At war with the scale

Hello my fellow health journey friends,

Wow what a week and month it has been. I cannot believe it is March already.

Today I want to share with you my entire journey through February 2016.

I started off with a bang, logging my weight one day in the first week of February and I have this screen popping up saying “Congratulations 10KG lost so far”. Wow did I feel amazing, and then it went all downhill from there for the month.

Now it is a known fact that you will have your good days and you will have your bad days on this journey of health, only thing for me was I had more bad days in Feb than good ones. In saying that the good days were really good and the bad days was just plain bad. Why? Purely for that fact that I have lost my mojo and this is only my own fault. It did not matter what I did I struggled to get back on track. My biggest issue was when it was weigh-in time the scale slowly crept up then I get depressed about my progress and before I knew it I fell back into my old habits of eating out of boredom and emotional eating.

The last straw was on Sunday when I weighed myself yet again with the slight hope that I have lost at least a 100g and it was with pure shock that I realised I picked up almost 4kg during February. I felt myself crumble inside second guessing why I am putting myself through all this hard work to get to the end of the month and it was in vein. It was then that I realised it is also monthly pic time, and I thought to myself I will see what the pic say and decide from there how I will feel. So I geared up in my workout tights and sports bra what I normally wear for my pics, called hubby to come take the pics and felt the fear rising in me and with that rising I started to doubt everything.

Hubby took the pics and I finished getting dressed and off we went to go do what we set out to do Sunday morning. While we on our way with hubby driving I decide I will do my month on month collage and also my 1^st pic, 2^nd pic and the most recent one. Lining them up at first on the month to month I did not see a change, and then my eye caught that one thing showing a certain difference, my fat roll is not going over as far as it did compared to the previous month – hope is slowly being restored. So I collated all the pics, my front view, side view and back view. And on the month to month I notice another small change my chicken wings flab was also a tad smaller, more faith is being restored. But I did not expect the next emotion when I looked at my very first pic when I started the journey at the beginning of the year and compared it to the other 2. O MY WORD emotional overloads much, and the sheer proudness in me when I saw what I did look like compared what I look like now. There was a significant difference and I was so chuffed with myself and so happy I forgot what the scale said.

Looking at this I realised (even though I read this so many times from one of my biggest motivators Serah from Fat 2 Fit NZ) we are more than just a number.

With this I would really like to share again what is working for me to overcome those emotional barriers when seeing a scale.

1.       Pictures – I swear by pictures as this gives you a time lapse visual of the difference in your body that you don’t notice from day to day. I do mine monthly but do what works for you, I would just not recommend weekly as you see bigger changes over a longer period.

2.       Clothes – How is your clothes fitting on you. There is small victories in your wardrobe, may it be that you had to go a hole up on your belt or that you fitting into a piece of clothes you did not manage to fit in a month ago.

3.       Overall health – Not just in how you feeling compared to a month or whatever ago, but actually your mental health. How are you feeling towards the foods you are eating and how is your relationship with your meals. Are you eating just because you have to eat or are you actually enjoying it?

Remember these small things that the scale doesn’t show.

We are on a life journey; enjoy it and NEVER NEVER give up.

You got this.

Please comment and tell me if you have any non-scale victories you use, or even how you deal with the harder days. I would love to hear from you. And if you would like me to write about anything specific please feel free to let me know.

Xx