Full Disclosure

Last Saturday, weigh-in day, I could tell by the look on the woman's face who was weighing me that it wasn't good news. "I gained, didn't I?" I said. Without looking me in the eye she said something, but it was so quiet I didn't catch it. I asked her to repeat herself, and this time I heard it loud and clear. I had gained 12.6 pounds in a week, almost everything it had taken me five weeks to lose. I think we were both shocked. She recovered her composure faster than I did and must have remembered her job. "What did you do differently this week?" she asked. "Have you been eating a lot of salt?" I mumbled something about knowing what had gone wrong, gathered my things, and sat down for the half of the meeting I hadn't missed. I woke up with a migraine, and wasn't even going to go, but I knew it was important for me to stay committed and go, even if it was just to get weighed.

I made it through the meeting, but as soon as I got to my car the waterfall of tears began. It wasn't just the weight gain, it had been a stressful week and I was suffering from several disappointments that morning. I was simply feeling sorry for myself. I cried for 10-15 minutes, feeling all the injustices of my life.

Finally, I started to think about the things that could have created such a huge gain in one week. As I said, it had been a stressful week, for various reasons. One of which was having family come to visit. I love it when we have family come, but we were only given five days notice, and although I'm a better house keeper now than I have been for several years, it still takes a fair amount of work to feel like I'm ready to have house guests. Even more than the stress, I take a high blood pressure medication that has a diuretic in it, plus I take a second diuretic, but I hadn't had either medicine for about a week and a half. On top of that, I had been guzzling diet soda and even though I had kept within my points, I wasn't following the Good Health Guidelines at all.

I went over all these things in my head, and a few more, and realized that this is how it's going to be for the rest of my life. I'm never, ever going to get to a point where I can just eat anything and not worry about how it's going to affect (or is it effect? help me here, Cyn) my weight. So I had to decide, do I continue to feel sorry for myself and eat myself to death, or do I try to do something about it? I wiped my tears and went to the grocery store where I bought fresh fruit and vegetables, whole grain bread, and the fixings for a 2 point bean soup that I love. The old saying is true, when you fall off the horse you need to just dust yourself off and get right back up there.

There are always going to be days when I feel like my efforts are fruitless, but as long as I keep trying, as long as I'm willing to put up a good fight, then at least I won't have to deal with that horrible, powerless, victim feeling.

I have to admit, when I was crying in my car I was thinking about what I was going to write here. I considered saying that I had gained weight, but not admitting how much. The whole point of this blog for me is to do the hard thing and admit publicly my reality. In some ways, I'm really open, but there are those things that I keep close to my heart. It's scary to put them out there, not knowing who will pick them up and how they will be treated, but I'm also understanding, for the first time in my life, that it can be liberating too.