Put it out in the universe that you need motivation and motivation will find you... bank on my A game this week!

I'm stuck in this funky spot with my health journey at the moment. I've lost 70 lbs., my body feels great, I'm healthier than I have been any time since my early 20's and, for the life of me, I cannot envision what comes next. So, I've just kind of plateaued - both physically and mentally. The excitement has worn off. Weight loss surgery is no longer shiny and new... it is status quo and I don't do so well with status quo. 

I need a new challenge to reignite the fire in my belly.

Every day, for the past two weeks, it's been pretty much the same conversation in my head... 

"Okay, this is the last [insert anything a post-WLS person should not be eating here] I eat. Tomorrow I'm back on the bandwagon."

"Okay, this is the last day I allow myself not to exercise. Tomorrow I'm back on the bandwagon."  

"Okay, this is the last day that I go to bed not having drank at least 64 oz. of water. Tomorrow I'm back on the bandwagon."

My precious snowflakes, there is no bandwagon to be found.

That's not to say that it's been all bad - some days are better than others. But the strict regiment I was following for a while there is gone. I've discovered that I can cheat just a little and still get "okay" results and somewhere in the last two weeks "okay" became okay again. Except it is not - I gave up "okay" the day I let a surgeon slice off 80% of my stomach. 

There is a itch within, a twinge of a desire to do something spectacular... I just don't know quite what it is yet. 

Eating to my guidelines, exercising, drinking an adequate amount of water, sleeping 7 hours, taking my supplements and practicing gratitude, daily, would be pretty fucking spectacular, I guess. I just don't know why it sounds so very uninteresting right now...

Me thinks I have found a topic for the next visit with Jillian, therapist to the stars...

The surgeon asked me last week if anyone is starting to notice my weight loss and I had to giggle. When you lose 60+ pounds – and talk about it incessantly – everyone notices. The next day I was recounting the conversation for Jillian, therapist to the stars, and she asked me if I noticed the difference.

Physically, I feel the difference. My body is so much limber than it was before, bending and moving in ways it hasn’t bent or moved in years. Aand it definitely takes up less space than it used to. My clothes fit different – as in not at all. I’m down four pant sizes in the past three months. And when I look at before and after pictures, I see the difference.

It just is that it isn’t that much different.

I have almost always liked what I saw when I looked in the mirror… from the neck up, at least. I never really saw double chins or puffy cheeks or fat, I just saw me. But, honestly, I was always shocked as hell when I would catch a full-body glimpse of myself in a store window. Like, “Who the hell is that fat chick?” My body image and my actual body size never really jived.

In fact, I have two decades of bruised hips to prove it. I was continually astonished when my body didn’t physically fit through spaces that my mind thought they should be able to fit through.

The physical pictures and the mental images are starting to more closely align. And the woman smiling back in the mirror does look somewhat different – she looks more awake, glowing… bright. But this body? It’s the body I always had as far as my mind’s eye is concerned. I don’t know how much that will change as the pounds and inches continue to drop, but I’m fascinated to find out.

I had my three month check in with the surgeon last Friday and learned that I’m ahead of schedule in my weight loss. The expectation for me at three months was that I would have lost 25% of my excess weight and I’ve lost 31%. Hells, yeah!

Besides my insatiable need to be an overachiever and win the approval of every “authority” figure in my life - like the surgeon (yeah, I said it), I am just relieved. I haven’t been following my prescribed diet as closely as I did the first two months and my weight loss has slowed dramatically. There was part of me that knew this was normal, but I just had to have the professional tell me so.

And the surgeon finally gave me a number – a goal.

It is good no one gave me a weight before now because I would have totally obsessed over it for the past three months. I feel ready to handle it now. So, 150 it is. That’s less than one half of my weight when I started this journey three years ago.

My mind automatically says I can’t even imagine what 150 is going to be like, but that’s not entirely true. Last night I saw it in my head clear as day. Now I’m just trying not to get ahead of myself and start creating charts and planning out how long it is going to take to get there.

I was told last Friday that I can expect to lose 50 to 60 more pounds by my 1 year “surgerversary” date if I stay on the same path I am on now. That’s as much weight over the next eight months that I just lost in three.

Patience and persistence is going to be motto for the next year.