaviest person in the room. (Maybe I need to move to other rooms.) So I've gone back to look at my wedding pictures and other photos where I was a normal size. An interesting note: when I got married I weighed 135 pounds at 5'9" tall. But for years prior, I'd been in the 115-118 range (too thin, from doing very disordered eating and purging, sigh), and I recall being so upset at my wedding that I'd gotten "so fat". Actually I was beside myself with shame - and when I look at the pictures now, my whole body looks tiny! Skinny arms, even. What useless suffering and self hate. Sad but true.

So I'm working on seeing myself lean, fit and healthy. I'm already pretty fit and healthy, so it isn't too much of a stretch to add in the pictures of my (albeit) younger self to help me have a real vision of my dream.

I'm going to see the Rockettes tonight - apparently a faction of them have taken the show on the road, and will be doing a Christmas extravaganza at the Wachovia Center here in Philly. Should be fun, and get me in the Christmas mood. I'll eat my weighed and measured dinner first, then leave the house by 6:15, and will be done with eating for the day. My hunger pangs of the last 2 nights have actually felt good - righteous even - and I expect more of the same tonight. But thanks to the extreme motivation and support from fellow bloggers, my determination, committment and focus have returned for the first time since probably September! From the ashes of the last binge seige rises hope and optimism. At least for today, and that's all I have, so it's good enough.