My usual flurry of weekend activity has been intensified by my determination to keep the “Plateau Blues” out of my head.  I busied myself with a myriad of tasks this weekend from my regular housecleaning to lunch with a girlfriend…and even cleaning my make-up brushes.  Yeah…I’m look’in for shit to do.  🙂  I’m focusing on the positive and doing things that make my life easier.  This also included straightening the closet.  That is, until my eyes fell upon a pretty storage box in the corner of the top shelf…and I stopped for a minute to look in it.

T-shirts.  Bunches of t-shirts that I’ve never worn.  Why?  Because there was a time in my life when I thought it would be motivating to buy clothes in a smaller size and hang them over the treadmill.  Turns out I was wrong.  It just made me feel bad.  It was like failure hanging over my head.  So I boxed them up and put them in the closet.

First, my apologies to all blondes. 🙂  I mean no disrespect…that shirt just made me laugh!  Second, I’m not sure I can pull off the “brown eyes hypnotize” shirt at my age…or the pink blinged out Super Girl shirt.  These two shirts feel like missed opportunities to me.  The OMFG STFU shirt is so small I’m not sure I’ll ever fit in it – as is the “Screw You We’re From Texas” shirt (great song!).

All of them are cute and I can understand why I bought them, but the problem with these shirts is that I was a giant fat girl when I bought them and I had no idea what size I would end up fitting in.  I bought mediums.  They all look unbelievably tiny to me when I hold them up now.   They almost look like little girl clothes to me.  I’m looking at the world through fat colored glasses, I guess.

I suppose if they don’t fit me when I hit my goal weight, I’ll have another raffle and send them off to all of you who are good enough to read this blog.  🙂  It seems like such a silly thing to have done, but I really wanted the shirts at the time and knew they wouldn’t still be for sale when I hit my goal weight.  I’m sure I thought it would happen sooner than this.

It could be that I’m so used to wearing giant Jabba the Hut pants that these normal sizes look tiny to me…so I’m hanging on to them for now.  In fact, as I write this, they’re already stowed in that pretty flower covered box and shoved to the back of the closet shelf again…waiting for goal weight day.

There are other pretty things that are waiting to be worn as well, including a bracelet my husband bought me right after we were married.  My wrist was/is too fat to wear it.  He felt terrible when he tried to put it on me and it wouldn’t fasten, even though nothing about it was his fault.  I own that, not him.  We’ll celebrate our 9th wedding anniversary this year and he’s never seen me weigh less than 265 pounds.

That shit’s gonna change!

Many of my readers have asked me lately “What’s keeping you motivated???”  I understand why those questions are being asked.  We’ve all been down this road a million times, haven’t we?  We’re doing well for a while and then BOOM…plateau.  Frustration gets us.  We want to lose weight, we don’t understand why we’re not, and we feel like…what’s the use?  Twinkie City, here we come.

I feel that way too sometimes, but the idea of doing this again seems absolutely insane to me.  Why would I put myself through all this again?  Granted, I have about 177 pounds to go and that’s overwhelming if you think about it (which I don’t)…but when I started this, I had 219 pounds to lose.  Why on Earth would I ever want to slam this car into reverse and go back to that?

I can’t help but see my bathroom scale when I walk through the master bedroom.  Many times lately, I see it and think to myself “It’s probably not going to move tomorrow either, damn it…”  I feel frustration.  I feel a little anger, even.  Sometimes I’m tempted to “just take a break…”  I know that leads to trouble.  You probably do too.

Then I think about that bracelet in my drawer that’s never fit me and I realize…simple science will win this battle for me.  Now is not the time to give up.  Less calories in, more calories out, water in, water out, cardio done, weights lifted.  No plateau in the world can stand up to the simple science of weight loss.  Why, oh why, would I reach for Twinkies or call for pizza?  If I do that, I’m guaranteeing that the bracelet will stay in its little velvet box a whole lot longer.

No plateau’s going to stop me from wearing it for my 10th anniversary.

Simple science + a little determination = success.  That’s how I’ve done it, that’s how I’m continuing to do it…and that’s how you can do it to.

The only way out is through.