41 Point Freak Out

Many of you know that I have embraced the Weight Watchers program.  I chose to count my food as  points as I am still unsure that I know what it means to be full. The Simply Filling program scares me so I knew I needed to count everything.  Because of my height and weight and gender I get a lot of points.  I started with 56 and am now down to 48.  I can barely eat that many a day if I stay within healthy eating.  I average about 22-25 points for dinner.  I usually have a 4 point breakfast and an 8 point lunch. This seems to work for me.  I feel comfortable in those zones.  I am comfortable there and I have been losing weight so why muck with it.

Last night I had a minor freak-out about dinner.  My fiancé cooks almost all our meals.  He hates doing the dishes so when he moved in we decided that he would cook and I would clean.  Last night he told me that dinner would be a whopping 41 points.  I freaked a little.  I bad a little bit of a panic attack over it.  41 points!  I barely hit that in a day.  It bothered me so much that I barely enjoyed the chili he made.  And then like everything else in the journey, I started to think about why it affected me so much.

Before I started this journey I used food as a comfort for both the good times and the bad.  Especially the bad.  After my mother died in 2002 I started eating Nestle cookie and ice cream sandwiches every night.  Sometimes two a night.  I put on weight of course but they were so creamy and sweet.  I loved them and they loved me back until I felt bad about eating them.  I broke up with a boyfriend and moved to an apartment complex that had a convenience store a building over from me.  Every Sunday night I would go there and get 4 or 5 ice cream bars, Arizona Ice Teas and chips.  That would be my dinner sometimes as I spent many Sundays by myself.  In good times I would eat too.  It did not matter what the occasion was, I would eat.  And I would obsess about the food I would get to eat.  At parties I would get mad inside my own head about people eating the food.  Like the food was just for me and how dare they it or get the last of it.  I ate to kill the little girl inside who still wanted her mother to be alive, who wanted her father to stay, who wanted her mean grandmother just to tell her she was pretty instead of the ugly names she called her.  I covered that little girl up in layers and layers of fat.  Damaged does not begin to cover the definition of who I was as I stuffed my face and overate almost all of my adult life.  And now I am worried I am obsessing in the other way. 

What I mean by this is I am worried that I am so anxious about staying within my points.  I am creating anxiety around being right on target and not going over that any dip in to the bonus points (49 a week) is a moment of anxiety that I will immediately put on the 52 pounds that I just lost.  I don’t like weeks that I maintain or gain.  They make me mad and frustrated.  I am trying not to beat myself up over minor setbacks.  I know intellectually that I will get through it and that I will lose weight but that little girl inside me wants to be better and prettier then she was told she was.

I have to remember that in addition to losing the weight, I am also fixing the pain and the reasons why I eat.  I will have moments that are anxiety ridden and I have to find ways to make sure that I don’t turn the anxiety in a direction that makes losing the weight as stressful as it was putting it on. Because until last night I have had minimal stress about what is happening.  In fact it has been the opposite.  I have loved the changes.  I love the smaller clothes.  I love how my face looks and how I feel.  Time to let it go and relax.  Take each moment at a time.  And love the changes happening to me.